LocalForm – Form Builder for Contact Forms, Surveys & Event Registration

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Can I bring my forms over from another plugin?

Yes. Forms > Import reads the forms Contact Form 7 and WPForms have on your site – neither plugin needs to still be active, since their forms stay in the database after they are switched off – and rebuilds a Google Form from its share link. The questions come across; the responses the old form already collected stay where they are, so export them from the old plugin if you need to keep them.

Every imported form arrives as a draft, with a report listing anything that could not be brought across – a file upload question, a Google Forms grid – so you can add it by hand before publishing.

Do I need an account or a license key?

No. There is no sign-up, no license key and no trial. Install the plugin and everything described here works straight away, with no limit on the number of forms or submissions.

Is there a paid version, and what does it add?

Yes – LocalForm Pro, a separate add-on sold at localform.dev. Nothing in the free plugin is limited, gated or timed to push you towards it: no submission cap, no form cap, no trial and no license key, and that is not going to change. Pro is for sites that need things the free plugin deliberately does not do – taking payment for a registration through Stripe, Mollie or a WooCommerce shop the site already runs, adding whoever ticked your newsletter box to Flexmail, Brevo, MailerLite or Mailchimp, showing a question only when another answer matches a rule, several dates or several price tiers on one event, file uploads, a “Build with AI” panel inside the admin, Elementor widgets, and a set of webhook and field-naming controls for wiring forms into another system. The full list is under “LocalForm Pro” in the description above, and the documentation is at docs.localform.dev.

Does the plugin nag me?

Once, and only if you want it to. After your site has collected 25 responses, LocalForm asks on its own screens whether you would leave a review – with “Not now” and “Don’t ask again” next to it, both remembered. Untick “Ask for a review on WordPress.org” under Settings > General and it never asks. Nothing else in the plugin interrupts you, and nothing is reported back to us either way.

Does LocalForm put a link to itself on my site?

Not unless you ask it to. There is a “Credit LocalForm under my forms” tick box under Settings > General, off unless you switch it on, which adds a small “Powered by LocalForm” line below your forms. Leave it alone and your visitors never see our name anywhere. If you do switch it on, the link carries nothing about your site and nobody who follows it is reported back to you or to us.

Can I use this instead of a cloud form service?

That is what it is built for. If you are used to Google Forms, Microsoft Forms or a similar service, you will recognise the way LocalForm works: add your questions, publish, share the link, and read the answers back as a summary. The differences are that the form sits on your own domain and carries your own branding, the responses are stored on your site rather than in someone else’s account, and your visitors are not sent to a third-party page to answer. LocalForm is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any of those services.

Can it add people to my Mailchimp or Brevo list?

Yes, with LocalForm Pro – Flexmail, Brevo, MailerLite and Mailchimp are all supported. You connect the service once, point a form at one of your lists, and name the tick box on the form that has to be ticked first: consent is a question your visitor answers, not a setting you switch on for them. Somebody who did not tick it is not subscribed, and somebody who unsubscribed from your list earlier is not quietly put back on it.

The free plugin sends nothing anywhere on its own. If you want to wire responses into a mailing list yourself, the free plugin’s webhook will post every submission to an automation tool such as Zapier, Make, n8n or Power Automate, and you can add the subscriber from there.

Can I split a long form over several steps?

Yes, and there is nothing to switch on. Add a section title where you want a break, and every question after it becomes the next step: the form then shows one step at a time, with a progress bar, a “Step 2 of 4” counter and Back and Next buttons. A form with no section titles stays a single page. Answers are only sent when the last step is submitted.

Can I send registrants a calendar invitation?

Yes. Give the form an event date under Settings > Event, then tick “Attach a calendar invitation (.ics)” under Email Notifications. Every registrant’s confirmation email arrives with a calendar file holding the date, time, location and organizer, which Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and the rest add with a tap. A form without an event date sends the confirmation as before, with nothing attached.

Can I build a poll or a quiz?

Both. For a poll, a single Single Choice or Checkbox question works well, and the Responses summary gives you counts and a bar chart per option without any extra setup. For a quiz, switch on Quiz under the form’s Settings and give the questions an answer key: tick the correct options, or type the answers you accept. Every response is then scored, with your own points per question and an optional pass mark, and the person answering can be shown their score, which questions they got right, the correct answer where they did not, and a sentence of explanation you wrote. Single choice, dropdown, checkbox, short text and number questions can all be marked; leave a question without an answer key and it is asked but not scored.

