Getting the opinion of your website’s users can be a conundrum. While many websites gather contextual data about their users via cookies, many websites have the need to poll and survey their users for direct answers. While WordPress does not natively have survey functionality built in, a WordPress plugin can easily do the trick. In this article we will examine features, pros, and cons of the top WordPress survey plugins.
Survey Plugins
WordPress offers a variety of plugins to allow your users to tell you what’s on their mind. The real question is, how do you want to consume that information? Do you want a poll, with predefined answers for users to select? Or maybe more of a contact form, with open-form answers? You may even have the need for a plugin that does both. The plugins available range widely in capabilities, price, and support. In the following sections we will explore the features of the plugins and in which situations they should be used.
YOP Poll
YOP Poll, made by yourownprogrammer, is a simple polling plugin that allows you to publish a poll, specify a poll end date, and easily view poll results in the backend. While YOP Poll doesn’t allow for a lot of customization in appearance, they do offer many survey templates to choose from. This plugin is ideal for a survey situation in which you want your users to select from predefined answers. It does not allow for open-form answers, except to include an “Other” option with a fillable field. Embedding the poll can be done in the form of a shortcode, or via WordPress widget.
Price: Free
Pros: Ease of use, schedule abilities, many templates, ideal for voting on predefined options
Cons: Only able to choose from predesigned templates, not ideal for open-ended answers
Polls by OpinionStage
Polls by OpinionStage is a robust quiz and poll plugin, offering many types of surveys, polls, outcome polls, and more. This plugin requires you to create a free account to connect to OpinionStage in the setup process. From there you are free to create customized quizzes (e.g. how much do you know about the US Constitution?), lists (e.g. 25 cats having a worse day than you), polls (e.g. vote for the worst pizza topping ever), outcome polls (e.g. find out which type of dog you are based on your dessert preferences), and surveys (e.g. take this survey and tell us how we did). Polls by OpinionStage also allows you to customize font, width, color, and more. OpinionStage polls and quizzes can be embedded in an article, as a popup, or via sidebar widget, and can easily be shared on social media using simple share buttons.
Price: Free
Pros: Wide variety of polls and quizzes, customization options, social sharing, ideal for all types of surveys, granular demographic reporting
Cons: Separate account required with OpinionStage, scheduling open and close of polls is not as clear cut.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a widely used premium form plugin, ideal for form-style feedback and surveying. While it comes with a price tag, it allows for easy integration to mail systems, conditional logic (only show certain fields if specific others were selected), and the ability for users to upload attachments to share with you. Need to have user submissions automatically generate a new post? Gravity Forms can do that too. With the Elite-level add-ons you can create polls and quizzes with customized grading as well.
Price: $59 for basic, $259 for elite (includes polls and quizzes)
Pros: Wide range of integrations and capability, customization of appearance, easy embed via shortcode or widget, add polls and quizzes with automatic, customized grading with the elite option.
Cons: Steep price tag to add polls and quizzes, but it also comes with many enterprise-grade integrations. No easy scheduling feature built-in.
WP Polls
The WP Polls plugin is a simple polling solution that works best to allow users simple voting options. WP Polls boasts wide customization options, including custom stylesheets, and the ability for users to select more than one option if desired. Additionally, users can set an expiry date to ensure the poll closes at a specific time.
Price: Free, Donations optional
Pros: Fully customizable appearance, options to select more than one answer if applicable, easy poll expiration dates.
Cons: Polls are the only survey option available, users report some conflicts with caching and/or testing of forms.
Google Forms
Using Google Forms with WordPress can also be rewarding. Embedding Google Forms allows all the customization options of Google Forms, coupled with your WordPress website. Google Forms allows for open-ended questions, polls, and various appearance options like dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, and more. Use your Google Form settings for who to accept responses from, when to close the survey, and whether or not to collect email addresses.
Price: Free
Pros: Many question format options, control of poll accessibility, ability to close polling easily, easy embed in posts or pages.
Cons: Controls of viewability and user access are managed separately in Google Forms.
What’s the Best WordPress Survey Plugin for You?
Ultimately, which WordPress Survey plugin you choose to use will depend on your own unique website needs. For simple voting-style polling, many free options exist. For more complex needs, a paid solution may work best.
A-Grade
With a wide variety of options and flexibility, Gravity Forms and Polls by OpinionStage take top honors. Gravity Forms, while a paid solution, offers powerful integrations, as well as the flexibility to offer quizzes and polls with their elite plan. And Polls by OpinionStage brings a wide variety of polling, social, and opinion-gathering methods with robust reporting and customization options.
B-Grade
Perfectly acceptable solutions for polls include YOP Polls and Google Forms. Google Forms offers the variety of question and appearance options, as well as integration and management through Google. And YOP Polls is a feature-rich option for a very specific need: polling or voting. The scheduling features and ease of use make it a quick win for users needing a simple solution.
C-Grade
For a simple, limited, but functional polling option, there is the WP Polls plugin. While WP Polls does accept custom stylesheets for a fully customized design, it doesn’t always play nice with caching systems. However, they do offer the option to set an expiration date for your polls as well as the option to select more than one response if desired.
Use the guides above to help make your decision and give it a try. And don’t forget–if you try one and find it doesn’t work quite right, no worries! You can pick up a different plugin that works better instead. We recommend testing new plugins in a staging or development environment to ensure the plugin works properly and does not conflict with other plugins or your WordPress theme.
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