How to Create an Effective Registration Page for WordPress Sign Up

How to Create an Effective Registration Page for WordPress Sign Up

When designing an effective registration page for user sign up on your WordPress website or blog, you first need to decide on the specific function of this page. Will your site require separate sign up areas and criteria for different types of site visitors? What personal information and data will you need to request of each registrant?

How to Create an Effective Registration Page for WordPress Sign Up

Creating a Frontend Site Sign Up Page

When designing a user registration page for your WordPress site, you may need separate sign up areas for different user categories. For instance, if you have a website for professional tennis enthusiasts, you will most likely want one registration area dedicated to tennis pros, promoters and coaches—people directly involved in the business aspects of tennis.

You will then need another sign up section for tennis fans which will collect data relative to people who attend or view tennis matches, are fans of the tennis pros and purchase clothing, equipment and paraphernalia related to the sport of tennis. If your site is heavily trafficked and gains a strong web presence you may find it necessary to include several different category-specific sign up boxes or pages—one for each separate type, gender or age group of visitors registering on your site.

With the aid of a simple registration plug-in you can design and install user-specific forms for all interested site visitors. Although this type of plug-in does not have the flexibility or versatility of the popular Register Plus WP plug-in, it is excellent for the creation of sign in forms and pages for specific groups of site registrants.

By using a basic shortcode you can insert a user type designated registration box or form anywhere on your WordPress site or blog. This convenient feature promotes an increase in user sign ups by eliminating the necessity for visitors to click through to a backend administration page to register. To install this helpful plug-in, just follow this easy procedure:

  1. Use the shortcode [register] on any page of your WordPress website or blog.
  2. Choose the default role, “subscriber.”
  3. To enter a different role or user category for registrants, make use of the role parameter feature. For example, [Register role="tennis pro"].
  4. If you need advanced capabilities, enter the shortcode with use of the TinyMCE button.

Quality Options for Use in Creating an Effective Registration Page

In designing your site’s registration page, you can choose what fields to include for site users or subscribers. You may only need basic contact information like name and email address. Many sites now request mobile phone numbers as well since text messaging campaigns are currently so popular and successful.

If your website caters to specific interest groups or offers age-specific products and services, you may want to request other user data. This additional input from registrants might be occupation, interests, age group and product preferences.

Best Practices in Creating Your WordPress Registration Page

The following five tips offer some useful best practices to keep in mind when creating your WordPress registration page or form:

  1. Include a simple and direct call to action.
  2. Make sure your branding is consistent throughout your site and especially on your registration page or form.
  3. Always remember that less is more. Never overwhelm site visitors by requesting an overload of registration data.
  4. Maintain high security levels for online payments. Your site registration page or pages should always be hosted on SSL encrypted pages.
  5. Permit offline payments. You will still have interested site visitors who are hesitant to make online credit card or bank account purchases. Make provisions for them to pay by mailing a personal check to enhance your sales.

How to Add and Remove Fields from the Standard WordPress User Section

Either while you are creating your site’s registration page or later on, you may have the need to add or remove certain fields from your user registration page or sections. In order to alter user profile contact data fields, follow the advice of Dave Clements, an expert on WordPress plug-ins. Dave explains that WordPress 2.9 offered the option to filter contact fields, adding or removing them as desired or needed. For example, if you want to remove the outdated AIM field and add Twitter and Facebook fields, use the following formula:

function modify_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
// Remove unwanted fields //
unset($contactmethods['aim']);
// Add new fields //
$contactmethods['facebook_url'] = 'Facebook URL';
$contactmethods['twitter_url'] = 'Twitter URL';
return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter('user_contactmethods','modify_contactmethods');2

Plug-ins That Assist with Creating New WP User Profiles

Plug-ins for WordPress which will assist with creating new user profiles at registration include:

Cimy User Extra Fields
WordPress is constantly growing as a popular tool for creating blogs and websites of all types as well as CMSs. One problem, however, for many site designers is the limited number of options available for creating a registrant’s user profile. With use of the Cimy User Extra Fields plug-in you can easily make needed additions to your site. These additions include text, textarea, textarea-rich, password, picture, picture URL, checkbox registration-date, radio, avatar, drop-down and file.

