Optimize initial form submission
If you have a form with lots of fields and the form is taking a while to submit, here are a few tips that can help to reduce the submission time.
Reduce initial form size
You can change the number of fields included in the initial form to improve performance by setting any fields which are not required by the initial submitter to administrative. Then use a Gravity Flow User Input step to assign the entry to the form submitter to capture the remaining fields.
- Learn how to set fields as Administrative.
- Learn how to assign a step to the Form Submitter.
- Learn more about configuring a User Input step.
Schedule the workflow
The scheduling settings on the Start step can allow you to delay starting the workflow by several minutes
- Learn more about scheduling workflow step
- The schedule uses the WordPress cron job/process. By default, WordPress cron will only work if there is traffic to the site and there are a number of factors that can cause it not to run properly. You may want to look into setting up a server-based cron job which your webhost should be able to help with.
Trigger Feed add-ons via steps
If the form is using any feed add-ons, make use of their Gravity Flow steps to move feed processing out of the form submission and into the delayed workflow. For example, if your form is using a Twilio feed, instead of triggering the feed during submission you can use a Twilio workflow step.
- Review the complete list of supported add-ons (Feed based, Field-based, and Third-party)
Make use of notification steps and delays
A workflow notification step can be used to trigger Gravity Forms notifications after submission instead of during form submission.
Break up complex forms
You might want to slice a large form into several smaller forms and use the Form Submission workflow step to capture inputs into the smaller forms. An Update An Entry step could be used to fill data back into one large form.
- For example, if you have one form with 100 fields, considering a 25 field form as a good size, you would need 4 forms with 25 fields each. Use the first form to capture the first 25 fields, then use the Form Submission step's redirection feature to capture the remaining four forms. Each form will have an Update An Entry step that will fill data back into the large 100 field form.
- Learn more about the Form Submission step
- More on the Update An Entry step
- Note: This approach requires the Form Connector extension.