6 Ways to Use Calculators on WordPress Sites

Calculators are a fantastic tool for any business. Want to learn how you can use calculators on your WordPress site? Here are six powerful ways!

Approximate read-time: 8 minutes

Calculators are a great tool for your audience. If you're running an online business, calculators could be more than just a tool.

Calculators could be fun. Yes, you heard that right!

Not only are they engaging for your users, but calculators can do double duty. They can also give you valuable customer insights.

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For example, if you publish a mortgage calculator on your WordPress site, you can collect a ton of critical info. You could learn about a customer's capacity to pay, how much money they've saved, and how much they want to borrow.

? Did you know?

With a calculator on your website, you can learn about your customers before they call you, email you, or visit your store!

Feeling inspired yet? There are many ways you can harness the power of calculator forms on your WordPress site.

In this article, we'll give you six of them! But first, let's start by learning how to first enable calculators on your WordPress website.

And don't worry, none of the options below require coding!

Learn more: How to Create a Calculator in WordPress

Should you use a calculator plugin or a form builder?

When it comes to making a calculator for a WordPress webpage, there are 2 major options:

Calculator plugins
Form builder plugins

Why use a Calculator plugin?

If you go to the WordPress plugin directory, you'll find a lot of different calculator plugins available for download.

And a lot of them can do the job quite well. You'll find cost calculator plugins, loan calculator plugins, and many more options to choose from.

There are even premium options available to buy at the Envato market

Among all these calculator plugins are some great choices. Until it ultimately dawns on you... isn't an online calculator the same thing as a web form?

Well - yes it is! So, although you could use a dedicated calculator plugin on your WordPress site, it might be better to use your existing form builder plugin.

Provided it has calculator functionality, of course.

Why use a form builder plugin as a calculator?

If you are worried about having too many WordPress plugins installed on your site, good! You should be.

Having too many plugins can slow your site down and increase the number of HTTP requests needed to load it.

Consolidating your WordPress forms into one plugin is always the best idea. When you discover how many things a form builder can do, you could probably trim quite a few plugins from your site.

Besides, a solid drag and drop form builder can do whatever calculations you need. There are no limits. Many form builders can integrate with eCommerce as well.

Our plugin, Formidable Forms, has a variety of form elements and field options. This allows users to build any form imaginable. With Formidable, you can calculate totals, provide cost estimates, and add calculations to any form.

Surprised? A great WordPress form plugin can do much more than simply create contact forms!

And a really great form plugin should come loaded with calculator templates too, so you won't need to start from scratch.

Who can use calculators on WordPress?

There are many uses for a calculator on a WordPress site (more on that shortly). But first, let's explore the obvious professional uses for them.

Once you realize that a calculator is just an online form with calculated fields, it becomes easier to imagine what professions can put them to work.

Still not sure? Here's a list of professionals who could benefit from calculators on their WordPress sites:

Bloggers
Marketers
Mortgage brokers
Personal trainers
Financial advisors
eCommerce platforms
...plus many, many more!

How can you use Calculators in WordPress?

Many of the uses we are highlighting below are most helpful for professionals running a business. But there are some strictly fun ways to use calculators too.

Let's say you are building a travel website. Why not create a resource about tipping in foreign countries, featuring a tip calculator of course! Maybe you could create a trip cost estimator? The sky is the limit.

Besides what we cover in detail in the next part of this article, there are loads of other easy ways to use calculators:

Paycheck Calculator: Find out your salary, daily, weekly and monthly wages.
Percentage Calculator: Never use your brain for math again!
Length Unit Conversion Calculator: Convert every inch. Or centimeter.
Age Calculator: You can also calculate how long you've had a customer.
Pregnancy Calculator: Predict a pregnancy due date.
Final Grade Calculator: Figure out if you made the grade!

Finance, fitness, mortgages, services, software, marketing... are you seeing a trend? Almost any industry can benefit from calculators.

Most of us think of calculators as boring stuff. Remember middle school math class? No thanks!

But as you'll soon see, there are some powerful ways to use calculators on WordPress sites. And luckily, almost no math skills are required for set up!

1. Fitness Calculators

Health and fitness is a growing industry. According to research by Statista, yearly fitness revenue in the United States is estimated to be at $18 billion as of 2020. If you are in the fitness business, this is great news.

