2020 has seen unprecedented challenges and changes for everyone, and we wanted to start by saying thank you to every one of our customers for sticking with us through these tough times and ensuring that our community has remained as strong as ever. We have really appreciated your on-going support!

For Gravity Forms, 2020 has been one of adaptation and innovation, as we strive to move with the times and cement our position as the #1 form builder on the market. We have worked hard to ensure that Gravity Forms has continued to cater to the ever-changing needs of businesses during 2020, coupled with future planning to strengthen our form builder’s usability, accessibility, extensibility, and much more.

In this ‘2020: Year in Review’ article, we discuss the many changes that have been made at Gravity Forms, the reasons behind them, and how they benefit you as a customer. We also provide a little sneak peek at what you can expect from 2021.

Gravity Forms 2.5 – New and Improved Like You’ve Never Seen Before!

Gravity Forms v2.5 has been at the heart of all product developments in 2020. Our product team has been working around the clock to bring you a number of 2.5 betas, continuously implementing the many alterations and updates that have been necessary throughout this beta period.

Gravity Forms is well known for its commitment to reliability, and we pride ourselves on a product that works, everytime, all the time! This is reflected in our numerous 2.5 betas and our rigorous testing process, helping us to ensure that 2.5 is compatible, reliable, and won’t let you down.

For those of you who are yet to test out 2.5 beta, or have missed out on the 2.5 announcements, here’s a little of what you can expect from 2.5…

2.5 Top Features

Gravity Forms 2.5 boasts a selection of new features and functionality – with a focus on accessibility, you will also find an updated form editor, improvements to usability, and enhancements to form markup and styles, as well as beautiful aesthetics. Let’s find out more…

• Form Editor – The Gravity Forms editor has been restyled and reworked, making it easier to use than ever before. Expect a fully revamped back-end user experience, with re-designed settings pages, easy-edit field settings, customizable form layouts, and much more.
• Accessibility – With a major focus on accessibility, this up-coming release will solidify our position as the most accessible form builder on the market. 2.5 provides all the tools you need to easily create accessible forms for your users – helping you to better serve your audience as well as boost form submissions.
• Updates to Markup and Styles – 2.5 enhancements to form markup and styles make it easier to customize frontend forms. For those of you looking to extend upon the base styles provided by Gravity Forms, you will find customizing the CSS is now a smooth and simple process.
• Theme Integration – The Gravity Forms team has worked with a wide assortment of theme developers to help ensure that 2.5 works with all popular WordPress themes straight out of the box.

We are very excited about the up-coming release of 2.5, which you can look forward to in 2021. In the meantime, 2.5 is available to test as a beta. To find out more about 2.5 and how to install beta-2.5-2, have a read of this article – Gravity Forms 2.5 Beta 2.

Browse, Import, and Customize Our New Form Templates

Gravity Forms has a new form template library, packed with lead generation form templates that convert. Lack of form templates was an issue that many customers had previously raised, so in 2020 we listened and acted, creating a bank of useful and stylish form templates that can be downloaded for free and used on any WordPress website.

Within our form template library, you will find a selection of templates ranging from contact forms to payment forms, as well as more advanced surveys and user registration forms. All templates are fully customizable, so you can easily import any of our templates to your site and configure them to suit your exact specifications.

We have created a number of Starter Guides to help you get your new projects off the ground using our form templates. These include…

• Starter Guide: How to Import and Customize a Basic Contact Form
• Starter Guide: How to Create a Webinar Registration Form
• Starter Guide: How to Create a Donation Form
• Starter Guide: How to Create a Request a Quote Form
• Starter Guide: How to Create a Survey with Gravity Forms
• Starter Guide: How to Set Up User Registration on your WordPress Website

2021 will see further templates added to this collection, so sign up to our form template library mailing list to stay in the know!

Accept Payments on Your Website with our Extensive Range of Payment Add-Ons

2020 has seen many businesses and business processes moving online – from customer engagement and retention, to accepting payments through websites – enabling many businesses to remain ‘open’ throughout the year.

