Full Documentation

Free forever

• The full visual builder, 25 field types and 27 ready-made templates.
• Entry storage with statuses, an entry detail view and CSV export. Your leads live in your own database, with no cap and no paywall.
• Conditional logic, multi-step forms, side-by-side field layouts and file uploads.
• Anti-spam: honeypot, time-trap, keyword blocklist, plus reCAPTCHA v2 and v3, hCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile and Akismet.
• All 7 email marketing integrations and webhooks, included.
• One-time payments through Stripe and PayPal with a 0% platform fee.
• Built-in SMTP, save and resume, abandonment capture, and GDPR tools.

The promise

• No subscriptions. The free plugin needs no account and no license key. The optional Lifetime Forms Ultra upgrade is a one-time purchase, never a recurring fee.
• No phone-home. The plugin makes no request of its own to LifetimePlugins.com or anyone else. The only outbound calls it ever makes go to a service you connected yourself (an email provider, a captcha, Stripe or PayPal), and only after you save that service's keys and enable it on a specific form.
• Your data stays yours. Entries are stored in the plugin's own tables inside your WordPress database and are exportable to CSV at any time.

Requires WordPress 5.8 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer. Current version: 1.0.0.

The canvas

• Drag a field from the palette onto the canvas, or drag existing fields to reorder them.
• Every field card has Move up, Move down, Duplicate and Delete actions, and shows a Required tag when set.
• Click a card to open its settings in the Field tab.

The toolbar

• Form title (defaults to “Untitled Form”).
• Use a template reopens the template chooser.
• The shortcode chip for the saved form.
• The Draft / Active status toggle and the Save button.

Existing forms autosave about three seconds after your last change; the toolbar shows “Unsaved changes” and then “Autosaved.”

Field settings

• Label, Required, Placeholder, Help text.
• Options, one per line, for Dropdown, Multi-select, Checkboxes and Multiple choice.
• Field width: Full width, Half (1/2) or Third (1/3).
• Min, Max and Step for Number and Slider fields.
• Allow multiple files and Max files for File upload.
• Amount for a Payment field, Content for an HTML block.
• Conditional logic rules (see Conditional logic).

Form settings

Grouped into Submit button (button text), Confirmation (show a message or redirect to a URL), Email notification, Spam protection, Save & resume, Privacy & data and Integrations. Each group is covered in its own section below.

General

• Simple Contact Form
• Feedback / Rating
• Suggestion Box

Business

• Request a Quote
• Appointment Booking
• Consultation Request
• Vendor Application
• Membership Application (two-step)

Marketing

• Newsletter Signup
• Testimonial
• Customer Satisfaction Survey

Support

• Support Request
• Bug Report

Events

• Event Registration
• RSVP
• Catering Request
• Contest Entry

Education

• Course Enrollment

HR & Jobs

• Job Application

Real Estate

• Real Estate Inquiry

Health & Wellness

• Medical Appointment

Nonprofit

• Volunteer Signup
• Donation (paid, Stripe or PayPal)
• Petition

eCommerce

• Product Order (paid, with shipping address)
• Return / RMA Request
• Warranty Registration

Statuses

• Unread, a new submission (the default).
• Read, once you have looked at it.
• Spam and Trash, moved there by you.
• Pending payment and Paid, for forms with a payment field.
• Partial, a saved or abandoned draft (see Save & resume). Partials never count as submissions.

Actions

View, Mark read / Mark unread, Spam / Not spam, Trash / Restore and Delete.

Entry detail

Open View to see one entry: the date, status, payment details for paid forms, the IP address (when IP storage is on for that form), and every field with its label. Uploaded files are shown as links.

CSV export

Click Export CSV to download all entries of the selected form (Partial drafts are never included). Every cell passes through a formula-injection guard, so spreadsheets open the file safely, and rich-text values are flattened to plain text.

Admin notification

Under Form settings → Email notification, keep Send an email on each submission on and set:

• Send to: one or more addresses separated by commas. Defaults to {admin_email}.
• Subject: defaults to “New form submission”.

The email is plain text: a “New submission for: form title” line followed by one “Label: value” line per field.

Merge tags

• {admin_email}, the site admin address from Settings → General.
• {field:email}, the first email address the visitor typed into any field.

Both tags work in Send to and Subject. The message is sent from the admin address, and its Reply-To is set to {field:email} automatically, so hitting Reply in your inbox writes back to the visitor.

Confirmation

After submitting, the visitor sees a message (default “Thanks for your submission!”) or is redirected to a URL you set.

Built-in SMTP

Default WordPress mail is often flagged as spam. Open Lifetime Forms → Settings → Email delivery (SMTP), tick Send emails through SMTP and fill in:

• From name and From email (use an address on the domain your provider sends for).
• SMTP host and Port (587 by default).
• Encryption: None, SSL (port 465) or TLS (port 587).
• My server requires authentication, then Username and Password.

