How to Easily Make a Volunteer Application Form in WordPress

Do you want to make a volunteer application form in WordPress?

By adding an application form to your website, you can recruit more volunteers and automatically collect the information you need from them. This can save you time and allow you to build a network of people who are willing to help out.

In this article, we will show you how to make a great volunteer application form in WordPress, even if you’ve never created a form before.

Why Create a Volunteer Application Form in WordPress?

Many organizations rely on volunteers, especially charities and nonprofits. However, going back and forth with potential new volunteers over email can take a lot of time. Many nonprofits still use paper forms to recruit new helpers, which can take even more time to process.

By adding a volunteer application form to your WordPress website, you can easily reach more people who may be browsing your site and decide to help you out.

A volunteer application form also tells visitors exactly what information you need, such as their email address or phone number and any previous volunteering experience. This means you don’t have to spend time on follow-up emails and phone calls, trying to get all of the information you need from a new volunteer.

A good form builder plugin will also show all of its data in the WordPress dashboard in a nicely organized way, and send email notifications to the right people for follow-up.

With that said, let’s show you how to easily create a great volunteer application form in WordPress, step by step.

Creating Your Volunteer Application Form in WordPress

The easiest way to create a great volunteer application form in WordPress is by using the WPForms plugin.

WPForms is the best WordPress form builder plugin on the market. It is beginner-friendly and is used by over 5 million websites. With WPForms you can quickly create any kind of online form you need with their drag-and-drop builder.

Note: In this guide we’ll be using the WPForms Pro version because it has hundreds of pre-made form templates including a ready-made volunteer application template. If you’re on a budget, then there is also a free WPForms Lite version that you can use.

First thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, please see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activating the plugin, you need to visit WPForms » Settings page in your WordPress dashboard to enter your license key. You can find this information under your account on WPForms website.

If you’re using the free version, then you can skip this step.

Next, you need to click on WPForms » Add New page to create your Volunteer Application Form in WordPress.

This will open the WPForms drag & drop form builder where you need to start by typing a name for your form and then select your form template.

WPForms comes with

hundreds of pre-made form templates to help you quickly build any type of forms such as a contact form, online order form, etc. Since we want to create a volunteer application form, simply type “Volunteer” in the template search bar.

You will now see several volunteer form templates to choose from. We will select “Volunteer Recruitment Form” by clicking on the ‘Use Template’ button.

WPForms will now create a volunteer application form for you.

You can then easily customize this form to better fit your needs. To edit or change anything, simply click on the form field that you want to change.

WPForms will now show all of the settings that you can customize on this field.

Want to change the text that appears in this form field? Then simply edit the text in the left-hand menu.

To customize existing multiple choice options, just click on any of the + buttons. This will let you add more options.

You can easily add more questions or options to your volunteer application form by clicking the Add Fields tab in the left-hand menu.

This shows all the fields that you can add including some more advanced options such as the ‘File Upload’ field.

The ‘File Upload’ field lets volunteers submit a file alongside their application. For example, you might ask for a copy of their CV or resume. To learn more, see our step by step guide on how to create a file upload form in WordPress.

You may want to make some fields required, such as the field where applicants can type in their email address. If you make a field mandatory, then visitors cannot submit the form without filling in this field.

To make a field mandatory, simply click to select that field. Then in the left-hand menu click on the ‘Required’ slider to turn it from grey to blue.

You and your volunteers can easily see which fields are required because they’ll have a small red asterisk next to the field label.

When you’re happy with how your volunteer application form looks, click on ‘Settings’ in the left-hand menu.

On the ‘General’ settings tab, you can change various form related settings such as the submit button text, setup spam protection, and more.

As the leading WordPress form building solution, WPForms comes with advanced anti-spam settings to help you reduce form spam.

You can see that it’s automatically enabled by default under the ‘Enable anti-spam protection’ slider. Unless you’re going to use a different form of spam prevention instead, we recommend keeping this honeypot enabled.

To learn more about how WPForms can protect your site against spam, please see our step by step guide on how to block contact form spam in WordPress.

Setting Up Notifications and Confirmations

By default, every time a visitor submits a form on your site, you’ll get an email containing all the information they’ve submitted.

You can also see all of your submitted form entries in your WordPress dashboard as well.

We also recommend sending the volunteer an email confirming that you’ve got their application. For more details, please see our guide on how to send confirmation emails after WordPress form submission.

Even if you do send a notification email, it’s still a good idea to show an on-screen confirmation every time someone successfully submits a form.

