Forms overview
Add forms to your site by asking. Every submission becomes a person and a lead you can follow up.
Forms are first-class in PageFork. You don’t install a third-party widget or paste embed codes — you just ask, and every submission lands on your Leads page as someone to follow up.
Adding a form
Open the editor and say what you want:
- “Add a contact form with name, email, and message.”
- “Put a newsletter signup form (just email) in the footer.”
- “Add a waitlist form with name, email, and company — make email required.”
PageFork generates the form in the right section and connects it to its own form backend for this site. There’s nothing else to wire up.
Visitors can only reach a form once the site is published, which needs a Basic or Pro plan and your own domain. See Publishing overview. Publish, then send yourself a test from the live address.
What happens to a submission
When a visitor presses send, PageFork does four things:
- Stores the submission exactly as it was sent.
- Finds or creates the person. If someone with the same email — or, failing that, the same phone — is already on the site, the submission is filed under them and any details they were missing are filled in. Otherwise a new person is created.
- Attaches it to a lead. If that person already has an open lead, the submission joins it. If not, a new lead is created in the first stage of your pipeline.
- Tells you. An email notification goes out, and on Pro sites the submission is passed to any destinations you’ve set up.
So a customer who fills in your form twice is one person with one lead and two submissions — not two unrelated messages.
Where you see it
Open Leads in the sidebar and pick the site.
| Plan | What you get |
|---|---|
| Basic | A list of submissions you can read, search, filter by form, mark read and export to CSV, plus the notification email. |
| Pro | The full CRM: Board, List, Calendar and People views, lead records with notes and follow-ups, custom fields, tags, import, and destinations. |
New sites start with a 14-day Pro trial. After it, a site without a Pro plan has Basic features. See Basic and Pro plans for the full comparison, and Leads overview for a tour of the Pro views.
People and leads are recorded for every submission on either plan, so nothing is missing if you move to Pro later.
Sending submissions elsewhere
On Pro, a destination passes each submission on to another tool as it arrives: a Google Sheet, email, Kit, Mailchimp, a webhook, or the Zapier and Make apps.
Destinations are managed in the site editor, under the Forms tab. Start with the Destinations overview.
Forms vs third-party tools
If you already use Typeform, Tally, HubSpot forms or similar, you can embed them instead — see Embeds and iframes for the patterns.
Reach for a third-party form when you need features PageFork’s built-in forms don’t cover: branching logic, calculations, or payment fields.
Bear in mind that an embedded form sends its submissions to that provider. They won’t appear in Leads, and no person or lead is created.
Getting submissions into another tool is not a reason to leave — destinations do that on Pro. For everything else, PageFork’s built-in forms are the simpler default: one less service to manage.
Required vs optional fields
Tell PageFork which fields are required:
- “Make email required, everything else optional.”
- “Require all fields.”
Client-side validation is automatic: empty required fields block submission.
Ask for at least an email or phone field on every form. That’s what lets PageFork recognise a returning visitor as the same person. See Form field schemas.
Privacy
For each submission PageFork stores:
- The values submitted.
- The submission timestamp.
- The submitter’s IP address (for anti-spam / legitimacy checks).
Submissions are only accepted from your site’s own addresses.
If you need to comply with a privacy policy (GDPR, CCPA), add a clear disclosure to your form (“By submitting, you agree to our privacy policy”) and publish a matching policy page.
When someone asks you to delete their data, an owner or admin of a Pro site can erase the person, which removes their submissions, leads and history together.
Limits
- No artificial cap on submissions per form.
- Submissions are rate-limited to prevent abuse: 5 per minute from one address.
- For extremely high-volume lead capture, contact support.