Step 1: Create the Form Settings

• Go to Forms > New Form
• Click Edit in the Form Settings box.
• Enter a Title for the form. You can use a title that tells you which form it is. It need not be displayed.
• Enter something in the description box if you want an introduction to your form. Or leave it blank if you don’t.
• In the right hand column, choose elements from the 4 “Fields” boxes to use in your form. These will be added top to bottom in the order you select them. E.g. Select Name, Email, Phone, Drop Down, etc.
• Each element will appear in the left hand column. Click on the Edit link to expand the element to show additional settings, such as “Required”. What appears depends on which element you’re editing.
• Click on Update Form to save your work. Don’t wait until the end…

Step 2: Create the Notifications Settings

• Click the Notifications link at the top of the window.
• Fill in the form with Send To Email, From Name, From Email, etc. Use the circled ? for help with what each means.
• You can probably leave the default Subject and Message boxes if they seem right. If not, use the “Merge Tags” to include the information from the visitor’s form submission.
• You can optionally send an email confirmation to the person who submitted the form, assuming you asked for their email address. Click on Enable email notification to users.
• Fill in the rest of the form that appears. This part of the form is similar to what you did above to specify the email that goes to you.
• Be sure to Save Settings before you leave the page.

Step 3: Decide how you want to respond to the visitor after submitting the form

• Go back to Form Settings
• Edit the Form Settings box at the top.
• Select the Confirmation tab
• You have the following choices (I recommend always using the Page option)
  • Text: Just replace the form with a short “thank you text”
  • Page: Select a “thank you” page. The visitor will be sent to that page. You need to create this page, of course, before you can select it here.
  • Redirect: Enter any old URL. The visitor will be sent to that URL. You could use this to send them somewhere off site. I don’t know why, though.
• Be sure to Update Form.

Step 4: Place the form on some page or post

• Edit (or create) the Page or Post or Widget Content to hold your form.
• In the editor, notice an icon above the Visual toolbar next to Upload/Insert. Hover over the icons to identify the Add Gravity Form icon. Click it.
• A lightbox will appear. You can select your form from the drop down menu. Choose to display your title or not, your description or not, and whether or not to enable Ajax.
• Hit “Insert Form” and you will see a “short code” that indicates to WordPress to display your form.
• Save the entry by hitting Publish or Update

Step 5: Test the form

• Go to the Page, Post, or Widget that contains your form.
• Fill in the form with sample data, and hit Submit.
• These things will happen:
  • WordPress will send email as indicated in the “Notifications” settings you did in Step 2.
  • You should be taken to the “Thank you” page you specified in Step 3. (Unless you chose Text, in which case the current page changes to display that text.)
  • The submission will also appear in the WordPress admin back end. Go to your form, and click on the Entries link to the right of  Notifications. You should see some of the field you submitted.

Step 6: Fix any problems you found in Step 5 by going back to some previous step and re-doing something.