How to ‘Power Up’ Your LifterLMS Course with Forms
Integrating forms into an online course or learning-based membership site can be used for many purposes. Learn what’s possible with this live demo of our 4 forms integrations.
How LifterLMS Form Plugin Integrations Work
LifterLMS integrates with four form plugins, Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms, so you can require a form before a lesson is marked complete, replace the default LifterLMS registration form with a custom one, and view every form entry directly inside LifterLMS reporting. This webinar demos all four integrations on the same course so you can compare the registration, feedback, and reporting experience before choosing one.
What You’ll Learn
- What a form can actually do beyond a basic contact form, including custom registration, e-signatures, file uploads, and event registration
- How the Lesson Completion setting requires a form submission before a student can mark a lesson complete
- How to replace the default LifterLMS registration form with a custom form built in Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms, or Formidable Forms
- Where form entries show up inside LifterLMS student reporting
- How the four form plugin integrations compare to each other in setup and features
Key Takeaways
- Map out which of the fourteen-plus form use cases discussed apply to your course before you pick a form plugin
- If you already use one of these four form plugins, stick with it rather than switching for this integration alone
- Try the free versions of Ninja Forms, WPForms, or Formidable Forms before committing to a paid plan
- Remember that a custom registration form requires the paid user registration add-on from whichever form company you choose, on top of the LifterLMS integration
- Use the Lesson Completion setting to require feedback, a signature, or an upload before a student moves past a specific lesson
Frequently Asked Questions
There is no single right answer. If you already use one of these plugins, stick with it. Ninja Forms, WPForms, and Formidable Forms all offer a free version you can try first, while Gravity Forms is premium only. Ask in the LifterLMS Facebook group for real user experiences before you decide.
Yes. Each form add-on has a Lesson Completion setting that determines whether a form on a lesson is required or optional, and it can be set globally or overridden on an individual course or lesson. When a form is required, the Mark Complete button will not appear until the student submits it.
With Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms, you can set a Checkout Update Form and an Account Update Form so existing students can correct or update their information, such as a misspelled name, from their account. WPForms currently supports a custom login form and registration forms, but not a dedicated update form.
Yes. If you already own the Universe bundle or the Infinity bundle, the Ninja Forms and WPForms integrations are already part of your account. You do not need to purchase them separately. Check your LifterLMS account to access them.
Gravity Forms offers a Signature add-on that lets a student sign with a mouse or a finger directly on the screen before submitting a form, which works well for agreements or waivers a student needs to accept before starting a course. Check whether your preferred form plugin offers an equivalent add-on.
The LifterLMS reporting integration is built around the student view, so you look up form entries from an individual student’s course record. To aggregate responses across every student, you would need to use your form plugin’s own reporting tools or pass entries to a spreadsheet through its Zapier integration.
You can add a form early in a course that collects a student’s goals and where they are starting from, then use those answers to manually place students into small groups of three to eight people who meet on a recurring call. This works best for course-sized groups rather than platforms with tens of thousands of students.
The custom Checkout Registration and Checkout Update forms are built for the native LifterLMS checkout. If you are selling with WooCommerce instead, those specific checkout forms will not apply, but you can still use Gravity Forms inside your lessons for required forms, feedback, and other content the same way.
Full Webinar Transcript
What Is A Form Really For
Every website is familiar with a basic contact form, but that undersells what a form can actually do. Forms exist to collect and send data, and a contact form is just one narrow use of that. Once you see a form as a general-purpose way to move data back and forth between a student and a course, a lot more becomes possible than a simple message and an email address.
Contact and conversation are still genuinely important on a learning site. Making it easy for a prospective student to reach you, or for an active student to reach their teacher, coach, or tutor, matters a great deal, and a form can collect far more context than a message alone. The goal here is not to dismiss the contact form. It is to encourage you to think bigger than one.
Three Core Features Of The LifterLMS Form Integrations
The LifterLMS form integrations that just rolled out share three main capabilities. First, you can install a form into a lesson and make it required or optional for that lesson to be marked complete. Second, you can build a custom registration form for your platform, which has been a long-standing request from the LifterLMS community. Third, every form entry a student submits gets pulled into LifterLMS reporting, so you can look at a student’s record and see their form activity without hunting for it somewhere else.
LifterLMS already ships with its own registration form, with optional fields for first name, last name, email, password, and physical address that you can turn on or off. Sometimes that is not enough. A course may need to collect far more information at signup than the default fields allow, and a form-plugin-powered registration form is how you go beyond that default.