Save, enter an address under Send a test email to and click Send test email. It works with any SMTP relay (Brevo, SendGrid, Mailchimp Transactional, Gmail or your host's own server), and no separate SMTP plugin is needed.

On the Integrations page

• Paste the credentials and click Save, then Test connection to verify them against the live API.
• Pick a Default list (new subscribers land there unless a form chooses its own).
• Disconnect removes the stored credentials entirely.
• Keys are shown masked (the last four characters only) and never echoed in full again. The list catalog is cached for five minutes.

On each form

• Enable the provider and pick its List / audience, or keep Use the global default list.
• Email field: choose which field holds the address, or leave Auto-detect (first email field).
• Tags: comma-separated. Mailchimp applies them to the member and webhooks include them in the payload.
• A Name field is split into first and last name for the provider.

On by default, zero setup

• Honeypot field: an invisible input that humans never see. If a bot fills it, the submission is rejected.
• Time-trap (block instant submits): submissions sent less than 2 seconds after the form was rendered are rejected.

Keyword blocklist

List keywords one per line or comma-separated. Any submission containing one of them (case-insensitive, in any field) is rejected.

Akismet

Install and configure the Akismet plugin, then tick Check submissions with Akismet on the form. No keys are needed in Lifetime Forms. The submission's text, author name and email, IP and user agent are sent to Akismet for a spam check.

Captcha

Save the keys once under Lifetime Forms → Settings (each provider has a Site key and a Secret key), then choose the captcha per form:

• reCAPTCHA v2: the classic “I'm not a robot” checkbox. Keys at google.com/recaptcha/admin.
• reCAPTCHA v3: invisible and score-based; submissions scoring below 0.5 are rejected.
• hCaptcha: a privacy-focused challenge. Keys at dashboard.hcaptcha.com.
• Cloudflare Turnstile: free and mostly invisible. Create a widget under Turnstile in your Cloudflare dashboard.

The widget renders just above the submit button, and the provider's script loads only on pages with a form that uses that captcha. Secret keys are stored on your site only and are sent solely to that provider's verification endpoint.

Set up the processor

Under Lifetime Forms → Settings:

• Payments (Stripe): paste the Publishable key and Secret key from Developers → API keys in your Stripe dashboard, and choose a Currency (USD, EUR, GBP, PLN, CAD, AUD, CHF, SEK, NOK, DKK or CZK). Test or live mode simply follows the keys you paste (sk_test_ or sk_live_).
• Payments (PayPal): paste the Client ID and Secret of a REST API app created under Apps & Credentials in the PayPal Developer Dashboard, and pick the Environment: Sandbox (testing) or Live.

Build the paid form

Add a Payment (one-time) field and set its Amount. Several payment fields add up. An optional Order total field shows the visitor the sum. When both Stripe and PayPal are configured, the form shows a Pay with choice: Card (Stripe) or PayPal.

What happens on submit

1. The entry is stored as Pending payment.
2. The visitor is sent to Stripe Checkout or PayPal's hosted page and pays there.
3. Back on your site, the plugin verifies the payment with the processor: Stripe must report the session as paid, PayPal must report the order as completed, and in both cases the amount must match exactly.
4. Only then does the entry become Paid, and only then do the notification email and integrations fire, exactly once.
5. The visitor lands on your confirmation message or redirect URL. If the payment was cancelled or could not be verified, they return to the form with a notice and the entry stays Pending payment.

Operators

• is / is not
• contains / does not contain
• is greater than / is less than (numeric)
• is empty / is not empty

Rules of the game

• Up to 20 rules per field. “All” means AND, “any” means OR.
• Checkbox and multi-select fields match when any selected value satisfies the rule.
• Conditions can chain: a field hidden by its own rules counts as empty for every rule that references it.
• A Hidden field can be a rule source but is never toggled itself. Layout blocks cannot be sources.

Let visitors save and continue later

Adds a Save and continue later button to the form. Clicking it stores the current answers and shows a private link (“Bookmark or copy this link to finish later”). Opening that link prefills the form; when the visitor finally submits, the draft is removed so nothing is duplicated.

Capture abandoned forms

Quietly auto-saves what a visitor typed, about two seconds after the last change and again when they leave the page. Half-filled forms show up under Entries as Partial with an “In progress / abandoned” tag instead of vanishing, so you can follow up.

Per form

• Consent / GDPR field: add a required acceptance checkbox with your own wording.
• Store IP address with entries: on by default; switch it off under Form settings → Privacy & data to skip the submitter's IP.
• Data retention: delete entries older than N days (0 keeps them forever). A daily cleanup removes only entries strictly older than the window.

WordPress privacy tools

Lifetime Forms registers with Tools → Export Personal Data and Tools → Erase Personal Data. Given an email address, the exporter finds every entry where a field equals that address and exports each field with its label, the submission date and the IP (when stored). The eraser deletes those entries and their metadata.