If you’re interested in collecting feedback from your website visitors, then using a free WordPress poll plugin is essential.
With the right polling plugin, you won’t have to code a web form from scratch or keep track of the entries on your own. More importantly, you’ll be able to glean valuable insights from the submissions by tracking results and pinpointing patterns in responses.
Below, we cover the features of good poll plugins and the best options we’ve found online. Let’s get started.
What makes a good WordPress poll plugin?
Gathering information about your target audience is a difficult task, but polls and surveys are an easy way to go about it — while increasing engagement. Not only do you want to gather data to improve your messaging or customer experience, but implementing and facilitating data collection must be simple and without hassle.
With that in mind, a polling plugin should have a few essential features that will allow you to do just that.
Easy Poll Builder
The most important feature that a poll and survey plugin must offer is a code-free poll builder. The best polling plugins have virtually no learning curve; you should be able to sign up, create a poll, and embed the poll into your website in as soon as an hour.
Shortcode Generator or Page Builder Integration
As mentioned, you should be able to easily add your poll to your website. That means that a WordPress poll plugin should automatically generate a shortcode for each poll you create, making it easy and simple to embed it into sidebars, blog posts, pages, and footers. Using the shortcode, you should even be able to make a popup poll with the help of a popup plugin.
If the poll plugin doesn’t generate a shortcode, then it should integrate with your page builder, allowing you to create, edit, and embed your poll using the page builder’s built-in tools.
Poll Results Dashboard
A poll isn’t valuable unless you can read and examine the results. A poll plugin should include an entry tracker, ideally with notifications that tell you when a new entry has been submitted. You should also be able to see charts and graphs of the results, showing you the responses’ distribution across your audience.
External Software Integrations
Software integrations are essential if you plan to use your poll maker with another tool, such as a CRM or payment gateway. That way, you can easily correctly attribute and sync data across all your chosen services. For instance, if you’d like a new contact to be created from every poll submission, then your chosen poll plugin should integrate with your CRM.
Finding a poll plugin with these features can be a challenge. That's why we’ve collected some of the best WordPress poll plugins that require little technical setup and offer the functionalities you need. These plugins make participation easy and enjoyable to increase the number of respondents who make it all the way through all the questions.
Best Poll Plugins for WordPress
- HubSpot WordPress Plugin: Best for CRM Integration
- WPForms: Best for Publicly Sharing Results
- Gravity Forms With Add-Ons: Best for Filtering Submissions
- Forminator: Best for Adding Custom CSS
- Poll, Survey, Form & Quiz Maker by OpinionStage: Best for Using Premade Templates
- TS Poll: Best for Gutenberg Editing
- YOP Poll: Best for Scheduling Successive Polls
- Democracy Poll: Best for Write-In Polls
- WP-Polls: Best for Quick and Simple Poll Creation
- Modal Survey: Best for Results Visualization
- WordPress Survey & Poll: Best for Adding Parallax Effects to Polls
- Buzzy: Best for Magazine Polls
- TotalPoll Pro: Best for Adding Structured Data
- Advanced Poll for WordPress: Best for Adding User Permissions to the Tool
- Poll Maker: Best for Redirecting Voters Based on Answers
1. HubSpot WordPress Plugin: Best for CRM Integration
If you’re looking to get a gauge on what your website visitors or customers are thinking, consider the HubSpot WordPress Plugin. The plugin’s free form builder is an easy-to-use solution for gathering feedback on WordPress.
Use the intuitive drag and drop builder to build your form, and then embed it or launch it as a popup on pages across your website. Submissions are synced to HubSpot’s free CRM and can be analyzed from a dashboard within WordPress.
Rather use an existing forms tool to conduct a survey? No problem! The HubSpot WordPress Plugin easily integrates with most WordPress form and survey builders out-of-the-box, so you don’t have to worry about a thing.
Price: Free
2. WPForms: Best for Publicly Sharing Results
WPForms is the most popular form builder plugin on the market with over 5,000,000 active installations. It offers 300+ pre-built form templates to get you started quickly, and the drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to customize forms to your liking. Plus, using the Survey and Polls add-on, you can create powerful polls just as easily.
You’ll be able to add smart fields like Likert scale, multiple-choice, and star ratings; use conditional logic to show specific questions based on previous answers; and add image choices to make your poll more engaging.
In addition, you can display the real-time results of polls on your website as well as view results from the WordPress dashboard in beautiful, easy-to-read report types like pie charts, bar graphs, and more.
Price: Free; $39.50/year (Basic); $99.50/year (Plus); $199.50/year (Pro); $299.50/year (Elite)
3. Gravity Forms With Add-Ons: Best for Filtering Submissions
Gravity Forms is a popular solution for embedding forms on your WordPress site. If you're already using Gravity Forms for this purpose, it would be super easy to simply use the Polls add-on or Survey add-on to fit your needs without using another vendor. Both of these add-ons are Elite add-ons, available only with an Elite License of the software. However, being able to rely on a trusted resource in the industry such as Gravity Forms would be a huge benefit.
You'll be able to view poll results from your internal dashboard and have an option to display them on your site. What's more is that Gravity Forms takes the data analysis part of polling to a whole new level by allowing you to filter submissions using conditional logic.
