Have you ever noticed that when you use a default form for your website, it rarely ever matches the theme of your site? What’s worse is when end users access these forms, they may often find mismatched styling and be presented with a poor user experience when using them online or through mobile applications. This can potentially damage a company’s reputation or make people lose confidence in your site’s design.
Proper styling helps your forms look more attractive and professional. Additionally, it makes your forms “fit in” with the rest of your site instead of sticking out like a sore thumb. There are some simple fixes for your forms to stand out from the crowd and fit in with the rest of your theme. Let’s discuss six of them.
Keep the Form Placement in Mind
One of the easiest things you can do to make your forms fit into your theme is to place them in a specific location on your website. By default, Gravity Forms will add all forms directly into sidebars. For many, this may not be an ideal solution for styling purposes, as it places forms outside of your post or page elements. However, placing forms inside your content makes them look more native to the rest of the site.
Add a Custom Header Image
When you create a form through the Gravity Forms plugin, it automatically populates the form with a header image. This is typically the first thing that your users will see when they open the form itself. By default, this image is not themed to match your site’s look and feel.
Instead of changing the styles for the entire site, you may find it beneficial to change this header image on a per form basis.
Using the “fields” tab in Gravity Forms, you can add a custom header image for each form that you create. This will change the look of your forms without changing the rest of your site’s design.
Add Custom CSS Classes When Using Single Form Placeholders
By default, Gravity Forms allows you to display a single form within a page or post. Each row of the form gets a listing in WordPress. While this is nice for your users filling out forms, it does make styling more complicated than it needs to be.
Instead of going through the trouble of putting each individual field into a container, you can instead add specific styling classes to each field listing. For example, add the class “gform_field” to all named fields (such as the title and description) and then add your custom CSS class that changes the color or sizes of these items.
This is an easy way to make it so that you don’t have to style each field – and you only have to modify the CSS once if you want to change the styling for all of your forms.
Use Hooks for More Control Over Form Styling
If you’re using a WordPress theme that gives you more control over your HTML elements, it’s possible to add custom attributes through hooks. Most themes have a function like “add_theme_support( ‘custom-background’);” that allows you to add custom CSS hooks.
This gives you more control over the styling of your forms, as you can add this code directly into stylesheets instead of your theme’s functions.php file or template files. This also lets other people know where to find the code to make their modifications or fixes.
Style Your Form with a Custom Logo
When creating forms, most people only consider the header image and custom CSS class styling. However, there is another crucial element that most developers forget about: your form’s logo.
The logo is typically displayed at the top of each form page or as part of the “actions” menu when users click on a row to edit or view something. If you’re using a standard WordPress theme, the logo image is added by Gravity Forms when it populates your forms.
This means that you can add your custom logo and choose to display it as part of the form or not. Using a custom logo is one of the easiest ways to add your identity to each form page.
Make Sure All Fields are Labeled Clearly
Balancing your digital form’s style and function is important when ensuring high engagement and rates and increased submissions. Click To TweetThe most important piece of advice you can use when styling forms is making sure all fields are labeled clearly.
Gravity Forms allows you to create any form imaginable, which means that it’s straightforward to have multiple kinds of field types on the same page. As a result, users typically scan over forms instead of reading each field individually. Without clear labels, it’s easy for users to lose track of what they should enter into a field and accidentally submit an incorrect form.
Final Thoughts
By following these steps, you should be able to modify Gravity Forms’ default styling and make it fit into your website’s theme seamlessly. Alternatively, you can also use a solution like JetSloth, a certified Gravity Forms Add-on that makes creating the perfectly styled Gravity Form easy and pain-free. By taking the time to use these tips and solutions, you’ll easily improve user engagement on your site while helping to maximize form submissions.