Description
LocalForm is a form builder for WordPress. Add your questions, drag them into order, pick your colors, and hit publish. Your form gets its own page and a link you can share right away – no page building, no shortcode wrangling, no fighting your theme’s CSS.
The name says what it does: every response stays local, on your own site, under your own domain and branding. Nothing is sent to a third-party form service, so you stay in control of your visitors’ data. And there is nothing to set up before your first form is live – install, activate, and start building.
If you have been collecting answers with a cloud form service such as Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, LocalForm covers the same ground – write your questions, share a link, read the results back as a summary – except the form lives on your own domain and the answers never leave your site.
What you can build
- Surveys and feedback forms. Ask your questions and read the results back as a summary with counts and charts, right in the admin.
- Sign-ups and intake forms. Collect the details you need and get an email every time someone submits.
- Event registrations. Set the event date, time, location, organizer and price, cap the number of registrations, open and close the form on a schedule, and send every registrant a confirmation email.
Why LocalForm?
- Simple to use. A distraction-free builder: add questions, drag to reorder, pick your colors, publish.
- Share a link. Every form gets its own page with a URL you choose – or drop it into an existing page with a shortcode or block.
- Your data stays yours. Responses are stored on your own site and can be downloaded as an Excel file whenever you like.
- No surprises. No account, no license key, no trial period, and no limit on the number of forms or submissions.
- Nothing calls home. No analytics, no telemetry, and fonts are served from your own domain – so building a form never sends your visitors anywhere else.
- Works with AI assistants. Built-in MCP support lets an assistant like Claude build and edit your forms for you, on your own site – see below.
Features
Building forms
- Drag-and-drop builder in the WordPress admin – no code, no page builder needed.
- Question types: text, long text, email, phone, number, dropdown, single choice, checkboxes, date, date range and rating.
- Add section titles, text and images between questions to explain or break up a long form.
- Choose the colors and the font; pick from seven bundled font families.
- Organize your forms with tags and filter the forms list by them.
Sharing your form
- Every form gets its own page at a web address you choose.
- Place a form inside an existing page or post with the
[localform id="123"]shortcode or the LocalForm block. - Share dialog in the builder: copy the link, copy the embed code, or download a QR code for print and posters.
- Forms are shown full-screen by default, or in your theme’s normal page layout if you prefer.
Collecting responses
- Visitors get instant validation and a thank-you message you can write yourself, without the page reloading.
- Get an email whenever someone submits, and send the person who submitted a confirmation email you can customize with their answers.
- Cap the number of registrations and set an opening and closing date and time, with your own message shown when the form is full or closed.
- Built-in spam protection: a hidden trap field, rate limiting and duplicate-submission checks.
Reading and keeping your results
- Browse every submission per form in the admin.
- Summary view per question: counts and bar charts for choice questions, lowest/average/highest for numbers, per-day counts for dates, and the most recent answers for open questions.
- Download all responses as an Excel (XLSX) file.
- Back up every form, submission and setting to a single file, and restore it here or on another site.
Connecting to other tools
- Send each submission to a web address of your choice (a webhook), to plug LocalForm into your own system or an automation tool like Zapier, Make or Power Automate.
- Requests are signed and retried automatically if the receiving end is down, with a log of the last 30 days so you can see what went out.
- Optionally skip saving submissions entirely and only send them onward.
Building forms with an AI assistant (MCP)
LocalForm speaks MCP – the Model Context Protocol – so an AI assistant such as Claude can build your forms for you. Ask for “a registration form for the summer school on 12 and 13 August, with a student rate”, and the form is created on your site, with its page, ready for you to review.
- Three WordPress Abilities are registered – list forms, read a form, and create or update one – and become MCP tools as soon as the MCP Adapter plugin is installed.
- It is your site doing the work. The assistant connects to WordPress; LocalForm sends nothing out, and no form or response is uploaded anywhere.
- Everything goes through the same validation as the builder, so an assistant cannot save something you could not have built by hand, and reconfiguring a form never touches the responses already collected.