Cimy User Extra Fields

In addition, with this plug-in numerous WP hidden fields can be enabled at the time of registration. These hidden fields include: first name, last name, nickname, password, website, Aim, Yahoo IM, Jabber/Google Talk, and biographical data. More helpful elements provided are:

  1. Image upload with crop/resize capabilities
  2. Custom registration logo (non MS installations)
  3. Form confirmation (non MS installations)
  4. reCAPTCHA, and more

This valuable plug-in also provides two new menu voices in the admin for the administrator, as well as two others for the benefit of users. These two menus are as follows:

WordPress and WordPress MultiSite per-blog registration

  • “Users -> Users Extended” – lets you show users lists with the new fields that are created.
  • “Settings -> Cimy User Extra Fields” – lets administrators add as many new fields

WordPress MultiSite unique registration

  • “Network Admin -> Users Extended” – lets you show users lists with the new fields that are created.
  • “Network Admin -> Cimy User Extra Fields” – lets administrators add as many new fields.

Profile Builder
This helpful plug-in offers simplified frontend log-in for users and easy registration. Profile editing is quick and efficient using shortcodes. Site users with administrator rights can alter certain user fields and add new customized fields.

To edit a profile, create a new page with a name like “Edit Profile” (an intuitive name). Then just add this shortcode: [wppb-edit-profile]. Now you can publish your profile page.

Profile Builder

The following editing shortcodes are available for use:

  • [wppb-edit-profile] – will give users who log in to your site frontend access to their profile data
  • [wppb-login] – will allow addition of a frontend log-in form
  • [wppb-register] – will facilitate addition of a frontend registration form
  • [wppb-recover-password] – will assist in adding a form for password recovery

Users who have administrator rights can benefit from such features as:

  1. Choosing whether or not to have the admin bar displayed in the frontend for a particular group of site registrants
  2. Deciding which data fields users can view and/or edit

The Profile Builder Pro plug-in has more options such as the ability to create additional User Fields like Heading, Agree to Terms Checkbox, and Timezone Selects. This WP plug-in can be used only for editing fields in the frontend.

Gravity Form Add-ons
Gravity Form has been rated by many website design professionals as the most effective contact form plug-in for WP sites. With use of this plug-in, registration and user profile fields can be edited to display or hide fields, areas, sections or even designated pages. With use of Gravity Forms Add-ons you will enjoy complex and powerful integration with WordPress.

With Gravity Form Builder you can quickly structure and build your needed WordPress forms using the form editor. With the tools included you can choose fields, configure options and embed forms on your WP site. By adding advanced fields to your user profile forms you can expand your registrant database to contain phone numbers, email addresses, site URLs, file uploads, text fields, drop-downs, checkboxes and radio buttons.

Gravity Forms Add-ons

WP User Frontend Plugin
With use of this plugin you can enable your user registrants to edit and update their profiles from WP frontend. Users can also upload attachment files from the frontend. One helpful aspect of this plug-in is that administrators can manage the user database from the frontend, as well. Also, site administrators are able to limit any user level from accessing the WP admin (backend) area of the website.

WP User Frontend Plugin

Conclusion

To conclude, there are many methods, plug-ins and widgets currently available for your use in creating a highly professional and effective user registration page or form for your WordPress website or blog. With their aid you can gain the interest of site visitors who will register as website members and customers to best promote the ongoing membership, visibility and success of your online site and/or business interests.

For example, with the use of the comprehensive plug-in, Cimy User Extra Fields, you can make numerous additions to your WordPress site’s user registration page as needed. You can also easily enable many WP hidden fields to expand user profile data input.

In addition, the convenient Profile Builder plug-in provides frontend site log-in for user registration as well as quick and efficient user profile editing by use of shortcodes. With the use of Gravity Form Add-ons you will promote complex and powerful integration with WordPress for your site’s optimal functionality. Also, when using WP User Frontend Plug-in for your site, you will enable your site registrants to edit and update their profiles with ultimate ease from WP frontend.

Your WordPress site is now equipped with the best possible capabilities to successfully register users of all types while accommodating all relevant data fields and entries.

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