How to Create an Online Registration Form in WordPress

Online registration forms are important for a lot of different businesses, but how do you go about creating one?

Registration forms are a necessary feature for a lot of businesses out there. It may be that you're selling memberships and need people to sign up in an easy to follow form. Or perhaps you need to register people for an event or a course and need their contact details. It may be a one-off registration form, or it could be the foundation of your website and services you offer.

Whatever your needs and the reasons for opening an online registration form, you may be wondering how to go about creating one. You will need a registration form that is closely tailored to your website and business. A template can be a good starting point, but ideally you'll need to be able to customize one as much you want.

In this post, we'll be taking you through our tips for creating an online registration form. But first of all, what are the benefits of an online registration form and when will you need to use one?

The benefits of using an online registration form

• Create a membership site - If you are looking to sign up new members, an online registration form is the first step to create a solid membership site and database. You can then provide users with a custom login if you need them to access your site.
• Get your data organized - You can keep a record of all the important details you need from your users with a registration form.
• Boost website security - By having a registration form, you can prevent registration spam and therefore keep your WordPress site safe and secure.
• Specify permissions for users - You can set the level of access that each user will have after completing the form. The level of access could be determined by conditional logic triggered by specific answers.

Now you know some of the benefits, here's how to create a registration form with Formidable Forms.

How to create a WordPress registration form

In order to use our WordPress user registration plugin, you'll need to download and install the user registration add-on if you haven't already. In order to do this, you'll first need to purchase and activate Formidable Forms Pro version.

Once you've done this, take a look in your WordPress admin panel. Go to the Formidable option in your menu bar and then click Add-ons. You should find a User Registration plugin option. Simply click to install it, as shown in the screenshot below:

Once your add-on is active, click on Forms on the left and create a new form. You will then see an option for User Registration if you click on Create from Template.

If building from scratch, you'll need to add an email address field and possibly a password field too. We'd definitely recommend the password field in order to stay safe and protect your website. Feel free to add any additional fields that you need users to complete during registration.

For example, contact details will probably be necessary if you're creating an online event registration form. That way, you can keep attendees aware of any updates after they register. You can also keep track of how many people will be coming and ensure you have the capacity to manage every person who attends.

Register a new user

To register a new user, go into your form's Settings and then the Form Actions tab. From there you'll need to click the Register User icon in order to add a registration action to your form.

This is how it should look:

You may want to re-label your Register User icon so it's easier to refer back to. Any labelling changes that you make will only be seen by you in the back-end of your website.

Connect form fields for user registration

Next, you'll need to connect your form fields with the relevant registration options.

You can start by mapping the User Email to the Email Address section in your form. Then, depending on whatever fields you have, you can map each one to the relevant registration option. For example, link up the Username with the Username field for a login form.

See below for an example of how it will look:

Other online registration options available for customization

Once you have got the basics of your registration form set up, you can then include other options if you wish.

We wanted to make it easy to create a form that's fully customizable and tailored to your specific needs. So, we made our user registration options virtually limitless.

With our user registration add-on, you can also:

• Check the box "Automatically log in users who submit this form" if you want to support user login.
• Add extra User Meta for additional information you'd like to add to a user's profile.
• Specify permissions to either allow or prevent logged in users to create new users in your form.
• Create a sub-site when a new user registers. This is handy for those with multi-site setups who want to make it easier to accept user submitted data.
• Send email notifications when a user is fully registered to let them know they've been added to the system. You can also direct them to the next steps you want them to take from there on. For example, direct people to a registration page to make the user registration process more streamlined.
• Want to build a custom registration form? You can build custom fields for ultimate flexibility.

These are just some of the options you can use and customize to make your registration forms really yours. For more details and instructions on how to build a registration form and use additional options, take a look at our our documentation. This should cover any questions you have in creating a registration form. You can also read our tips on avoiding registration form mistakes.

We hope that this introduction to user registration forms has helped. If you're still wondering whether you need this feature, our blog post breaks down the top reasons to have a registration form plugin. We'd love to hear how you get on with creating your own forms, so please leave a comment below.

If you've not yet signed up to Formidable yet, take a look at our wide range of features. With Formidable Forms you can customize your WordPress forms and improve user experience.

With our drag and drop form builder, it's easy to build the forms you need, even without the experience of designing website forms.