There are a few different ways to do this. WPForms allows you to either show a confirmation message on the same page, or you can redirect the user to a custom Thank You page on your site.

You can configure these settings by going to the Confirmation tab on the Settings panel and then choose from the Confirmation type options.

Most organizations will just use the default Message, but some may create a custom thank you page, or even redirect the visitor to your events calendar, so they can start learning about your upcoming fundraising events.

When you’re happy with how your confirmation message is set up, click on the ‘Save’ button to save your changes.

Bonus Tip: WPForms integrates will all the best email marketing services. If you have an email newsletter, then WPForms makes it easy to add your new volunteers to this newsletter.

Adding Your Volunteer Application Form to Your Site

Now you’re ready to add your form to your WordPress website, so people can start applying to become a volunteer.

With WPForms, it’s easy to add your form to any page, post, or widget-ready area on your site.

Most of the time you’ll want to show your form on a page or post. To do this, either create a new page or post, or open an existing one in the WordPress editor.

In the WordPress block editor, click on the + button to create a new block. In the popup that appears, type ‘WPForms’ to find the right block.

Then just click on the ‘WPForms’ block to add it to your page.

Next, open the dropdown menu in the WPForms block.

You’ll now see a list of all the forms you’ve created. Simply go ahead and click on the volunteer application form to add it to your page.

If you’re happy with how the form looks, then you can publish or update the page. Now you can visit your website to see your volunteer application form live.

It’s also a good idea to test your form to make sure it’s working. Simply fill out and submit the form, and check that you see a confirmation message. You should also get an email notification that the form has been filled in.

If you don’t get an email, then there could be an issue with how your emails are set up in WordPress. To learn more, see our guide on how to fix the WordPress not sending email issue.

Once you’ve published your form, you can go to WPForms » Entries to see all of your volunteer applications.

You’ll see ‘Abandoned’ as the status for the entries where a visitor decided to leave the form without submitting. For more information, please see our guide on how to track and reduce form abandonment in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to make a great volunteer application form in WordPress. You may also want to go through our guide on how to track website visitors to your WordPress site and see our expert pick of the best WordPress plugins for nonprofits.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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How to Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress

Do you want to make blog post comments show up in WordPress search results?

By default, WordPress search doesn’t include comments. This can make it difficult for your visitors to find interesting conversations and engage with other users.

In this article, we will show you how you can make blog comments searchable on your WordPress website.

Why Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress?

A lively and interesting comment section can keep people on your WordPress website longer and create a sense of community around your site.

Because of that, comments are valuable content, and you’ll want to do everything you can to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts.

However, since WordPress doesn’t include comments in its search results by default, visitors may struggle to find interesting discussions and connect with other users or revisit a specific comment thread on your WordPress blog.

You might even be using the comment section for your visitors to submit reviews or testimonials. Having searchable reviews can help to boost sales on your online store, since people will be more likely to find the exact product they’re searching for.

That being said, let’s see how you can fix these problems by making blog post comments searchable in WordPress.

How to Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress

The easiest way to make blog post comments searchable in WordPress is by using the SearchWP plugin.

SearchWP is the best custom search plugin for WordPress, used by over 30,000 websites. It’s easy to use and lets you improve the built-in WordPress search.

You can also easily configure the plugin to include custom post types in WordPress search results, as well as registered users.

To make your blog post comments searchable, you’ll need to install and activate SearchWP. If you need more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will see a popup telling you that SearchWP has already created an engine for you to use. The first step is customizing this engine.

We’ll show you how to change the default engine in this guide, so you can go ahead and click on the ‘Close’ button to exit the popup.

You will now be taken to the SearchWP » Settings page automatically.

On this screen, click on the ‘License’ tab. You can now paste your key into the ‘License’ box.

You’ll find this information in the email you got when you purchased SearchWP and in your account on the SearchWP site.

Once you’ve pasted the license key, click on the ‘Activate’ button next to it.

Next, just click on the ‘Engines’ tab so that you can customize everything that the plugin will display in search results.

You will see here that by default, posts are searchable and are broken into title, content, slug, and excerpt.

To allow comments to be searchable on your site, you want to click on the ‘Sources & Settings’ button near the top-right part of the screen.

A popup will appear in the middle of your screen. Under the ‘Sources’ heading, you’ll see all the different types of content that SearchWP is capable of searching.

By default, the plugin searches your site’s posts, pages, and media.

