Do you want to learn how to create a WordPress user registration form?
User registration forms make lives easier for websites that want to give their users the option to sign up.
In this post, we’ll show you the easiest way to create a user registration form in WordPress so new users can register on your site from the frontend within a few minutes.
Create Your User Registration Form Now
Why Create a User Registration Form in WordPress?
There are various benefits to creating a user registration form on your website to accept new users:
- Organization — When you let visitors create a WordPress account and make their own user profiles on your site, you’ll have a recorded entry of all their important details needed to automatically add their account.
- Security — By requiring new users to submit a form with activation requirements, you will keep your WordPress site secure and stop user registration spam.
- Permissions — You can control the level of access different users have on your site based on their registered WordPress roles such as author, contributor, subscriber, and more. If you’re a WooCommerce store, you can even require users to register first before purchasing from you online.
- Membership Sites — You can create a membership site using one of the best WordPress membership and member plugins on the market and require people to register as a member using a registration form.
- Ease of Use — Once users register for your site and log in via WordPress user login, they’ll be able to view their own user account page and edit their profile within their WordPress dashboard.
Ready to let your users register in WordPress and simplify user management? Here’s how.
WPForms is the best WordPress Form Builder plugin. Get it for free!
In This Article
- Step 1: Install WPForms
- Step 2: Activate the User Registration Addon
- Step 3: Start Creating WordPress User Regisration Form
- Step 4: Add and Customize User Registration Form Fields
- Step 5: Configure WordPress User Registration Form Settings
- Step 6: Configure User Activation Method
- Step 7: Change the New User Registration Notifications Settings in WordPress
- Step 8: Edit On Page Registration Form Confirmation
- Step 9: Configure User Registration Marketing and Payments (Optional)
- Step 10: Add the User Registration Form to Your Site
- Step 11: Add Your Registration Page to Your Website’s Menu
Step 1: Install WPForms
WPForms is the best WordPress contact form builder. The free version allows you to create simple contact forms, but WPForms Pro comes with premium addons that enable more complex functionalities like user registration.
The best thing is that you don’t need to know HTML, PHP, or CSS to build your own WordPress registration form with WPForms. It’s a simple drag and drop form builder that anybody can use.
To get started, the first thing you’ll need is to install and activate the WPForms plugin. It’s very simple for beginners to install this form plugin.
Make sure to purchase the WPForms Pro plan because this includes the User Registration addon that we’ll be using to create registration forms.
Step 2: Activate the User Registration Addon
When you’ve installed WPForms on your site, the next step is to install and activate the User Registration addon.
To get this addon, head over to WPForms » Addons from your WordPress admin area.
This will open the WPForms Addons page. You can scroll through the list of addons or just type in “user registration” in the search field to find the User Registration addon.
Click on Install Addon to begin the installation.
The status under the User Registration addon will now read Active.
Great job! Now that the User Registration addon is ready, we can start creating WordPress user registration forms using WPForms.
Step 3: Start Creating WordPress User Regisration Form
To create a new registration form, click on WPForms » Add New. You’ll now see the form setup screen where you can name your form and select a template.
In this example, we’ll create the registration form from scratch, which is really easy. But if you want to do this even quicker, you can also make a user registration form from a template.
Now, click on the Create Blank Form.
You should now see the form builder screen. At this point, the form will be empty since we chose to create a new form using the Blank Form option.
WPForms is extremely customizable and includes lots of custom fields that you can add if needed. We’ll take advantage of its various registration features in the next steps.
Step 4: Add and Customize User Registration Form Fields
We’ll create a really simple registration form, adding only the most important fields to it to collect user information. This is to keep the registration process short and sweet.
Longer forms have a much greater chance of being abandoned by users, but you can still capture leads using WPForms’ Form Abandonment addon.
Now, let’s add some fields using the simple drag and drop form builder. All you need to do is select a field from the left-hand pane and drag and drop it onto your form on the right.
