LocalForm Form Builder for Surveys and Registrations

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.