- Sign in with an Application Password and the usual WordPress permissions apply: only an administrator can read or change a form.
LocalForm is fully translatable, with translations contributed through translate.wordpress.org.
External services
This plugin does not connect to any external service on its own. It contains no analytics, telemetry, license checks or remotely hosted assets.
The MCP support described above adds no outbound request either: it registers WordPress Abilities, which an AI client calls by connecting to this site over the REST API, authenticated as a WordPress user. The plugin never contacts an AI provider, and holds no API key for one.
The one outbound request it can make is entirely under your control: if you enter a webhook URL on a form (or as the site-wide default under Forms > Settings > Webhooks), each submission is POSTed as JSON to that URL, signed with HMAC-SHA256. That destination is chosen and operated by you – the plugin has no default endpoint and sends nothing anywhere if no webhook URL is configured. The payload contains the submitted answers, the form title and slug, the event details you set on the form, and any custom fields you added. Consult the privacy policy and terms of the service you point the webhook at, since they are the party receiving the data.
Screenshots
Blocks
This plugin provides 1 block.
- LocalForm
Installation
- In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins > Add New, search for “LocalForm”, and click Install Now. Or upload the plugin files to
/wp-content/plugins/localform/. - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress.
- Go to ‘Forms’ in the admin menu and click ‘Add form’ to build your first one.
- Publish the form and use the Share button to copy its link.
FAQ
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Do I need an account or a license key?
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No. There is no sign-up, no license key and no trial. Install the plugin and everything described here works straight away, with no limit on the number of forms or submissions.
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Can I use this instead of a cloud form service?
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That is what it is built for. If you are used to Google Forms, Microsoft Forms or a similar service, you will recognise the way LocalForm works: add your questions, publish, share the link, and read the answers back as a summary. The differences are that the form sits on your own domain and carries your own branding, the responses are stored on your site rather than in someone else’s account, and your visitors are not sent to a third-party page to answer. LocalForm is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any of those services.
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Where do my responses go?
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They are saved on your own site, in your own WordPress database, and only you can see them. LocalForm does not send them to any form service, and there is no dashboard elsewhere holding a copy.
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How do people find my form?
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Every form gets its own page with a web address you choose – just share that link, by email, on social media, or as the QR code you can download from the Share button. You can also place the form inside a page or post you already have.
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Can I put a form in an existing page?
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Yes. Add the LocalForm block in the block editor, or paste the
[localform id="123"]shortcode. The form’s own page keeps working at the same time. -
Do I get an email when someone fills in my form?
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Yes. Each form can email you on every submission, and can also send the person who submitted a confirmation email. You can write that message yourself and drop their answers into it – for example the form title, the event date, or any question you asked.
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Can I stop taking registrations after a certain number, or on a certain date?
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Yes. Set a maximum number of registrations and/or an opening and closing date and time per form. Once the form is full or closed, visitors see a message you write instead of the form. The maximum requires responses to be saved in WordPress.
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Will the form match my site’s design?
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You choose the colors and font for each form, and forms are shown on a clean full-screen page by default so nothing in your theme gets in the way. If you would rather the form sit in your theme’s normal page layout, there is a per-form setting for that.
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How do you stop spam submissions?
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LocalForm uses a hidden trap field that real visitors never see, limits how often the same visitor can submit, and blocks accidental duplicate submissions. You can adjust all three under Forms > Settings > Security.
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Can I get my responses into Excel?
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Yes. The submissions screen for each form has a download button that gives you an XLSX file of every response.
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Can I move my forms to another site?
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Yes. Under Forms > Settings > Data, “Download backup” gives you a single file with every form, its submissions and your settings. Upload that file on any other site running LocalForm to bring everything across. If a form already exists there, you choose whether to keep it or replace it with the backed-up one – so restoring the same file twice never duplicates your responses. Webhook logs are not included in the backup.
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What happens to my forms if I delete the plugin?