Repeat this process until you’ve added all the desired fields. For our form, we added the following fields:
- Name
- Single Line Text (for username input)
- Password
You can easily customize options for your form fields. For instance, we changed the name of Single Line Text field to read Username, set a maximum character limit, and added an input mask to control allowed characters for the username.
To customize any field, click on the field to open the Field Options. Under the General tab within Field Options, you can change the label of the field, add a description, and choose whether you want the field to be a required one.
Normally, usernames only contain alphanumeric characters and no special characters. You can enforce this requirement so that the Username field only accepts letters or alphabets.
To do this, click on the Advanced tab under Field Options for the Username field. Then, scroll down to find the Input Mask option.
WPForms uses formulas to create Input Mask rules. In our example, we wanted to create a Username field that accepts numbers, uppercase letters and lowercase letters, and a character length between 4 to 15.
To define these WordPress username rules, the formula for the custom input mask is: ****[*{0,11}]
For more information about input masks, see our doc guide on using custom input masks in WPForms. You can set down your own WordPress username rules using custom input masks.
Similarly, we customized the Password field in the Field Options to enable the Password Confirmation and Password Strength options.
These options are exceptionally handy if you’d like to make sure your users sign up with strong credentials and prevent the risk of hacking. The interactive password strength meter also helps enhance the user experience.
WPForms also adds an extra layer of security by using anti-spam techniques to prevent brute force attacks and spambots. You can even connect WPForms with Google reCAPTCHA as explained in this guide on stopping WordPress form spam.
Also, you might want to change the label of the Submit button on the bottom of the form so that it reads Register instead.
To do this, click on the Setting button on the menu on the left and then click General. From here, simply edit the text under the Submit Button Text field.
Once you’re done customizing your form, click Save.
Step 5: Configure WordPress User Registration Form Settings
In this step, we’ll map our form fields to the WordPress user profile and assign a user role to new users.
To start, click on Settings » User Registration.
Now, click on the button next to Enable User Registration to enable it.
On this page, you can do the following:
- Map each form field
- Select default user roles
- Enable notifications
- Select which confirmation page to redirect users to
For field mapping, simply use the dropdowns to select a field from your form that corresponds to the user profile field.
Scroll down to the User Roles section to assign one of your WordPress site’s predefined user roles to new users.
In the next step, we’ll configure the user activation method.
Step 6: Configure User Activation Method
If you scroll down from the User Roles section, you should see User Activation & Logins section. We recommend toggling on the Enable User Activation button if you want to prevent spam signups and control user activations.
WPForms gives you two user activation methods:
- User Email
- Manual Approval
The User Email method is more convenient if there are lots of people signing up to your site every day. Plus, it will help prevent spam user registrations and require all new users to complete their registration using a special link sent to their provided email address.
You can customize the email subject, message, and select a User Activation Confirmation Page to display when a user clicks the activation URL in their email.
Note: Make sure you’ve already created the page confirmation page on your WordPress site so that you can select it in the User Activation Confirmation Page dropdown.
If you select the Manual Approval method, site admins will need to approve each user on the backend to confirm registration. This can be time-consuming.
Once you’re done configuring the user registration settings, click Save to store your changes.
Step 7: Change the New User Registration Notifications Settings in WordPress
Scrolling down further from the settings in the above section, you should now find the Email Notifications section. This gives you the ability to change the new user registration notifications. The available options include:
- Send email to the admin when a new user registers.
- Send email to the user with the account information they entered during signup.
- Send email to the user once their account has been activated.
If you want to edit the header and content of these emails, you can do so by simply clicking on the Edit Template button next to each notification type.
Step 8: Edit On Page Registration Form Confirmation
Apart from the notification emails, WPForms also displays a confirmation message to the user when they submit the form.
WPForms has three confirmation types to choose from:
- Message. This is the default confirmation type. When a user completes your registration form, a simple message confirmation will appear letting them know their form was processed. Look here for some great success messages to help boost customer happiness.
