I noticed a lot of people asking this question lately:
“How Do You Conduct Surveys in WordPress?”
It’s easy and you won’t need to use any special plugins. In this article, I’ll show you how to insert surveys into any post on your WordPress blog.
I’ll demonstrate with Google Docs as our preferred survey technology. SurveyMoney is ok too, but it is not free and has the limitation that it doesn’t notify you when a new person fills out your survey. So let’s stick with Google Docs!
Let’s Start By Setting Up Your Survey
Step 1: Head to http://docs.Google.com/
Step 2: Click Create New
Step 3: Click ‘Form’ to create a new Survey
Step 4: Add your survey questions and give your survey a title.
Step 5: Save the new survey. If you find the ‘Save’ button is disabled, it means the survey has been auto-saved. So don’t worry about it.
Step 6: Click ‘More Actions’ in the top-left.
Step 7: Choose ‘Embed’
IMPORTANT: Leave this window open and don’t close it! We’ll come back to this in a moment to grab your embed code.
Setting Survey Notifications
This section will help you be notified in real-time whenever the survey is updated.
Step 1: Go to the main Google Docs window (if you didn’t close the tab, it should already be open for you)
Step 2: Click on your new survey to open it. The main Google Docs window will automatically update to show your new survey at the very top. Just click it to open it. You’ll see a Docs Spreadsheet rather than the form. This is ok.
Step 3: Click the Tools menu.
Step 4: Choose “Notification Rules” from the Tools menu.
Step 5: Check the ‘Any Changes are Made’ Option to be notified at your main address every time a new survey is submitted.
Step 6: Save the new settings. If you find the ‘Save’ button is inactive, then the settings have been auto-saved so don’t worry.
Adding the Survey to Your WordPress Posts or Pages
Your new survey can be placed into any WordPress Post or Page. Here’s how:
Step 1: Go to the Form Editor window, which hopefully you’ve left open to save some time.
Step 2: In the top left corner, click the ‘More Actions’ button and choose ‘Embed’
If you’ve accidentally closed this window, don’t worry. Just open the Survey again from the main Google Docs window and it will go to Spreadsheet view. Use the ’Form’ Menu and choose ‘Embed Form into a Webpage’ to get the code.
Step 3: Copy the provided Embed code to the clipboard by Right-Clicking on it and choosing ‘Copy’.
Step 4: Create a new Post or Page in your blog where you’d like to start a survey. You can write and format your post as normal.
Step 5: Click on the HTML tab to enter HTML view. This is IMPORTANT – if you don’t do this, the code will not be interpreted.
Step 6: Find where you’d like to place your survey. If at the end of the post, then just scroll to the bottom.
Step 7: Paste the Embed code there.
Step 8: Edit the code where it says “width” and change it to the width of your posts. Mine, for example is 600 pixels. So my code looks like this:
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dE1YdVdDM2pjZ0ExUVdLb1BzX2d1V1E6MQ"
width="600" height="638" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0">Loading...</iframe>
Step 9 (optional): I like to also change the height to accommodate the entire survey so there are no scrollbars. You’ll need to experiment with this while previewing changes between values until you find the right height. Modify the height attribute accordingly.
Step 10: Remain in HTML view and Publish the post.
Note that changing to Visual view is likely to break the embed code. Stay on HTML view until the post has been published then you can switch back as long as you don’t need to publish the post again.
That’s it kiddies!
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