How to Add Buttons to a WordPress Form

Your Submit button is gray. Or blue, or whatever color your theme decided for you, and it says “Submit,” because that’s the default and you never touched it. Not exactly a button that makes someone want to click it, is it?

Maybe you don’t want a boring Submit button at all. You want something that says “Get a Quote” or “Download Now,” something that looks like a real call-to-action button in WordPress, not a text link someone has to go hunting for. Maybe you want a second button entirely, something like “Learn More” sitting right next to Submit, without breaking the form that’s already working.

If you’ve gone looking for how to add buttons to a WordPress form, you’ve probably found a pile of advice that assumes you already know CSS, or that sends you off to install a whole page-builder plugin just to style one button. You don’t need any of that.

Yes, it’s a little annoying that WordPress doesn’t hand you a button-maker out of the box. But it’s also a quick fix, and there’s more than one way to get there depending on what “button” means to you.

What you’ll need

• Ninja Forms (free)
• [Optional] The Layout & Styles add-on (for point-and-click button styling with no CSS at all; standalone, or included with memberships)

Your Submit button doesn’t have to stay plain

Every Ninja Forms form comes with a Submit button already built in, and you can change what it says without touching a line of code. Open its settings, update the Label, republish, and you’re done. That covers the single most common request we hear from anyone trying to add buttons to a WordPress form: “I just want my button to say something else.”

1. In the builder, open the Form Fields tab and click the Submit field on the canvas to open its field settings window.
2. Change the Label field to whatever you want the button to say, like “Get a Quote” or “Join the Pack.”
3. If you want, update the Processing Label too. That’s the text the button briefly shows while the form submits behind the scenes (it defaults to “Processing”).

That’s it. No plugin, no CSS, no add-on. Republish and your button says what you told it to.

Want to theme the button, not just relabel it? There’s a hook for that, but it comes with a catch: Ninja Forms core doesn’t hand you a color picker for the Submit button. Here’s the workaround:

• Turn on Developer Mode under Ninja Forms > Settings > Advanced Settings. A Display settings accordion appears on the Submit field.
• Type a class name into the Custom Class Names option (the Element field). Ninja Forms tags the button with it.
• Style that class with your own CSS, wherever you keep it. You still have to write that CSS yourself.

The same trick works on other field types too. If you’ve ever wanted your radio or image choices to look more like toggle buttons, the door’s open, but you’re on your own for the styling there.

If writing CSS isn’t your idea of a good afternoon, skip on down for the no-code version of this.

The classic way to add buttons to a WordPress form

Ninja Forms has an HTML field built for this. Drop it anywhere in your form, paste in a styled link, and it renders as a real, clickable button, not a plain underlined text link. This is the same method people have used to add buttons to a WordPress form for years, and behaviorally, it still works today.

1. Open the Form Fields tab, click the blue (+) icon to open the Fields window, and choose HTML from the Layout Fields section.
2. Click the new HTML field to open its settings, then click the “</>” icon in the field’s built-in editor to switch to code view.
3. Paste in an anchor tag styled to look like a button.
4. Click “</>” again to switch back to the visual view. You should see your button rendered right there in the editor’s own preview, not just a line of code.
5. Save the field, then publish the form. Closing the field panel alone doesn’t save the form; the Publish button in the top right does that.

Something like this works well: <a href="https://example.com" style="display:block;background-color:#3F82D9;color:#ffffff;text-align:center;border-radius:4px;padding:12px;text-decoration:none;">See Sample Newsletter</a>. Swap in your own link, your own colors, and your own button text.

That’s all there is to it. Publish, and you’ve got a real second button living wherever you dropped that field, styled the way you told it to be, sitting right alongside your relabeled Submit button.

Between those two tricks, your Submit button says what you want and you’ve got a real second button wherever you need one. If you’re not running Ninja Forms yet, this is a good moment to grab it free and try both on your own form.

Want people to land somewhere specific after they click submit?

A call-to-action doesn’t always mean a second button sitting on the page. Sometimes it means where people end up after they hit Submit. Ninja Forms has a Redirect action for that: point it at a page, and every visitor who submits your form lands there automatically.

1. Open the Emails & Actions tab, click the blue (+) icon to open the Actions window, and choose Redirect.
2. Set the URL field to wherever you want people to go, like a thank-you page, a download, or a landing page built for this offer.
3. Toggle the action on, and publish the form.

Submit the form yourself once to make sure it sends you where you expect, and you’re done. It’s not a button on the page, but it’s a legitimate answer to “I want a call-to-action that takes people somewhere,” if what you care about is the destination and not a second thing to click.

Want to skip the code completely?

If writing your own CSS, or waiting on a developer to write it for you, isn’t how you want to spend your afternoon, one add-on covers the rest of this without any code at all.

Layout & Styles adds a real visual editor to the builder. Instead of typing a class name and hunting for somewhere to put CSS, you point and click: background color, border, size, padding, right there in the field settings. It’s the no-code version of the Custom Class Names trick from above.

Make your form’s buttons work as hard as the rest of your page

You now know how to add buttons to a WordPress form three different ways, and none of them required a developer. Relabel Submit, drop in an HTML button, send people wherever you want after they click, whichever one solves your problem. You never needed a full page-builder plugin for any of this, just the right corner of the builder.

Curious what else Ninja Forms can do for the rest of your form? Explore the full library of add-ons and see what else is worth adding.