If you have long forms or multi-step forms on your WordPress website, you might experience your forms being completed less often. It is a common reality, as we live in hectic times and your visitors don’t always have the luxury of uninterrupted time. Luckily, there is an easy solution to solve the low completion rates using the Save Progress on WordPress forms.
Allowing your visitors to save their partial information on the form and continue later will eliminate lost valuable submissions. Your visitors will no longer be frustrated if they need to start filling up your forms again. So let’s dig in!
Save progress on WordPress forms for logged in users
Save Progress add-on introduces the Save button located under the Common Fields that appears as a field in the backend. This Save field can be added to a form just like any other field and allows users to save their form submission in its current state, so they can come back to it where they left off before submitting it.
Using the Save progress add-on on WordPress forms requires users to be logged in to your WordPress website in combination with the User Management or similar registration plugin.
If your users are logged in via WordPress, the Save Progress feature works across multiple devices. This means your users can start filling out the form on the phone and continue on the computer exactly where they stopped.
Presently, a save record is only created once a logged-in visitor clicks the Save button. We do not offer a way to collect the user’s data before consent has been provided by sharing the form data via saving or submitting, and we strongly advise against doing so as a general principle for user privacy best practices.
Sometimes, your users need to make more than one change on the form. In order to allow this, Save Progress gives you the option to allow multiple saves on the WordPress form.
This can be done by toggling on the option Allow Multiple Saves under the Advanced tab > Save Progress. If you can’t see this option, make sure your Developer Mode is enabled.
We would also like to point out that for users who use our Save Progress add-on, the files are only transferred once the Submit button is clicked. The save and continue function won’t save the data of File Uploads fields.
Save progress on WordPress forms for non-registered users
If you don’t have any method for users to sign in and don’t want to use the registration plugin with your WordPress forms, you can still use the Save Progress feature. However, the Save button only appears for logged-in users.
Saving progress on WordPress forms for users who are not logged in can be done via the option Local Browser Storage in the Save Progress settings. This option grants non-registered users the ability to save their work automatically.
This will save the data to the visitor’s browser via a cookie as he moves from field to field. This data would persist for the duration of the browsing session or until the browser cookies/cache are cleared.
If users switch to another device or browser, the data on the form won’t be saved if you are using the Local Browser Storage option. Save Progress works across multiple devices and browsers if your users are logged in via WordPress only.
Submission management of saved forms
If you wish to disable the saves from appearing in the submission database, you would simply toggle off the Save button from the Store/Record Submission action.
With Save Progress enabled, you can also set any action including the actions for specific add-ons to trigger when the user saves the form.
In the screenshot above, a Success message is set to fire on Save (1) and another success message is set to fire on Submit (2). To make any action fire on save, all you need to do is toggle on the Save feature for that action. Note that if you have both Submit and Save toggled on for an action, it will fire on both.
Want to learn more about the Save Progress add-on and submission management of saved forms? Check our documentation guide that will walk you through the process of installing and using the Save field on your WordPress form!
Don’t lose out on valuable submissions!
If you are using multi-step forms such as registration forms, order forms, or any other long forms that contain a lot of information, the Save Progress add-on comes in very handy.
It gives the visitors option to save their forms and continue filling them later when they have time to return. The Save Progress feature will assure your longer forms will be submitted more often and you can expect your conversion rates to go up!
Keep in mind, that even though you can use the save and continue functionality for non-registered users, having a registration plugin is far more reliable. If you have both, your users can stay logged in, and save their progress on the form returning at any time, from any device and any browser. After all, relying on browser history via cookies doesn’t always work out the best, and you don’t want to lose valuable submissions!
