Digital marketers often struggle with making WordPress forms engaging. A key difficulty lies in setting a unique default placeholder for form fields, making them stand out from standard list options to better capture user attention and interaction.
Another challenge is ensuring dropdown select fields don’t have pre-selected options. This is crucial for collecting accurate data. Default selections can mislead marketers about customer preferences, leading to skewed insights and ineffective strategies.
Submitting forms with automatic default selections causes a significant issue. This often results in low-quality data and unreliable information, which can negatively impact the development and effectiveness of marketing strategies. This underscores the need for more intuitive and flexible form customization in WordPress.
With our free Ninja Forms core plugin(download), you can:
- Set a distinct default placeholder for dropdown fields.
- Prevent automatic selection of options, encouraging users to make active choices.
- Avoid the common issue of forms being submitted with a default option, ensuring more meaningful user responses.
Make your form fields unique a default placeholder
The image below shows a dropdown select field without a unique default placeholder setting.
As shown in the video below, the first option in the dropdown is automatically selected by default. This is a problem because chances are high for users to leave the field the way it is.
Check out our tutorial Dropdown Select Field in WordPress Forms (Quick Guide) to discover the most common ways to use the dropdown select field.
How to customize your form’s default placeholder
We will add a new option to act as our default placeholder to counter this problem of an automatically selected option for our Select field.
- Add a Select field to your form.
- Go to the settings of the Select field.
- Click Add New, give the field label “Please select one,” and leave the value blank.
- Check the box to ensure that the option “Please select one” will be the first option on the list. As shown in the image below.
Notice we have set the field as a required field. This way, if someone selects “Please select one (which has no value), they will be prompted to select one of the other options (which have values).
When you set a default placeholder that is different from the list options, as we have done, this is how your select field will look.
Bye-bye to form submissions with the automatic default select option!
Congrats! You can now add a default placeholder that is different from the list options in your WordPress form.
Did you know the Ninja Forms core plugin is free? It comes packed with a bunch of awesome features like calculations, unlimited submissions, submission management, spam protection, and more. Check out all the features that come included for free in the Ninja Forms core plugin!
Besides our free features, we offer over 40 different integrations to help match your needs and wants into a form-building experience unlike any other. Unlike our competitors, all our add-ons can be purchased individually in one-, five-, or twenty-site licenses. Need more add-ons? We recommend going with one of our membership plans, including additional discounts for even more add-ons!
Want to learn more about Ninja Forms? Check our frequently asked questions to get your answers right away!