Where do my responses go?

They are saved on your own site, in your own WordPress database, and only you can see them. LocalForm does not send them to any form service, and there is no dashboard elsewhere holding a copy.

Does LocalForm help with GDPR?

Keeping responses on your own server, under your own hosting agreement, is a real advantage for data residency and minimisation compared with routing them through a third-party form service. When someone asks for a copy of their data or asks you to delete it, WordPress’s own Tools > Export Personal Data and Tools > Erase Personal Data now cover LocalForm responses: enter the email address and every response they left, across every form, is included. For the consent side there is a Consent question type: one tick box, your own wording next to it, a link to your privacy policy if you want one, and the answer stored with the response so you can show what was agreed to and when. That said, LocalForm cannot certify your site as “GDPR compliant” by itself – that still depends on things you configure yourself, such as what you ask for, how long you keep it (see “Keep my data when the plugin is deleted” under Settings > Data), your own privacy policy, and any consent you need before collecting personal data. There is no telemetry or third-party call for a submission to leak through in the first place.

Do I have to start from a blank form?

No. The Forms screen has a “Start from a template” row with a contact form, a feedback survey, an event registration and an RSVP. Picking one opens the builder with the questions already written – rename them, reorder them, delete the ones you do not want. Nothing is written to your site until you press Save, and a saved form keeps no link to the template it started from.

How do people find my form?

Every form gets its own page with a web address you choose – just share that link, by email, on social media, or as the QR code you can download from the Share button. You can also place the form inside a page or post you already have.

Can I put a form in an existing page?

Yes. Add the LocalForm block in the block editor – it renders the real form on the canvas, so you can see how it sits in the page before publishing – or paste the [localform id="123"] shortcode. The form’s own page keeps working at the same time.

Do I get an email when someone fills in my form?

Yes. Each form can email you on every submission, and can also send the person who submitted a confirmation email. You can write that message yourself and drop their answers into it – for example the form title, the event date, or any question you asked.

Can I stop taking registrations after a certain number, or on a certain date?

Yes. Set a maximum number of registrations and/or an opening and closing date and time per form. Once the form is full or closed, visitors see a message you write instead of the form. The maximum requires responses to be saved in WordPress.

Can I limit a form to certain people?

Yes. Under the form’s Settings > Access, choose who can fill it in: anyone with the link (the default), anyone signed in to your site, or only the roles you tick. Someone who is not allowed sees the form’s title and a message you can write yourself – plus a sign-in button if being signed out is all that is wrong – and a submission from them is refused by the server, not just hidden in the page. Every response then records which WordPress account left it, and a “Submitted by” column appears in the responses list, in your exports and on the printout, which is what makes a staff form or a training quiz usable as a record.

Anyone who can manage forms is always let through, so you can preview a restricted form without keeping a test account – with a notice above it reminding you that everybody else is being turned away.

Limiting a form to particular people rather than roles is not built in; a membership plugin can do it through the localform_user_may_submit filter.

Will the form match my site’s design?

You choose the colors, font, corner style, shadow and width for each form, and forms are shown on a clean full-screen page by default so nothing in your theme gets in the way. If you would rather the form sit in your theme’s normal page layout, there is a per-form setting for that – and a Plain layout that drops the form’s own card, so an embedded form does not sit as a panel inside a panel. There is also a CSS class field if your theme wants to style one particular form itself.

How do you stop spam submissions?

In layers, and without asking your visitors to prove anything. A hidden trap field real visitors never see; a check that the submission came from a browser that actually opened the form, and did not fill it in in milliseconds; a content filter that reads what arrived and rejects a wall of links, a blocklisted word or a throwaway email domain; a cap on how often one address may submit; and a block on accidental duplicates. Everything is under Forms > Settings > Security, and the Blocked attempts tab there shows what has been turned away and why, so you can tune it from what is actually happening rather than by guessing.

If a site is being hit hard enough that none of that is enough, you can switch on a challenge (Cloudflare Turnstile or hCaptcha) – and set it to appear only for a visitor whose own device has already tripped the automated checks, so nobody else ever sees one. It is off until you configure it.

A form can also have its own settings instead of the site’s, which is what you want for an internal form a whole office fills in from one shared IP address.

Can I get my responses into Excel?