Throughout 2020 we have looked to support businesses and align our plugin with the needs of our customers, which is why we have seen the release of three new payment Add-Ons – Square, PayPal Commerce Platform, and Mollie.

Let’s find out more about each of these…

Square

Trusted by over 2 million businesses, Square makes payment processing quick, easy, and secure for your business. Integrating seamlessly with Gravity Forms via the new Gravity Forms Square Add-On, you can now accept payments on your WordPress website with Square.

Benefits of processing your payments with Square include…

• All Major Payment Methods Covered – Square accepts all major credit and debit cards, Apple and Google Pay, and many more.
• Transparent Fees – With Square there are no setup or hidden fees, you only pay when you make a sale.
• The Square Dashboard – Access real-times sales, advanced data, and analytics, all from within your secure Square dashboard.

Gravity Forms and Square are offering a great promotion for all new Square customers – free processing for up to 180 days on all credit card transactions. Sign up today so you don’t miss out!

PayPal Commerce Platform

Ideal for eCommerce solution providers, online marketplaces, and crowdfunding platforms, PayPal Commerce Platform combines PayPal’s most advanced technologies, tools, and services, to enable your sellers to accept payments from customers around the globe.

Top features of PayPal Commerce Platform include…

• Extensive Payment Options – Allow sellers to take payments via credit and debit cards, PayPal, and Venmo, to name just a few, providing their customers with multiple payment options.
• Real-Time Data – Access powerful insights based on real-time data and create custom dashboards to give sellers a unique understanding of how their businesses are performing.
• Advanced Fraud Protection – PayPal Commerce Platform uses real-time intelligence to protect your business, as well as your sellers and their customers, from fraudulent activity and transactions.

With the new official Gravity Forms PayPal Commerce Platform Add-On, you can now easily turn your website into an online store or marketplace, accessing the extensive functionality of PayPal Commerce Platform.

Mollie

Not only does Mollie integrate with all major credit card providers, it also connects with a wide assortment of local European payment processors. So, whether you are looking to focus on a specific localized market within Europe, or grow your business internationally, Mollie can help.

Here’s just a few reasons why you should consider installing the Mollie Add-On…

• Fast Set Up – With just one contract and one integration, Mollie has an extremely fast and straightforward setup process, allowing you to take payments on your site in minutes.
• Multiple Payment Options – Smoothly integrate your online payment form with all major payment methods as well as numerous regional ones. These include Mastercard, Visa, American Express, Apple Pay, PayPal, Klarna, iDeal, SEPA, SOFORT, Bancontact, Cartes Bancaires, PostePay, and many more.
• No Hidden Fees – Mollie doesn’t charge any signup fees, and there are no monthly subscriptions or hidden costs. Simply pay for each successful transaction.

Currently none of these three add-ons allow you to accept subscriptions on your website, but this is all set to change in 2021 – watch this space!

EmailOctopus

As well as multiple payment Add-Ons, Gravity Forms has also introduced integration with the popular EmailOctopus email service.

EmailOctopus is a great choice for anyone looking to grow their business through email marketing. EmailOctopus is popular with bloggers and publishers, entertainers and retailers, tech owners and realtors – anybody with a niche mailing list and a desire to engage with their subscribers.

With EmailOctopus you’ll find an affordable and extremely user-friendly experience, coupled with an intuitive dashboard and friendly support – everything you need to get your email automations set up, lists managed, and customers engaged with your brand.

Opening the Lines of Communication with The Gravity Forms Roadmap

Throughout 2020 Gravity Forms has been concentrating hard on opening up the lines of communication between our team and our community.

This focus has seen us introduce a monthly newsletter to keep customers informed of Gravity Forms news and announcements, an increase in emails to help people access the resources they need, and crucially, the implementation of the Gravity Forms Roadmap.

The Roadmap aims for more transparency between Gravity Forms and our customers, letting you know what we are working on, what our priorities are, and to keep you up to date with what has been recently launched.

