How To Collect Electronic Signatures in Online Forms

New laws about electronic signatures allow many legal and banking forms to be completed online. Learn how to use signature fields in online forms to take advantage of the possibilities.

Electronic signatures aren't new, courier services embraced them almost without exception over the last ten years. In most countries. these online signatures are legal and binding. As a result, electronic signatures may even be used as evidence in court in some countries.

This has opened up a whole new realm of uses for online forms. Now legal documents, lease agreement forms, loan applications, and much more are easily completed online! If your form needs to be legally binding, asking for an electronic signature is a must.

Sadly there isn't yet a global standard for electronic signatures that will hold up in court. For that reason, if your form needs to be binding, it is vital to check the laws where you live.

The Formidable Digital Signature Plugin

The Digital Signature plugin allows two ways to collect user signatures. Your users may draw their signature with a touch screen, trackpad or mouse, but they also have the option to type it. The drawn option is almost certainly the preferred route, but the "Type it" option makes sure this field can be used by all your website visitors, even those with limited mobility.

Add electronic signatures to existing WordPress forms

Adding a signature field to your old forms is easy and only takes a moment. The first step is to download the Digital Signature plugin and activate it on your site. Don't forget to add your license key on the Formidable → Plugin Licenses page inside your WordPress dashboard.

Once the Digital Signature plugin is installed, a new field type will appear on the Form Builder page.

To add a signature field to your form, go to edit your form. Find the Signature field in the right sidebar and click or drag and drop it into the form. The signature is usually placed at the end of a form, but you can include it wherever looks best. Finally, save the form and click Preview.

Now the Signature field will appear and is ready for use.

If you want to set custom text for the 'Draw It', 'Type It' or 'Clear' labels, you can do this within the field settings.

Display electronic signatures in emails and confirmation messages

An image file is created when the submit button is clicked, and this image can be inserted in a form confirmation message, email notification, or in a View (meaning you can now sign PDFs in WordPress too!).

The simplest way to display a signature is to insert [x] in the email message or View where you want the image to be displayed. Make sure to swap out x for the ID or key of your signature field. This will embed the image into your message.

You can also show the image URL alone if you wish, without the image HTML tag. To do this simply use the shortcode:

[x use_html=0]

Not using Formidable Forms yet? Get the best WordPress form maker around and start doing more with your website today!

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