Price: $59/year (Basic); $159/year (Pro); $259.50/year (Elite)
4. Forminator: Best for Adding Custom CSS
Forminator by WPMU DEV is another form-based plugin, but it comes with built-in functionality for polls and and quizzes. Creating a new form or poll is easy with their drag-and-drop editor, and you can even add custom CSS to customize it according to your brand. Forminator also shows the status of all active forms and polls along with their metrics such as views and entries.
Price: Free; $7.50/mo (Pro)
5. Poll, Survey, Form & Quiz Maker by OpinionStage: Best for Using Premade Templates
Getting a poll or survey up and running is easy with OpinionStage because you can choose from hundreds of free templates or create one from scratch based on your unique preferences. It offers customization options such as color, fonts, and size, as well as a CSS override that gives you complete control over the look and feel of the poll or survey. You can also include images and a call-to-action at the end.
Price: Free
6. TS Poll: Best for Gutenberg Editing
TS Poll is a fantastic tool that will allow you to implement a survey using the Gutenberg editor or a shortcode. You can use this plugin to display and manage the poll results on your site. This provides a seamless on-page experience where you can show users the results of the poll after you ask them for their opinion. The plugin supports image responses and unlimited polls.
Price: Free
7. YOP Poll: Best for Scheduling Successive Polls
YOP Poll plugin helps you to create a beautiful survey on your WordPress blog. You can run multiple polls simultaneously, and it provides you full control over the tool once you activate the plugin.
You can create a new poll or clone an existing poll, and you can manage the votes, what details to display, and what to keep private from the dashboard. You can also schedule successive polls one after the other.
Price: Free
8. Democracy Poll: Best for Write-In Polls
Democracy Poll enables users to capture customers’ opinions anywhere on their website. The online polls are completely customizable. Users can pick and choose which questions and scoring options they wish to use, add their own design or logo, and choose their own language. They can also enable and disable write-in answers.
Once feedback is collected, it will be immediately available on the dashboard. Alternatively, users can receive feedback alerts straight to their email inbox.
Price: Free
9. WP-Polls: Best for Quick and Simple Poll Creation
WP-Polls is one of the most popular free WordPress polling plugins with more than 100,000+ downloads. Its popularity is, in short, due to its simplicity combined with being highly customizable. You can choose from a number of templates and CSS styles to make it your own, then easily embed the output on a post or page using a generated shortcode.
Price: Free
10. Modal Survey: Best for Results Visualization
If you anticipate engaging your audience a lot, Modal Survey is an excellent choice, with no limit on the number of surveys or polls you can run. It's also extremely flexible across the board from implementation (embed, pop-ups, and modal boxes) to customization (parallax scrolling and RGB color picker). It also provides many options for displaying the results of your surveys: pie charts, bar charts, progress bars, and more.
Price: $44/year
11. WordPress Survey & Poll: Best for Adding Parallax Effects to Polls
This plugin will allow you to create surveys and polls that are compatible with all browsers and fully responsive. You'll also be able to choose from a variety of display options and more than 30 animated effects. It also offers anonymous polling with de-duplication to avoid data skew.
In addition, you can add an engaging parallax effect to your poll, so that it follows the user as they scroll down the page.
Price: Free
12. Buzzy: Best for Magazine Polls
With different animation options, the ability to add images and video, and control over whether users see poll results, this is another option if you value customizability. Its mobile-first design makes it extremely SEO- and UX-friendly as well.
Buzzy is especially designed for news and viral online magazines. If you intend to use polls on articles, this is an excellent plugin for you.
Price: $35/year
13. TotalPoll Pro: Best for Adding Structured Data
This extensive poll plugin for WordPress enables you to create great-looking responsive polls on your site. You can place it in the sidebar using the built-in widget or anywhere else using the shortcode.
The best part about this plugin is that it comes with GDPR compliance options right out of the box. In addition, you can add structured data to your polls for easier and more effective crawling.
Price: $79/year
14. Advanced Poll for WordPress: Best for Adding User Permissions to the Tool
Advanced Poll for WordPress is known for its level of user-friendliness, boasting few obstacles for poll creation on the fly. It comes with attractive, ready-made themes as well as style options for custom design. What makes this plugin particularly unique is its ability to include media in poll answers.
In addition, the plugin allows you to add and limit user permissions depending on the WordPress user’s role. This is particularly useful if your site has different editors and writers working on the backend. Adding user permissions will prevent polls from getting accidentally deleted.
Price: $17/year
15. Poll Maker: Best for Redirecting Voters Based on Answers
With more than 13 style options and the ability to customize colors, borders, backgrounds, and images, Poll Maker is an excellent choice for making an attractive poll. It includes a "schedule poll" feature where you can set a start date for when it should begin appearing for visitors on your site. It doesn't limit the options that users can pick from, and there are also options for voting and rating using emoji or star-rating icons.
Lastly, you can redirect poll voters to different pages based on their answers. That way, you can continue engaging them after they’re done voting.
Price: Free
Use a Poll Plugin to Boost Engagement
Once you've chosen a survey and polling plugin for your WordPress site, you're well on your way to learning more about your website visitors and engaging with them. Plus, who doesn’t love voting in polls? The fun factor will keep your users on the page, increasing your dwell time and boosting your SEO.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
