Skip to main content
WordPress made easy with the drag & drop Total WordPress Theme!Learn More

Use Gravity Forms To Create Surveys In WordPress

Last updated on:

By now you’ve probably gathered that I don’t mind the Gravity Forms plugin, previous posts on WPExplorer.com cover using Gravity to create polls Β and some power tips that I’ve shared.

Today I’m going to introduce you to another add on: Gravity Forms Surveys.

Until now creating a survey for your site or on a client job would probably mean you’d look to dedicated tools (think Survey Monkey) but this job can now be attended to by this relatively new add on for Gravity Forms. In the same way as all of the extras for Gravity Forms work, it’s a separate plugin that you install that adds functionality to the main forms interface.

First things first – you’re going to need a copy of the Gravity Forms Plugin.

survey-fieldsIn the field editor Gravity Forms gives the field choices that you have grouped by type: standard fields, advanced fields and post fields. When activated the plugin give you just one new field type in the advanced section, don’t be put off by this there’s a lot of functionality in this new ‘Survey’ field.

Once you’ve found this new field type, building a survey is a matter of adding that field over and over to create the various questions that you’d like to ask your users.

This special survey field type allows you to choose from some standard options like: drop down menus, single line of text, paragraph of text but also provides three specific survey question formats:

Likert

likert

Rating

rating

Ranking

ranking

One of the real features of this add on is the way that it just integrates with the main plugin. So as you’re adding survey fields, you continue to use many of the other features that Gravity Forms provides. All of these core features work just as well for surveys:

  • Split forms (surveys over a number of pages)
  • Conditional logic (user select XYZ in this field, show them a specific question)
  • Set certain questions as required fields
  • Limit the number of entries in a survey
  • Embed hidden fields to collect extra data like the IP address, WordPress username, URL etc…

What does a survey look like?

Well I’ve build a fairly simple example to show you.

Sample Gravity Forms Survey

Survey Results

The way the results are presented is both slick and incredibly simple to use and understand. The best way that I can convey this is to just show you (Yes I have indeed sat here and filled in the survey a number of times so that I can show you!).

In the WordPress dashboard, you navigate in to the ‘Forms’ section and then ‘Entries’ as you normally do. Survey forms have a special option here though ‘survey results’. Clicking this reveals the results for your survey.

Gravity Forms Survey Results

Depending on the field type the results are displayed in different ways.

Likert format questions

Likert Results

Radio button questions

Radio Button Results

Paragraph responses

These are listed so that you can review each of them

Paragraph Results

filters

On the same interface there is also a filtering tool that allows you to view results based on the date that they were entered but also filter for responses that answer certain questions in a specific way.

Overall building a survey is very straight forward, if you’ve built any forms with Gravity you’re going to pick this up and create surveys with the same ease that you do other forms. New users don’t really face much of an additional learning curve for this add on, thanks to the seamless integration into the main plugin.

Get Gravity Forms

Have you used Gravity Forms to build a survey? What was your impression of the plugin? And if you have any tips for other users, be sure to share it in the comments below!

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Get our latest news, tutorials, guides, tips & deals delivered to your inbox.

16 Comments

  1. mentalist3d

    I’ve always used a standalone installation of LimeSurvey for clients that have needed it because survey plugins were quite lacking on WordPress, but due to having a dual installation and requiring the clients to remember username and passwords for two sites has never been ideal.

    If I ever get a future client requiring this feature, I’ll be sure to give your plugin a go. If it is anything like the themes you create, I’m sure it will be coded to a high standard. Keep up the good work πŸ˜‰

    • Kyla

      Thanks so much for the kind words! We actually didn’t create the plugin though – we just love Gravity Forms and sharing it’s features with our readers πŸ™‚

  2. Kristof

    What version are you using? As far as I can see, GF has a “Poll” option but not “Survey” and there’s no Likert option.

  3. releasethecreativeKristof

    Disregard. Didn’t see they had a new add-on for this. Thanks!

    • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer

      Yep, it’s an add-on πŸ˜‰

  4. jason carrigan

    Has anyone found a good theme for doing daily surveys? I am working on a project and I am using Gravity forms to create a different survey for every day – 6 questions, mostly used on a mobile device.

    Any ideas? I was just going to strip down a Twitter Bootstrap theme, but thought I would see if there is any input from others.

    • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer

      I personally don’t know of any good themes for this, I simply don’t think there is a big enough market for someone to take on the challenge. Your idea of stripping down a theme is good. Or…why make a theme yourself and then give it a way πŸ˜‰

  5. Stephanie Schnirch

    Wonderful advice, thank you. Question to you all: I have a client who wants a hearing loss survey that depending on how the person answers the questions, will give different result pages. Resulting in either A.) You don’t have a hearing loss, or B) You might have one, contact us to set up an appointment.

    Does this plugin allow for a mixed result based on the answers, and one of those results including a contact us form?

    • AJ Clarke

      To be honest I”m not quite sure, you should try contacting the Gravity Forms developers to make sure!

  6. Carthage

    This add on sounds great and it might allow me to do what I want to do.

    I am building and e-learning site. At the end of each module, I would like to have questions where the participant types in their answers. As well as me seeing their answers, I want them to be able to access and print a copy of their own answers. I would expect the printout that have the question followed by their answer, follwoed by the next question etc.

    Would this tool be the right way to go about it?

    • AJ Clarke

      I’m not quite sure honestly. You should head over to their site and reach out to them, because maybe if it isn’t possible maybe they can consider a solution for a future update.

    • Peter Shilling

      Hi I think by the sounds of what you’re saying the add-on should work well for you.

      For the printing of their answers you could also set up this as part of the email notification that goes out to the user after they have complete the form….

  7. Carthage

    Hi AJ,

    Thank you for getting back to me. I dropped them an email and they informed me that they have no way for the client to access the information that they input. They did say that if I had the necessary programming skills I could probably make it work.

    I will just have to find another solution.

    • AJ Clarke

      Bummer…thanks for letting me and others know!

  8. jackoslam

    Sounds interesting, but let me see if I understand correctly. If I have an online magazine, an authenticated reader might read an article and then be willing to answer 2 survey questions about the article. The reader might then read another article and answer another 2 survey questions. Could these 4 questions (so far) be part of the same survey, even though they are on discontinuous pages, and would the responses be totaled for this single reader independently of totals for other readers?

    What would happen if any authenticated reader logs off and then logs back onto the same issue of this magazine, where there would be additional questions which the reader could have answered earlier, but chose not to? Would the same survey be continued for this reader; would the reader start a new survey; or would the reader be locked out of continuing the earlier survey (because of a duplicate name, IP address, or cookie)?

  9. bertrand

    Just to inform that the survey can now be visualized on the public side using the GF Charts Reports plugin. Cheers!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Learn how your comment data is processed by viewing our privacy policy here.