Ready to turn your website into an engaging community hub? This WordPress voting plugin will bring your site to life with contests, elections, and polls.
Approximate read time: 5.5 minutes
People want to feel heard. While comment sections and forums are quick ways to give site visitors a voice, they're tough to control.
Luckily, there's a way to boost user engagement and avoid the messy business of moderating posts.
Let users vote!
From fun photo contests to employee of the month elections, you can do many creative things with an online voting system on your website. All you need is the right WordPress voting plugin. And before you know it, you'll be counting ballots and watching those stats soar.
Today, we'll cover the benefits and features of a good online voting tool and introduce you to the best voting plugin for WordPress, Formidable Forms.
But first, let's figure out whether you need a voting plugin for your WordPress site.
Do you need a voting plugin for WordPress?
The truth is there are a lot of WordPress plugins to help you collect opinions.
But a vote isn't an opinion. It's an endorsement.
People need to be registered to vote. Otherwise, you're simply conducting an online poll. There's nothing wrong with polls — they differ from elections or contests.
Take presidential elections, for example. All those public opinion and exit polls only give us an idea of who might win. They don't decide who wins like a democratic vote does.
Can you guess where we're going with this?
Yep, that's right. You'll need a plugin with user registration features to create a WordPress voting system. You'll also need to make a registration form and set up user permissions.
But don't worry; Formidable Forms has you covered!
More on that in a minute.
Decided you don't need a whole online voting system after all?
Formidable Forms is also one of the best survey form plugins and poll makers! Learn more about Formidable's WordPress poll plugin.
Why use a WordPress voting plugin?
There are two main reasons to use a voting/contest plugin for WordPress like Formidable Forms.
Why use two plugins when one will do? 🔌
To create voting in WordPress, users have to be able to register on your site. Simple poll and survey plugins like YOP Poll and WP Poll Maker don't have this feature, so you'd need to install another plugin for user registration.
Because you have better things to do with your time. You need a lot of WordPress knowledge and patience to code your online voting system. And why spend hours on development if you don't have to?
Now we know the benefits of voting plugins, let's learn why Formidable Forms is the one to use and what the plugin offers.
What makes Formidable the best WordPress voting contest plugin?
Formidable Forms is more than just a WordPress form builder plugin. It also has everything you need to run elections or contests on WordPress websites, including:
- User registration
- Form and poll builder
- Custom form styling
- Email notifications
- Visual results and reports
- Powerful integrations
It's truly an all-in-one solution. It works with any WordPress theme, has a user-friendly interface, and there's a free version you can try out, too!
User registration
The Formidable Forms user registration add-on handles everything you need to let users register on your WordPress site. After they register, you decide their access level to your site and content.
With Formidable, you can also allow front-end editing. You don't get that with the default WordPress user system.
Form builder
Remember how we said you'd need to make registration forms? Well, Formidable is the best WordPress form maker you'll find. It even has a user registration form template to help you get started fast.
Formidable's drag and drop form builder also makes it easy to create online contest entry forms, voting forms, registration forms, contact forms, and any other kind of form you need for your site. All without needing to code!
Here's a quick look at how it works:
Custom form styling
Web design matters.
Have you ever seen a flashy website with old-fashioned online forms? They don't inspire confidence.
Formidable's visual form styler and customization options ensure your visitors won't feel that way. Pick your form width, colors, and fonts, and click to apply the style. You won't even have to touch any CSS, although you can if you want. And you'll do it all right from the WordPress dashboard.
Email notifications
Email notifications improve the user experience. Email users to tell them how to get started, remind them when to vote, and share voting results.
With Formidable, it only takes a few seconds to set up automated emails after form submission.
Then, use form data to personalize the email or trigger a series of emails based on different conditions, such as time, date, user information, and more.
Visual reports and results
Voting is only the part of a contest or election. Then there's counting votes and sharing the outcome.
And, you guessed it; Formidable's WordPress voting plugin also takes care of this for you!
Its no-code WordPress charts and graphs feature can visually display results wherever you want – in the vote confirmation message, on a separate page, or in a blog post. It's up to you.
👉 Learn more: How to create charts in WordPress
Integrations
If you use another platform for email, CRM, or payments, there's a good chance that Formidable has an integration. That means you can connect your online voting system to everything from Mailchimp to Stripe without any complicated setup.
Check out all of Formidable Forms integrations.
Can't wait to run your first WordPress contest or election?