- Show Page. This confirmation type takes users to a specific web page on your site thanking them for registering. For help with this step, check out our tutorial on redirecting customers to a thank you page. In addition, be sure to check out our article on creating effective Thank You pages for boosting customer loyalty.
- Go to URL (Redirect). This option is used when you want to send customers to a different website, such as an eCommerce site you’re an affiliate for.
You can customize confirmations by clicking on Settings » Confirmations. In this example, we used the default Confirmation Type (Message), but we edited the message to include instructions for the user.
If you want to automatically log new users into their newly created WordPress account, rather than show them a thank you message after registering on your website, check out this article on how to set up WordPress registration redirects.
Don’t forget to Save your changes. Next, we’ll embed and publish the form on your site.
Step 9: Configure User Registration Marketing and Payments (Optional)
You can also create a WordPress registration form with payment options using WPForms. It’s really easy to combine your site’s user registration forms with our email marketing addons like Mailchimp, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, MailerLite, and GetResponse.
This allows you to automatically add all registered users to your email marketing list. You can even add them into various marketing automation sequences from there.
For instance, you can add a checkbox field that lets users signup for your newsletter while registering. With WPForm’s marketing integrations, you can then send new signups to your mailing list automatically.
In addition, you can configure your user registration forms to accept payments using our payment addons for Stripe, Authorize.Net, PayPal, and Square. This is perfect if you want to run a membership or WooCommerce site to accept payments while a user is registering for your site.
To configure the payments settings on your user registration form, you’ll first have to install and activate the right payment addon.
For easy step-by-step instructions, check the following tutorials:
- PayPal Standard addon installation
- PayPal Commerce addon installation
- Stripe addon installation
- Authorize.Net addon installation
- Square addon installation.
Step 10: Add the User Registration Form to Your Site
After you’ve created your WordPress user form user registration and login form, you need to add it to your WordPress website.
You can embed any WPForms form using 3 easy methods. The simplest one is the WPForms embed tool.
Click on the Embed button on the top-right of the form builder screen.
Now, select Create New Page.
Give your new page a name and then click Let’s Go.
WPForms will now take you to your WordPress editor with your new registration form already embedded within. When you’re ready, click on Publish. With WPForms, this is all you need to do to add a registration page to your WordPress site.
You might want to redirect your default WordPress registration URL to your new custom login page. The default WordPress login page is too plain and it doesn’t match your site’s WordPress theme, so it can feel out of place to use the standard login page in WordPress. See our article on how to add login and registration redirects in WordPress for details.
You can also embed the registration form in the sidebar widget on your site.
Now, users can register on your site using your custom registration form. Once they register, you can then change their roles or other settings from the default WordPress profile page for each user.
After you publish your new user registration form, it will be ready to use. However, visitors have to be able to find it if they want to sign up.
The easiest way to make your registration page accessible is to add it to the main menu of your WordPress site. You can do this by going to Appearance » Menus and choosing your new registration page from the options listed on the left.
Depending on which WordPress theme you have, you might also need to remove your old registration page from your site’s menu. Don’t forget to save your changes.
If you need help with this, we recommend checking out this WordPress menu tutorial.
And that’s it! You now know how to make a WordPress registration form to enable an easy signup process for new users on your site.
Next, Run a Successful Giveaway
Now that you’re getting new registered users on your site, it might be a good idea to further increase your followers by running an Instagram giveaway. Check out these tips for running an Instagram giveaway, to launch a successful one.
Also, did you know that you can let users preview their form entry before submitting it? See our article on how to preview a form entry before submitting it for more details.
You can even create a Google Drive upload form using WPForms and add files directly to your Google Drive.
Create Your User Registration Form Now
So, what are you waiting for? Get started with the most powerful WordPress drag and drop form builder and WordPress user registration plugin today. The Pro version of WPForms has a pre-built user registration form template. And you get powerful features like conditional logic and form abandonment too.
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