How To Require A Form Before A Student Completes A Lesson
Each form integration adds a Lesson Completion setting. It determines whether a form present on a lesson must be submitted before that lesson can be marked complete, and the default behavior can be set globally, then overridden for an individual course or lesson if you need an exception. When a form is required, the Mark Complete button will not appear until the student submits it.
This single setting is what makes forms useful for far more than feedback. A required form can gate a legal agreement, a signature, an upload, or an assessment behind lesson progress, so a student cannot move on until they have done what the form asks.
How To Build A Custom Registration Form For Your LifterLMS Site
Building a custom registration form requires the paid user registration add-on from whichever form company you choose, on top of the LifterLMS integration itself. Each integration exposes several form slots you can point at your own form: a Checkout Registration Form that replaces the default LifterLMS registration form for new users during enrollment and purchases, and an Open Registration Form that replaces the default form for anyone registering without buying anything.
Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms go further and also expose a Checkout Update Form for existing users updating their information during a purchase, and an Account Update Form for a logged-in student updating their details from their account. WPForms currently supports a custom login form plus the checkout and open registration forms, but does not yet expose a dedicated update form.
How Form Entries Show Up In LifterLMS Reporting
Once a student submits a form, the entry gets attached to their record inside LifterLMS reporting under the relevant course. Each integration adds its own reporting column, labeled WPForms Entry, Ninja Forms Entry, Gravity Forms Entry, or Formidable Forms Entry depending on which plugin you use, with a link that opens the actual entry inside your form plugin’s own entry view. This matters more as a course scales. Some LifterLMS sites have tens of thousands of students, and a coherent way to find one student’s form submissions without leaving the reporting screen is what actually makes a form usable at that size.
Ten Creative Ways To Use Forms Beyond A Contact Form
Before picking a form plugin, it helps to think through what you might actually use it for. A custom registration form can collect employer information, demographic details, or product variants like a T-shirt size or a color choice tied to a physical item that ships with the course. A form can also capture a signature on a legal document a student needs to agree to before starting.
Forms can request uploads, whether that is a photo, a video, a PDF, or an audio file, which is a classic use case for a lesson that asks a student to submit proof of work. They can also power live or virtual event registration, when a course or membership includes access to scheduled webinars or in-person events. On the feedback side, a form can collect testimonials, general feedback on a lesson, or a simple one-to-five star rating, all of which help you see whether your content is actually landing with students.
How To Use Forms For Sales, Coaching, And Community Building
Beyond collecting data, forms can route conversations and even process payments. A contact form embedded in a lesson lets a student reach a teacher or coach privately instead of posting in public comments, and different lessons can route to different teachers or coaches. Because these form plugins have their own payment systems, you can even sell a product from inside a lesson, such as equipment a student needs partway through an otherwise free course.
Forms can also send data to a CRM or marketing automation tool like ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp, and every one of these plugins has its own Zapier integration if you want to connect to other apps. That same data-collection ability supports polls, surveys, and coaching assessments, which let you personalize coaching by collecting information up front instead of guessing. It also supports intentional community building: a form early in a course can gather a student’s goals and starting point, which you can then use to place students into small mastermind groups of three to eight people who meet on a recurring call. Some form plugins additionally support front-end posting, where submitted data populates a public-facing page, such as a directory built from student submissions.
Choosing Between Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms, And Formidable Forms
LifterLMS has a deep integration with four form plugins: Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms. Gravity Forms has been a premium WordPress form plugin for a long time, and the Gravity Forms integration itself just received a major overhaul. WPForms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms are three newer integrations. Ninja Forms, WPForms, and Formidable Forms each offer a free version of their plugin if you want to try one out before committing, while Gravity Forms is premium only, with different plan levels offering different amounts of functionality.
How To Build A Custom Registration Form And Collect Feedback With WP Forms
On the demo site, a logged-out visitor buys a course using a custom registration form built in WPForms. The form collects a first and last name, an email, a password, and, because this particular course ships with a yoga mat, the student’s number of children, their preferred mat color, and a shipping address. After the registration fields, the checkout moves into the LifterLMS Stripe add-on for payment, running in test mode.
Once the purchase completes, the WPForms integration setting confirms which form is assigned as the Checkout Registration Form, along with the option to require it. To use a custom registration form with WPForms, you need WPForms Pro for access to its user registration add-on, since that add-on is what actually creates or updates the WordPress user behind the scenes.