Pick up a Formidable Business or Elite plan to get all these great features. Then, follow along with our step-by-step tutorials on how to make an online survey or create a poll in WordPress.
Try Formidable's WordPress voting contest plugin risk-free with our 14-day money-back guarantee. If, for some reason, you don't love it, get a full refund.
For more WordPress fun, follow us on social media! You'll find us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
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Hi there,
We are a painting festival in Ireland and would like to allow our participating artists to be able to vote / poll through our website each evening; in what we are calling an ‘Artist Choice’ vote for the best paintings of the day.
Each artist needs to be able to input their ID and then input the ID number of the painting they choose and Submit.
This will be done through their own mobile phones.
After which we need to be able to assess the vote and announce the results.
Would your plugin give us this ability?
Look forward to hearing from you soon.
Kindest regards
Paul D’Arcy
Layout would be something like this :
Poll Name - Artist Choice Vote
Field Name - Your Artist Registration Number
Field - User input ( ID for vote )
Field Name - Choose your Painting
Field - User inputs the Painting Number ( this is the field that will be assessed for the poll / vote)
Yes! This would be a great application. we actually first designed this for a very similar event (a chili cook-off).
Formidable Forms seems to have covered all the bases with a flexible product and add-ons that enabled our non-profit organization to receive and keep track of donations, sell products, and accept membership applications online. The support has been very good. We use Formidable Forms Pro, Pro2PDF, Forms Registration, and Visual Views (which title seems redundant).
I am a designer, not a coder, and the format for Formidable's backend is very user-friendly.
Highly recommend Formidable Forms.
Coincidentally I was just asked by a client about this functionality. I'll know what i will recommend.
Hi
We want to run award page where we have nominees for Businesses and Personal Categories.
That the nominee are able to Register by selecting B or P. Then they add their personal information and have to select to which region they belong to and category.
That their information with a picture of them may be viewed.
And that at this display page voters may select the best for them in any of the categories and vote only once. This voters can initially authenticate through Facebook. Counting will be visual and in real time.
Is this something your plugin may do?
Thanks
Hi Gabriek,
It sounds like Formidable Forms/Views would be a good fit for your application, but it is difficult to say without a more complete understanding of your project details.
I would recommend either contacting our support team so we can get more details, or trying out the plugin to see if it meets all your needs.
Hello. I run a website for a non-profit group and once a year they hold an election for officers. The Formidable Forms sounds like what I need, in that it restricts voting to list of voters, the members of the organization.
We currently use a voting plugin, but it's old and creaky and not supported anymore.
Does it allow a voter to select among certain candidate for an office? So for president, choose Joe or Jane, and for vice-president choose on among Bill, Sue and John and tally the votes for the different offices?
The voters need to be able to vote once and not more than once.
This is for one site only, so what plugin would I have to purchase. I also have some other questions, so who can I talk to get them answered.
Thanks for you help.
Dave LeBlanc
Hi Dave, It does sound like Formidable Forms would be able to accomplish what you need, but I'd love for you to get in touch with one of our support people so they can better understand your use case and point you in the best direction.
Please create a new ticket from the link below and we'll be happy to help:
https://formidableformscom.bigscoots-staging.com/new-topic/
How does FF restrict the voting to just one vote per registered voter?
This is easy to do by going to your form settings > Permissions and setting the option to allow only one entry per logged in user.
I love using formidible and want it to work for our board elections!
However, we want the votes to be anonymous. Is this possible? Or will it always be that the website admins can see who-voted-for-who?
Yes, you can create anonymous voting in your forms by following these steps: https://formidableformscom.bigscoots-staging.com/knowledgebase/create-a-form/#sts=Anonymous%20forms
Hi,
I'm looking for a solution that will first allow people to send in their suggestions for a naming contest.
Then a top-10 will be hand-picked and people can vote on 1 (or 2) favourites. Voting should be possible only once per person, perhaps through mail verification?
Is this something that can be done with Formidable?
Hey Rafael,
Thank you for reaching out. Yes, Formidable Forms can help you with your goal.
You can create a form allowing users to submit their ideas. Then, using another form, they can vote for their favorite ideas. You can restrict the number of times a user can vote. You can read more about this here:
https://formidableformscom.bigscoots-staging.com/knowledgebase/general-form-settings/#kb-limit-number-of-entries
If you have any follow-up questions, you can create a ticket here: https://formidableformscom.bigscoots-staging.com/new-topic/
Best,