Go ahead and check the ‘Comments’ box. You can then click on ‘Done.’

This includes all comments in the search results on your site.

You can further customize how your blog comments are searched by scrolling to the bottom of the ‘Engines’ tab. You’ll see a new section where you can configure how your comments will be searched.

To get started, click on the ‘Add/Remove Attributes’ button.

On this screen, you’ll see sections for the different parts of the comments that SearchWP includes in its search results, such as author name, email, and comment text itself.

SearchWP can search the comment’s author name and email address, plus the content of the comment itself.

In the following image, we’re telling SearchWP to look at the comment’s content by checking the ‘Comment’ box, as well as the name and email address of the person who posted it.

After making your selection, click on the ‘Done’ button.

Whatever options you checked will now appear under the ‘Comments’ section of the ‘Engines’ tab.

For each one, SearchWP has an ‘Applicable Attribute Relevance’ scale. This is the weight that SearchWP will give to each attribute when searching the comments on your blog.

Content that matches an attribute with high relevancy will appear higher in the search results. By contrast, content that matches an attribute that has less relevancy will appear lower in the user’s search results.

By default, all the attribute sliders are set to ‘low,’ but you can change that by simply dragging the slider to the right.

Every site is unique, so you may want to try different relevancy settings to see what gives you the most accurate and helpful search results.

If you decide later that want to remove an attribute from your search, you can simply repeat the steps above, but uncheck the box next to it.

Once you’re happy with how the search feature is set up, you can go ahead and click on the ‘Save Engines’ button.

After a few moments, SearchWP will show a message ‘The index needs to be rebuilt.’

If you do get this message, then go ahead and click on the ‘Rebuild Index’ button. This will add all of your site’s comments to the search index, so they appear in relevant results.

Once you’ve done that, SearchWP will look at your WordPress site’s comments when creating its search results.

How to Change SearchWP Settings

Now that your blog post comments are searchable, you may want to enable some advanced settings that will make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

To take a look at these advanced search settings, click on the ‘Advanced’ tab.

On this screen, you can change a lot of the plugin’s behavior such as making adjustments for misspellings.

For example, if someone makes a spelling mistake when typing in their search term, then SearchWP can show a ‘Did you mean?’ correction box with results that are similar to what the search query should have been.

The following image shows an example of how this might look on your website.

To use this feature in your searches, go ahead and check the ‘Automatic “Did you mean?” corrections’ box.

You’ll also need to check the ‘Partial matches (fuzzy when necessary)’ box, since the ‘Did You Mean?’ feature uses partial matches.

For more tips on SearchWP’s advanced settings, please see our step-by-step guide on how to improve WordPress search with SearchWP.

We hope this article helped you learn how to make blog comments searchable in WordPress. You may also want to see our picks of the best live chat software for small businesses and the ultimate guide to creating a WordPress membership site.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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How to Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive (Free and Easy)

Did you know that you can make a backup of your WordPress site on Google Drive?

If you have a Google account, then you already have 15GB of cloud storage for free. You can use this storage to keep a copy of your site in reserve, just in case something bad happens, and you need a reset.

In this article, we will show you how you can automatically backup your WordPress site to Google Drive.

Why Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive?

A backup is a copy of your website that’s stored separately, and it’s one of the most important ways to keep your site safe. If something goes wrong with your website, then you can restore a backup with just a few clicks to get it working again.

Even in the worst-case scenario where a hacker breaks into your WordPress website and deletes your data, you can simply restore a backup and get your site back.

Many website owners also create a backup before making a big change to their site, such as editing their WordPress homepage or installing a new theme. If the change breaks their website, they can simply restore a working version of their site from a backup.

By backing up your site to a cloud storage service such as Google Drive, you can restore your site even if your main hosting account got hacked. Also, it won’t take up precious storage space on your WordPress hosting plan.

By creating a Google account, you’ll automatically get 15GB of free cloud storage that you can use for backups and file storage. If you need more space, then prices start at $1.99 per month for an additional 100GB.

How to Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive

WordPress does not come with a built-in backup solution. However, there are several great WordPress backup plugins that make it easy to backup and restore your site.

UpdraftPlus is the best backup plugin for WordPress. This free plugin lets you create scheduled backups, so you can automatically back up your WordPress site to Google Drive.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the UpdraftPlus plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Once you’ve activated UpdraftPlus, you can configure your backup settings and choose Google Drive as a storage destination.

To do this, head over to Settings » UpdraftPlus Backups in your WordPress dashboard. Then, simply click on the ‘Settings’ tab.

