How to Connect Your WordPress Forms to Anything – For Free!

Ever wished that there was an easy way to connect your WordPress forms to the other plugins and tools that you’re using?

You would be able to automate key actions, get your data where it needs to go, and just generally simplify your workflows.

Well, you can probably guess where we’re going with this…

With Uncanny Automator 3.1 and higher, we’ve made it even easier to automate your WordPress forms – for free!

With the free version of Uncanny Automator, we recently added two key features that help you more effectively automate your WordPress forms on a budget:

1. You can now trigger actions based on any form submission, whether or not the person who submits the form is signed in to your site. You can do this via the new “Everyone” recipe type.
2. We added a new app credit system to the free version of Uncanny Automator that gives you a chance to use advanced integrations for free, such as connecting your forms to Google Sheets, Slack, Mailchimp, Zoom, and more.

With the new app credit system, you can get access to 250 free app credits when you register for a free account. These app credits give you a chance to automate up to 250 form submissions with otherwise-app integrations.

Once you use up your 250 free app credits, you can either keep using the free version of the plugin without the app integrations. Or, you can purchase the premium version of Uncanny Automator to unlock unlimited usage to unlock unlimited usage of those app integrations

In this post, we’ll quickly show you how the “Everyone” recipe type works. Then, we’ll share a bunch of use cases for how you can automate your forms and save time.

How to Set Up Your First Free Recipe With the Everyone Recipe Type

Uncanny Automator works on a “Trigger → Action” model. For all of the automation examples that we’re sharing in this post, the trigger is someone submitting your form, and the action is whatever you want to automate.

Uncanny Automator works with pretty much all popular WordPress form plugins. Here’s the full list at the time this article was published:

• WPForms
• Formidable Forms
• Contact Form 7
• Elementor Pro Form widget
• Gravity Forms
• Fluent Forms
• Forminator
• HappyForms
• Ninja Forms

With the new “Everyone” recipe type, you can automate actions even if the person filling out your form is an anonymous visitor.

To use it, you’ll first create a new recipe. When you do that, make sure to choose “Everyone” as the recipe type. Or, if you want to automate forms that your logged in users fill out, you can stick with “Logged-in users”.

Next, you can choose the actual trigger for your recipe. In this case, it’s a new form submission from your form plugin – e.g. WPForms:

Finally, you’ll choose the action that you want to take when someone submits a form. For example, adding submissions to Google Sheets:

Want to see a more detailed guide? You can check out our post on connecting WPForms to Google Sheets for a more in-depth example of how it works.

Not sure what to automate? Well, that’s kind of the point of the rest of this post. Below, we’ll give you some example ideas of what you can automate for free.

Seven Examples of How You Can Automate Your Forms for Free

Now that you know how Uncanny Automator helps you automate your forms, let’s look at seven real-world examples of how you can automate your WordPress forms with Uncanny Automator for free.

1. Connect Your WordPress Forms to Your CRM

If you’re using a customer relationship management tool (CRM) to manage your contacts, you might be running into the problem of how to get new leads from your WordPress forms to your CRM.

With Uncanny Automator, you can easily pass some or all of the data from your form(s) to your CRM, along with additional metadata such as the date that a person submitted the form.

To set this up for free, you can either use Uncanny Automator’s Mailchimp integration (if you’re using Mailchimp) or use WP Fusion Lite alongside Uncanny Automator to connect to other CRMs.

2. Store Form Submissions in Google Sheets

Storing form submissions in Google Sheets can be really useful for analysis and reporting. For example, maybe you’re trying to learn more about your audience so you ask them some questions to find out what they’re interested in. If you stick that data in Google Sheets, you can easily analyze it.

Or, not all form plugins offer in-dashboard submission storage, especially in their free versions. By storing data in Google Sheets, you could add this functionality to your form plugin even if the plugin doesn’t offer it.

To connect your forms to Google Sheets, you can use the Google Sheets action and the 250 app credits that you get with the free version of Uncanny Automator:

3. Get Real-Time Notifications for Form Submissions in Slack, SMS, Etc.

Almost all form plugins let you send notification emails for new form submissions. But what if you want an even more real-time notification, such as getting a message in Slack or an SMS when someone submits a form?

With the Slack and Twilio actions in Uncanny Automator, you can easily send yourself real-time notifications whenever someone submits a form:

• Slack instructions
• Twilio instructions

4. Register People for a Zoom Event

Want to create a custom registration form for a Zoom webinar or meeting? With Uncanny Automator, you can connect your forms to Zoom and automatically add or remove people from a Zoom webinar or meeting when they submit a form.

5. Post a Message on Social Media

This one is a niche use case, but you might have situations where you want to post some content to social media when someone fills out the form. This could be a static message that’s always the same, or it could incorporate some of the information from the form submission.

With Uncanny Automator, you can post to the following social networks when someone submits a form:

• Send a tweet.
• Publish a post to a Facebook page.
• Share a photo to a Facebook page.
• Share a link with a message to a Facebook page.
• Publish a photo to an Instagram account.

6. Create a Blog Post (or Other Post Type) Based on Form Data

If you allow user-submitted content, you might want to offer frontend content creation forms that users can submit content from.

With Uncanny Automator, you can take the content from a form submission and use it to create a blog post. For example, if you allow guest posts, you could create a frontend form that automatically saves the guest post as a draft.

It’s not just for blog posts, though!

You can also create new posts in any custom post type that you might be using. For example, maybe you have a directory of public tennis courts in your area where you save each court as a “Tennis Court” custom post type.

With Uncanny Automator, you could create a frontend form that lets visitors submit a new tennis court to your directory. Then, you could save all that data as a new draft “Tennis Court”.

7. Send Form Data to Zapier to Connect With Thousands of Apps

If you want to unlock even more flexibility, Uncanny Automator also lets you send form submissions to a Zapier webhook. Once it’s there, you can pass that information to any one of the thousands of apps on Zapier.

However, note that while Uncanny Automator will let you send data to Zapier for free, you might need a paid Zapier plan to use that data to connect to other apps.

If you want to pass data to other non-WordPress apps, that’s fine too! Sending data via webhooks to other applications is supported in the free version of Automator, too.

Automate Your Form in Your Own Unique Way

The examples above are by no means a complete list of all the different ways that you can automate your WordPress forms with Uncanny Automator.

To see all of Uncanny Automator’s 75+ integrations, check out this page.

If you click on a specific integration, you’ll be able to see all of the available actions for that tool. Or, you can check out the full list of all triggers and actions.

Automate Your WordPress Forms With Uncanny Automator

With Uncanny Automator, you can connect your WordPress forms to…well, pretty much anything.

Thanks to the new “Everyone” recipe type, you can easily automate all of your form submissions, whether they come from anonymous visitors or registered users on your site.

With the new free app credits, you’ll also get a chance to automate app integrations for free, such as connecting your WordPress forms to Google Sheets, Slack, Mailchimp, and more.

Ready to begin automating your WordPress forms? To get started, install the free Uncanny Automator plugin from WordPress.org and then register for your free Uncanny Automator account to get your 250 app credits.