Yes. The Responses screen for each form has an Export button, with a choice of Excel (XLSX) or CSV. If your Excel is set to Dutch, Belgian, German or another language where the decimal mark is a comma, pick the semicolon-separated CSV and it will open in proper columns straight away.

You can also export part of a form’s responses rather than all of them: set a date range or type in the search box, check that the list on screen is what you want, and the download matches it. There is no cap on how many responses an export can hold.

Can I move my forms to another site?

Yes. Under Forms > Settings > Data, “Download backup” gives you a single file with every form, its submissions and your settings. Upload that file on any other site running LocalForm to bring everything across. If a form already exists there, you choose whether to keep it or replace it with the backed-up one – so restoring the same file twice never duplicates your responses. Webhook logs are not included in the backup.

What happens to my forms if I delete the plugin?

Deactivating LocalForm never touches your data. Deleting it removes everything by default – your forms, responses and settings. If you want them to survive, turn on “Keep my data when the plugin is deleted” under Forms > Settings > Data before you delete, or download a backup first.

Can I send submissions to another tool?

Yes. Enter a web address (a webhook) on the form, or as a site-wide default under Forms > Settings > Webhooks, and each submission is sent there as it comes in – handy for connecting to a CRM, a spreadsheet, or an automation tool. Requests are signed with a secret key so the receiving end can confirm they came from you, are retried if the other side is temporarily down, and the last 30 days of deliveries are logged so you can check what was sent. If you would rather not store responses in WordPress at all, you can switch a form to send them onward only.

Can I send submissions to Power Automate, Make or Zapier?

Yes. Any of them accepts an incoming webhook – paste the URL into the form (or set it site-wide under Forms > Settings > Webhooks) and each submission is POSTed as JSON as it arrives. With Power Automate, use the “When an HTTP request is received” trigger and the submitted answers, form title, event details and custom fields arrive as a structured payload you can map straight into SharePoint, Dataverse or an approval flow.

Can an AI assistant build my forms?

Yes, and it is built in. LocalForm registers three WordPress Abilities – list forms, read a form, create or update a form – which become MCP tools once you install the MCP Adapter plugin. Point an assistant such as Claude at your site with an Application Password and you can ask for a form in plain language; it is built here, on your own domain, with its page created for you. The assistant signs in with an administrator’s Application Password, and everything it saves goes through the same validation as the builder – so it cannot create something you could not have built by hand. Reconfiguring a form never deletes the responses it has already collected.

The premium add-on, LocalForm Pro, adds the other half of this: a “Build with AI” panel inside the WordPress admin that does the same thing without an outside assistant, using whichever AI provider your site is already connected to.

Does the AI support send my forms to an AI company?

Not by itself. The free plugin makes no outbound request of any kind – an MCP assistant connects to your site, the way your browser does, and the abilities only read and write your own database. Whatever you type into that assistant goes to whoever you are using it with, exactly as it does when you chat with it about anything else; that is between you and them, and LocalForm is not in the middle of it.

Can I send submissions on to another system?

Yes. Every form can post each submission to a web address of your choice – a webhook – which is how you plug LocalForm into your own system or into an automation tool like Zapier, Make or Power Automate. Requests are signed and retried automatically if the receiving end is down, with a log of the last 30 days so you can see what went out, and a form can skip saving submissions entirely and only send them onward. There is also a REST API for a form’s field structure, for building a custom renderer or syncing form definitions into another system, authenticated with WordPress Application Passwords.

Does LocalForm send any data to an external service?

Not unless you tell it to. The plugin makes no outbound requests of its own: no analytics, no license checks, no telemetry, and no remotely hosted fonts. It can only ever reach a service you set up yourself – a webhook URL you entered, the Google Form you asked it to import, or a spam-challenge provider whose keys you added. All three are described under External services below, and a site that configures none of them makes no outbound request at all.

Because of that there is nothing reported back about how you use the plugin, and no dashboard on our side showing it. If you want to tell us, Forms > Settings > Support builds a site report you can read first and paste into a support thread if you choose to – that is the whole of it, and it happens only when you press the button.

Where do the fonts come from?

The seven font families (Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, Montserrat, Poppins and Nunito) are included with the plugin and served from your own site, not from Google Fonts or any other network. Picking one never reveals a visitor’s IP address to a third party. All seven are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; the license text is included at assets/fonts/OFL.txt.