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WordPress user registration and newsletter sign up all at once

If you’ve got a WordPress website that allows users to sign up to access or contribute content, you may want to have them sign up to your regular newsletter at the same time. This is easily done with a couple of useful plugins and no coding whatsoever.

What do you need?

• A Mailchimp Account
• Gravity Forms Plugin (With Developer License)
• Gravity Forms Mailchimp Add-on
• Gravity Forms User Registration Add-on

First you will need to install the plugins – Download Gravity Forms, the Mailchimp add-on and the User registration add-on and install them on your site.

When the plugins are installed and activated you’ll need to create the form -

• Go to Forms>New Form
• Give your new form a name
• Add your fields from the Fields section on the right (For this example you will need at least a Name Field and an Email field)
• Save your form

After you’ve created the form -

• Go to Forms>Mailchimp>Create One.
• Choose the mailing list you would like users to sign up for
• Choose the form you would like to use – This will be the one you just created
• Map the Mailchimp fields to the fields on your form
• Confirm your Opt-In setting
• Hit Save

Now your form will work as a Mailchimp sign up form – Next, we need to make it register a new user…

• Go to Forms>User Registration>Create One
• Choose the form you would like to use (same as before)
• Map the WordPress fields to the existing form fields, Name and Email are the only required fields here. You should also set the User Role to Subscriber (Or whatever access level you would like to grant new users), you should also check the box ‘Send this password to the new user by email’
• Hit Save

Now your form will work as Mailchimp sign up and a user registration form.
To add your form to a page -

• Edit a page or create a new page
• Hit the “Add Gravity Form” button beside Upload/Insert
• Choose and insert your form
• Update the page

There might be other ways to achieve a similar result but I’ve chosen Gravity Forms (as I always do), not only because it’s highly customizable but because it means I could take either or both of the add on’s and easily add this functionality to any existing Gravity Form on any other site I’ve built.

You don’t even need to keep it as simple as I have here, your form can be as big and complicated as you like, as long as you’ve got your add on’s mapped to the correct fields within the form you’ll always get the information you need.

So there you go, an efficient, hard working web form without all the complicated code.

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