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Deactivating LocalForm never touches your data. Deleting it removes everything by default – your forms, responses and settings. If you want them to survive, turn on “Keep my data when the plugin is deleted” under Forms > Settings > Data before you delete, or download a backup first.
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Can I send submissions to another tool?
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Yes. Enter a web address (a webhook) on the form, or as a site-wide default under Forms > Settings > Webhooks, and each submission is sent there as it comes in – handy for connecting to a CRM, a spreadsheet, or an automation tool. Requests are signed with a secret key so the receiving end can confirm they came from you, are retried if the other side is temporarily down, and the last 30 days of deliveries are logged so you can check what was sent. If you would rather not store responses in WordPress at all, you can switch a form to send them onward only.
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Can an AI assistant build my forms?
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Yes, and it is built in. LocalForm registers three WordPress Abilities – list forms, read a form, create or update a form – which become MCP tools once you install the MCP Adapter plugin. Point an assistant such as Claude at your site with an Application Password and you can ask for a form in plain language; it is built here, on your own domain, with its page created for you. The assistant signs in with an administrator’s Application Password, and everything it saves goes through the same validation as the builder – so it cannot create something you could not have built by hand. Reconfiguring a form never deletes the responses it has already collected.
The premium add-on, LocalForm Pro, adds the other half of this: a “Build with AI” panel inside the WordPress admin that does the same thing without an outside assistant, using whichever AI provider your site is already connected to.
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Does the AI support send my forms to an AI company?
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Not by itself. The free plugin makes no outbound request of any kind – an MCP assistant connects to your site, the way your browser does, and the abilities only read and write your own database. Whatever you type into that assistant goes to whoever you are using it with, exactly as it does when you chat with it about anything else; that is between you and them, and LocalForm is not in the middle of it.
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Does LocalForm send any data to an external service?
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No. The plugin makes no outbound requests of its own: no analytics, no license checks, no telemetry, and no remotely hosted fonts or scripts. The only request it can ever make is to a webhook address you enter yourself.
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Where do the fonts come from?
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The seven font families (Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato, Montserrat, Poppins and Nunito) are included with the plugin and served from your own site, not from Google Fonts or any other network. Picking one never reveals a visitor’s IP address to a third party. All seven are licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; the license text is included at
assets/fonts/OFL.txt.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“LocalForm Form Builder for Surveys and Registrations” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “LocalForm Form Builder for Surveys and Registrations” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.4.0
- Renamed the plugin to LocalForm. Existing forms, submissions, webhook logs and settings are migrated automatically on upgrade.
- Event details (date, time, location, organizer, price) are now part of the free plugin, with their own settings card in the form builder.
- Fonts are bundled with the plugin and served from your own domain; the form page no longer requests anything from Google Fonts.
- All request data is sanitized at the point it is received, before it is shaped, stored or passed to any filter.
- Per-form colors and fonts are attached to the enqueued stylesheets instead of being printed as inline
<style>tags. - Translations are now delivered through translate.wordpress.org rather than bundled with the plugin.
- New “Keep my data when the plugin is deleted” setting under Settings > Data, for sites that want their forms and submissions to survive an uninstall.
- Backup & Restore under Settings > Data: download every form, submission and setting as one JSON file, and restore it here or on another site.
0.6.0
- Email notifications: per-form admin notification and registrant confirmation emails with placeholder support.
- Registration limits: maximum registrations plus open/close date-times, with a configurable closed message.
- Embedding:
[localform]shortcode and a LocalForm Gutenberg block to place forms on any page or post. - New field types: single choice (radio) and date.
0.5.0
- Tag management for organizing forms, with tag filtering in the forms list.
- Slug field enhancements in the form editor.
0.4.0
- Text and image blocks for adding static content to forms.
- Performance improvements to form resolution and template loading.
0.3.0
- Per-form event date and payment price, included in the webhook payload and shown on the form page.
- Semantic-release based build and packaging pipeline.
0.2.0
- Initial public release.