We are also keen to gather input on developments moving forward, and get a clear picture of what is important to each and everyone of you. Within the Roadmap we encourage all our customers to have a say on features that are currently under consideration, as well submit a new idea or share your thoughts on other issues that you think would help make Gravity Forms an even better and more well rounded product.

Keep an eye out for new features ‘Under Consideration’ on the Roadmap in 2021!

New Website Coming Soon

2020 has seen Gravity Forms begin the journey of a brand refresh – from our swag to our website. Our Web team has been working hard, designing a stunning new website that can do justice to our powerful form builder whilst reflecting the integrity and authenticity of our brand.

Although the web design is still under-wraps, you may have caught glimpses of the future brand nestled within new pages on our site, throughout the 2.5 editor, and even via images in our newsletters – keep an eye out for more sneak peeks coming soon.

2021 will see the big release of our new website – we can’t wait to share it with you!!

Extend Your Forms with Certified Add-Ons

This year has seen the introduction of the Gravity Forms Certified Developer Program. Long ago we realised the potential of the Gravity Forms ecosystem, with many developers creating useful and dynamic plugins to extend and enhance Gravity Forms.

We created the Certified Developer Program to help our customers easily identify high-end third-party add-ons that will help people do even more with Gravity Forms. Our certified developers are trusted, long term members of the Gravity Forms community, with track records for reliability, security, and support, and we are delighted to be able to recommend each and everyone of their add-ons to our wider community.

The certified add-ons add extra features and functionality not available in the Gravity Forms plugin, enabling you to further enhance your forms, solve niche problems, and create unique solutions which will help you engage with your audience and grow your business.

Here are just a few ways the certified add-ons can extend your form experience…

• Understand Your Form Data – Create business reports including charts and calculations with GFChart to help you display, analyze, and understand your latest data.
• Design Stunning Forms – Easily add images, colors, collapsible sections, and tooltips to your forms with JetSloth’s bundle of add-ons, making your forms not just beautiful but extremely user-friendly.
• Display Form Entries on the Front End of your Site – Turn form submissions into useful content for your website and display it in a variety of stylish layouts on the front end of your site with GravityView.
• Generate PDFs from Form Submissions – With both Gravity PDF and ForGravity, you can automatically generate PDFs for your customers when they submit a form. Ideal for contracts, invoices, and more, PDFs can be emailed and downloaded, helping you to deliver the necessary information to your audience.
• Create Automated Workflows for Your Business – Gravity Flow provides a suite of business process management tools, enabling your business to build secure and efficient workflow automation systems, tailored to your exact needs.
• Solve Niche Problems – Gravity Wiz provides over 30 Gravity Perks (add-ons), which cater to a wide assortment of use cases, helping you to solve problems and create unique forms for your particular project.

You can now view all of the certified add-ons within the Gravity Forms Add-On browser in your WordPress dashboard. You can also read more about each of the certified developers on the Gravity Forms Blog.

If you are a third-party add-on developer, interested in finding out more about our Certified Developer program, please get in contact.

Gravity Forms has Grown!

Throughout 2020, Gravity Forms has grown as a company, increasing the number of employees, as well as our skill set and expertise.

During the year, Gravity Forms has welcomed new employees to our product, marketing, support, web, and operations teams. We have also seen long-standing employees move to new positions, sharing their knowledge and experience across the company.

The expansion of Gravity Forms is important for our customers as it means we can implement new product developments, features, add-ons, resources, and more, as well as offer further support and increase the reach of our plugin within the form builder market.

As a company we are truly excited about the growth of our team and the opportunities it presents for Gravity Forms moving forwards – 2021 here we come!

Keep Up to Date With Gravity Forms News

2020 has been an action packed year for us here at Gravity Forms. To keep up to date with future announcements, make sure you sign up to our newsletter, where we share the latest Gravity Forms news, monthly updates, resources, articles from the blog, and much more…