Naturally, fitness businesses are online. And a nifty calculator could be the perfect tool needed to engage your health-conscious audience.

For example, you could add a BMI calculator or a calorie counting calculator into your WordPress site. Got a new personal training client? Automatically send them an email series with links to your fitness calculators as part of their 'fitness journey'!

Ace Fitness is putting fitness calculators to work.

? Learn more: How to Make a Fitness Calculator in WordPress

2. Financial Calculators

If you are running a financial services business, you are probably familiar with the concept of compound interested. It's a concept you should be used to sharing with your customers.

We're guessing that some people might not enjoy doing the math? Well, with a compound interest calculator installed on your WordPress site, your clients will have it easy!

If you connect your financial calculators to an email address, you could actually collect valuable information about customers as they use the calculator. Your form could ask them direct questions about their investment plans as well. With this information, converting them into paying customers is a much easier task.

3. Investment Calculators

Here's another useful calculator that might interest investment bloggers. An ROI calculator is a simple tool that gives users a clear picture of their return on any investment. It will save your audience time and help evolve their investment mindset.

Just as with some of the other example calculators found in this article, the ROI calculator can also work as a powerful tool for collecting customer data and converting new customers.

One way to create an ROI Calculator on your WordPress site is to use a template, like the one included in the premium version of Formidable Forms. Since an ROI calculator is so simple, you could even use it as a widget in the sidebar of your WordPress blog.

Formidable Forms customer Wells Fargo has a selection of investment calculators.

4. Estimate & Quote Calculators

Life Insurance Calculator
Automobile Payment Calculator

If you want to spend more time working and less time dealing with sales, then an estimate or quote calculator could be exactly what you need.

Consider this: you could create an interactive estimate calculator and ask customers to submit their information through that. If you can drive enough qualified traffic to request a quote from you online, you could have a steady flow of new clients.

Who can benefit from estimate or quote calculators on their websites? Almost any business. Especially if you sell services online with WordPress!

For example, a life insurance agent could push traffic to their calculator instead of using high-pressure sales tactics. Automobile salespeople can set up a car payment calculator to show buyers what they can expect to pay for their new wheels. The possibilities are truly endless.

? Learn more: How to Create an Online Quote in WordPress

Formidable Forms customer Audi shows the power of an estimate calculator.

5. Price Calculators (eCommerce)

This one might be obvious to some, but there are many uses for calculators in eCommerce. It's hugely beneficial to let customers choose things like quantities or colors when buying a product. There just needs to be a way to calculate the order based on user selections. This is where calculators come into play.

Imagine if you had to manually log each form and provide a written invoice with every customer order!

That's way too much for a busy entrepreneur. Besides, customers are now used to getting results instantly. The last thing you want is for customers to go elsewhere because your buying process is so inconvenient.

? Learn more: How to Create a Price Calculator in WordPress

Pricing and eCommerce calculator example

Formidable Forms customer H&M shows the power of calculation in eCommerce.

6. Mortgage Calculators

Simple Mortgage Calculator
Advanced Mortgage Calculator

You may not know it, but mortgage calculators are an extremely popular tool. That's one reason why we have them included as templates in our own plugin, Formidable Forms.

The keyword "mortgage" is very popular, with 135,000 monthly searches in Google alone. A mortgage calculator could be all you need to capture the local search traffic in your geographic area.

There are 2 basic forms of mortgage calculators. One is known as a simple mortgage calculator. Using this calculator, your readers or clients can get an idea of how much they might have to pay each month. It will calculate based on the mortgage amount, interest rate, and time period a user inputs.

There's also an advanced mortgage calculator option. This advanced tool will calculate based on other important values such as annual tax, annual insurance, home value, annual PMI. And the client will get an in-depth financial analysis report in the process.

? Learn more: How to Add a Mortgage Calculator in WordPress

Even the government of Canada has a mortgage calculator on their site.

Wrapping up

As you can see, calculators have evolved into powerful tools for WordPress websites all over the world. If you run a WordPress site, calculators couldn't be easier to set up.

Remember, it's easy to get started with a WordPress plugin or a form builder plugin. With modern tech, calculators are only a few clicks away - so why not get started?