WS Form Reviews & Product Details

WS Form is easy if you're already using the WordPress family of products. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

WS Forms can be difficult if you are not a user of WordPress. If you are not used to the platform, there can be a bit of a learning curve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

WS Form has now become my go-to WordPress form plugin for every single project of mine. Do note that I came to using WS Form after using many other popular premium form plugins for years. I remember the days when I had to create a complicated form for a client that will calculate age and then do conditional things based on that value. To do that I had to write quite a bit of code taking advantage of different filters and things. But with WS Form no matter how complex a form you want to create, you can do that all within the form editor itself. WS Form does have many filters and hooks which you can take advantage of for custom use cases but rarely you will need them. WS Form is so powerful that now no matter how complex form clients think of it is always possible to do easily.

And there is the WooCommerce integration which allows users to add custom variations and features to the WooCommerce products like breeze. So, you can provide as many options to your buyer without thinking about the complex development part of it. I simply love WS Form and all the amazing features it comes with. I have not used any other WordPress form plugin that comes with so many features built-in without any extra hassle and built so efficiently. The UI & UX is super smooth and easy.

One of my most favourite features of WS Form (one of the main reasons I instantly switched to WS From) is the ability to build the form with the design language of the design framework you are using in your project. As an example, I use Bootstrap extensively in almost all of my projects. Now before the WS Form days no matter how well my custom theme has been designed as soon as I drop a form there it looked like an alien landed onto that page as it never fit properly with the design system the site is using. But in WS Form you can either use their native design system for the forms OR you can choose the design system that you are using in your project so that when WS Form will render your form it will use the proper structure and classes of that design system to render the form which makes it look like it's a custom handmade form. This is such an amazing feature and game-changing that I can't praise it enough. Previously with other form builders, I had to read the same CSS for the forms to kinda make it look similar but it never was perfect like it is now. Moreover, the WS Form team always keep their system updated with the new release of these design systems. As an example, WS Form supported Bootstrap 5 (latest) since its early Beta days.🤯

On top of all these, the detailed knowledge base, fast and human support of WS Form is second to none. The team is constantly adding new features all the time making WS Form not only more powerful but also more optimized and feature-rich.

P.S.: Did I tell you that WS Form has support for many payment gateways and not just Stripe or PayPal. There are many other alternatives to choose from as well. And any Indian readers who are reading this, Razorpay support is coming too (hopefully). So, you can make any sort of form, sell items, take donations, do whatever you want smoothly and swiftly with just one form plugin. I honestly don't know what more you can ask for. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With all the praises that I sang above regarding WS Form, you have to understand that nothing in this world is 100% perfect. That being said there are mainly 2 things in WS Form that I personally feel can be improved. Please note that these are coming from a person who has been a web engineer for more than a decade and is clinically obsessed with web performance and optimization.

So, first of all, the WS Form plugin heavily uses jQuery and is highly dependent on the ancient jQuery system. So, if you are building a custom WordPress site/theme that does not use jQuery and instead uses much faster native vanilla javascript, do note that on the pages where you would like to show the WS Form, you just need to load jQuery on those pages, otherwise the plugin won't work. I really wish that the plugin was not dependent on jQuery and instead used vanilla JS which the browser can instantly compile and execute without the need for another library to be downloaded, executed and parsed. That being said, it is a huge task considering the size of the WS Form and its complexities. Hopefully someday in future when WS Form will be super big and they will have a huge development team behind them, they might be able to rewrite all the JS of the plugin and this time use vanilla JS. Along with jQuery, WS Form also loads a few jQuery libraries based on which features you are using. So, yes it is a bit jQuery heavy, but you will not feel that on its performance that's for sure. Despite all these the plugin works super fast and smoothly. The goal of me saying this is because it can be even faster (which is insane to think of kind of like imagining multiplying infinity with infinity).

The second thing is that WS Form does not have any server-side rendering for the form. By that what I mean is that if you throttle your internet to dial-up internet speed and then do an "empty cache and hard reload" on the page that has WS Form in it, you will see initially the place where the form is supposed to be is totally Blank. Then the browser loads jQuery and parses it and then it loads WS Form javascript files and parses them and then finally the form will show up on the screen. So, if you disable javascript on your browser the WS Form won't work. So, technically this causes a slight CLS on the page if you have a super slow internet speed. But the crazy thing is that even when you run your pages with the form in Google Page Speed Insight you won't see any major CLS shift as the items are loaded so damn fast (unless you are using a dial-up connection).

So, I really wish:

1. WS Form would ditch jQuery and all jQuery libraries in future.

2. WS Form would render the form on the server-side instead of doing it on the client-side; making sure the forms are part of the page since the initial load and also the form somewhat work when JS is disabled.

But again as I said earlier both of these tasks are huge to accomplish and need time, money and a great team. I have high trust in the WS Form team that they will eventually do them sometime in future. Despite these 2 shortcomings (IMO) being an optimization fanatic I still chose WS Form and I will choose it in a heartbeat again and again due to the million things it does great and perfectly. I would highly recommend everyone to use WS Form. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.