Webflow offers the ability to construct basic forms in the designer. It also has a built-in forms submission handler, and the ability to connect forms to Logic's automation flows.
Limited Field Types
As of 04-Feb-2024...
Supported types;
- Input - including Plain text, Email, Password ( sort of ), Phone, and Number
- Textarea ( multiline plain text entry, no rich text formatting )
- Checkbox
- Radio Button
- Select ( from a pre-defined list of options )
- File Upload ( Business plan )
Unsupported types;
- Date fields
- Rich text entry
Limited UX's
In addition to the types, there are limitations in the UX's
- Numeric & date range sliders
- Toggle switches as a form of checkboxes
- Email fields have limited content validation
- Selects don't offer combobox or autocomplete capability
- Selects cannot be CMS-bound
Limited Form Designs & Logic
Webflow does not directly support;
- Multi-step forms
- Logic, or complex form validations to ensure good data is submitted
These limitations are significant, however there are many solutions which we'll point you towards in this course.
Webflow's Form Submission Handler Limitations
By default, when you just drop a new Form Block on your page, it's configured to use Webflow's default form submission handler.
- Responses will be automatically captured into a site-level database
- Responses can be automatically emailed to clients you designate
- An API webhook can automatically fire for external integrations
However it has a plethora of issues.
Email Notifications
Webflow's email notifications offers a quick and simple way to notify the site owner when a form is submitted. If you are the designer, you can add your client's email address under site settings to receive those notifications.
Problems;
- Unattractive. There is no styling or branding ability and very little ability to format the form data contents.
- Recipients. All forms share the same notification settings and recipients. One notification email for all forms. A notification recipient will receive notifications for all form submissions, site wide. If you have a contact-us form, and also a newsletter-signup form, you cannot choose to only notify them of the contact-us form submissions.
- Webflow-branded. No whitelabelling ability, it's clear the form notification emails are from Webflow.
- Line breaks. No line breaks are shown for multiline content, submitted from textarea fields. However line breaks are captured and will appear in CSV exports as well as ( probably ) the API webhook data.
- Unsubscribe problem. Since Sept 2022 there is a mandatory unsubscribe link. If anyone clicks it, that email address will be unsubscribed and will no longer receive any more notifications. Forms will still be captured, in the site database ( you can see this in the Editor also ), and you can re-add that email if you notice it has been removed, but this creates problems for a lot of site owners.
- SPAM issues. See below.
Form Submission Limits
Webflow's forms have a concept of form submission limits. Every time a form submission is received, it's counted towards a monthly limit that is defined by your site's hosting plan.
If you exceed that, you will be charged an additional $0.01 ( 1 cent ) per submission.
Normally, that's a non-issue, however these limits also apply to Logic forms, which means that if you're making frequent calls to Logic, those costs can rack up quickly.
reCAPTCHA Anti-Spam Protection
Optionally, you can enable reCAPTCHA anti-spam protection, however this is enabled site-wide and not per-form. If you enable it under your site settings, every Webflow-managed form must have a reCAPTCHA block added to it from the elements panel.
When you do this, make certain that the element is within the form itself.
SPAM Issues
Since the beginning of 2023, Webflow has been targeted by some spammers which mean a significant increase in SPAM.
They've added features to block it, but this has resulted in occasional instabilities in the form handling system.
At present Feb-2024, there are not many complaints in the forums- however no one know what's being identified as SPAM and deleted from view.
Turnstile Issues
In Oct-2024 Webflow enhanced SPAM and bot protection with the addition of Turnstile client-side.
This can complicate some form. Jean Costa did an excellent writeup here.
https://discourse.webflow.com/t/advisory-webflows-recently-released-bot-protection-may-break-complex-sites/295957
In particular be careful of any situation that involves re-initializing forms, which may include e.g. form inside of a Finsweet load CMS item setup.
Notes
Key points to research further;
- Are Logic forms SPAM-checked?
- Are SPAM submits counted towards your form submits? ( likely not )