Inside the course, the final lesson includes a WPForms feedback form asking which department the student has a suggestion for, alongside a five-star rating field. A student can leave a note about the course and a star rating, and once submitted, the entry becomes visible from the LifterLMS reporting screen for that student’s course record, linking through to the actual submission inside WPForms.
WPForms, like the other three integrations, has its own form-building interface, its own notification settings so submissions can route to a specific email address, and a library of pre-built form templates you can start from instead of building from scratch.
How Ninja Forms Handles Required Lesson Forms And Custom Registration
The same registration walkthrough repeats with Ninja Forms, this time built with Ninja Forms’ own form builder, which has a noticeably different interface even though the resulting functionality is the same. Ninja Forms offers a free version of its plugin if you want to try the builder before buying.
Inside a course lesson, a required form asks the student to rate how flexible they are on a scale of one to ten, and the Mark Complete button stays hidden until that form is submitted. Once submitted, the entry appears in LifterLMS reporting under a Ninja Forms Entry column for that student’s course, and the entry itself can be viewed and, if needed, edited from inside Ninja Forms.
How To Build A Custom Registration Form And View Entries With Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is the plugin the LifterLMS team has personally used the longest, and its integration has been part of the LifterLMS ecosystem for a while before this recent overhaul. On the demo site, a student registers through a custom Gravity Forms registration form, then completes checkout through the Stripe add-on in test mode.
Because a Gravity Forms Checkout Update Form is also available, an existing student who misspells their name during registration can correct it later from their account, which matters if that name appears on a certificate. Gravity Forms is entirely a premium plugin, and building a custom registration form with it requires the Gravity Forms User Registration add-on, which is what makes the create-user and update-user actions work.
Inside a course lesson, a Gravity Forms feedback question uses radio buttons to ask how easy it was to find time for a yoga practice that day. Once submitted, the entry appears under a Gravity Forms Entry column in LifterLMS reporting for that student, linking to the entry inside Gravity Forms, where you can add internal notes and resend notifications if needed.
Gravity Forms also ships with its own reporting dashboard for a form’s questions, and its form builder lets you drag in standard fields, advanced fields, and post fields, the last of which can be used to have a form submission publish directly to the site, such as a blog post.
How To Build A Custom Registration Form And Require Feedback With Formidable Forms
Formidable Forms also offers a free version, and its registration form for this demo collects the same core fields as the other three plugins. Formidable requires the site to be running over SSL for the Stripe checkout, since a non-SSL demo site has to stay in test mode for that reason. Like Gravity Forms and Ninja Forms, using Formidable Forms for custom registration requires its paid version to access the user registration functionality.
A required Formidable Forms lesson asks the student to explain in four sentences or less how they get into the right mindset for a yoga practice, using an expandable paragraph text field, and the lesson cannot be marked complete until that form is submitted. The entry then appears under a Formidable Forms Entry column in LifterLMS reporting, and Formidable’s entry view additionally shows details like the submitting IP address and browser.
Formidable’s own form builder includes a layout tool for arranging fields, along with the same range of field types available in the other plugins: radio buttons, paragraph text, file uploads, dates, addresses, toggles, and star ratings.
Which LifterLMS Form Plugin Is Right For You
There is no single correct answer to which plugin to use. If you are already using one of these four, the simplest path is to keep using it rather than switch just for this integration. Ninja Forms, WPForms, and Formidable Forms each have a genuinely capable free version if you want to try one before deciding, while Gravity Forms is premium only across all of its plans.
None of the four is a personal default recommendation. Each was chosen for this integration because of its support quality, its reputation, its user registration capability, and how straightforward it was to build a solid integration with from a development standpoint. If you want more input, ask in the LifterLMS Facebook group or another WordPress-focused community what plugin other course creators are using and why.
What You Need Before You Can Use Custom Registration Forms And Where To Get Them
Every one of these four integrations is exactly that, an integration. You still need your own license for whichever form plugin you choose, purchased directly from that company, and if you want custom registration to work, you also need that company’s user registration add-on specifically. The LifterLMS side of the integration connects the two systems together, but it does not include or replace the underlying form plugin license.
Each of the four LifterLMS form add-ons, for Gravity Forms, WPForms, Ninja Forms, and Formidable Forms, is available individually from the LifterLMS store. All four are also included in the Universe bundle, and anything in the Universe bundle is included in the Infinity bundle as well, alongside the LifterLMS Advanced add-ons. If you already own one of those bundles, the add-ons are already available in your account.
