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

FAQ

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 Mollie, 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.

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 I build a poll or a quiz?

For a poll, yes – 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. LocalForm does not do scored or graded quizzes (there is no “correct answer” or points system); if that is what you need, it is the one thing to look elsewhere for.

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. 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, 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.

Will the form match my site’s design?

You choose the colors and font 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.

How do you stop spam submissions?

LocalForm uses a hidden trap field that real visitors never see, limits how often the same visitor can submit, and blocks accidental duplicate submissions. You can adjust all three under Forms > Settings > Security.

Can I get my responses into Excel?

Yes. The submissions screen for each form has a download button that gives you an XLSX file of every response.

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.

Does LocalForm send any data to an external service?

No. The plugin makes no outbound requests of its own: no analytics, no license checks, no telemetry, and no remotely hosted fonts or scripts. The only request it can ever make is to a webhook address you enter yourself.

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.