UpdraftPlus makes it easy to save your backups to different online storage services including Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft OneDrive, and many others.

Since you want to backup your WordPress site to Google Drive, go ahead and click on ‘Google Drive’ in the section titled ‘Choose your remote storage.’

After choosing Google Drive as your storage location, you’ll need to give UpdraftPlus access to your Google account.

To get started, click on the ‘Sign in with Google’ button.

Now follow the onscreen instructions to give UpdraftPlus access to your Google account.

After reading the disclaimer, you can click on ‘Complete setup’ if you’re happy to go ahead and authorize UpdraftPlus access to your Google Drive.

Once you’ve done that, UpdraftPlus will take you back to its main settings page in the WordPress dashboard.

How to Create an Automatic WordPress Backup Schedule

After choosing Google Drive as your storage location, you’re ready to create an automatic backup schedule.

Still in the ‘Settings’ tab, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Save Changes button. UpdraftPlus will now automatically backup your site based on your schedule.

UpdraftPlus breaks WordPress backups into two parts: files and database.

Let’s start with files. As part of this backup, UpdraftPlus will create a copy of your site’s code files, plugin and theme files, and images. 

To get started, simply open the ‘Files backup schedule’ dropdown and choose how frequently UpdraftPlus should backup your WordPress website.

You can choose from once every month, right through to once every 2 hours.

When creating a schedule, think about how often you update or add new content to your site. For example, if you publish two blog posts each week, then you may want to backup your WordPress blog once a week instead of daily.

If you update your site more frequently, then you’ll need to backup more frequently.

In particular, if you run an online store then you’ll typically want to backup your site as often as possible. In this way, you can avoid losing important information such as new orders or a customer’s payment details.

After choosing a frequency for your backups, you’ll need to choose how many different backups UpdraftPlus should keep. This will help you optimize the storage space you use.

You can do this by entering that number into the text field next to ‘…retain this many scheduled backups.’

You can change these settings at any point, so if you’re unsure then you can start by saving a larger number and then reduce it if the backups are using too much space.

Once UpdraftPlus reaches your set number, the plugin will replace the oldest copy with newer WordPress backups.

Next, you need to create a backup schedule for your WordPress database in the ‘Database backup schedule’ section.

WordPress stores all of its posts and pages, comments, links, and website settings in the database, so it’s just as important to create backups of the database regularly as it is the files.

You can tell UpdraftPlus how frequently it should make backups of your database, and how many of them it should keep by following the same process described above.

How to Choose What is in UpdraftPlus Backups on Google Drive

By default, UpdraftPlus will include all your WordPress plugins, themes, and uploads in your Google Drive backups.

In the ‘Settings’ tab, scroll down to the ‘Include in files backup’ section. Here, you can choose whether to include plugins, themes, or uploads in your backup.

To create a complete copy of your WordPress website, you’ll want to leave the default 3 checkboxes selected.

If you don’t need to include plugins, themes, or uploads in your backups, then you can just uncheck the box next to that setting. Doing so can reduce the size of your backups and take up less space on your Google Drive.

If you leave the ‘Uploads’ box checked, then you can create some rules about the kind of uploads that UpdraftPlus will exclude from its backups.

There are already some exclusion rules. For example, the plugin defaults to excluding all files that have the word ‘backup’ in their file name. To create more rules about the kind of content UpdraftPlus will exclude, simply click on ‘Add an exclusion rule.’

You can then follow the onscreen instructions to create your exclusion rule.

For example, if you wanted UpdraftPlus to ignore all PDF files, then you would start by clicking on ‘All files with this extension’ and type ‘PDF’ in the field that appears.

By default, UpdraftPlus also excludes some files from the wp-content folder.

You can see all of UpdraftPlus’ default exclusion rules in the ‘Any other directories found inside wp-content’ section.

Do you need UpdraftPlus to exclude even more content from the wp-content folder? Simply click ‘Add an exclusion rule’ in this section and repeat the same process described above.

If you’re not sure about what to exclude, then we recommend sticking to the default settings. They are a good fit for most websites.

How to Know if an UpdraftPlus Backup to Google Drive was Successful?

Every time UpdraftPlus successfully creates a backup, it can send an email notification to your site’s admin email address that confirms the backup has been completed. If a backup fails, then you won’t get an email.

In the ‘Settings’ tab, scroll to the ‘Email’ section. You can now enable these notifications by checking the box in this section.

Now, every time UpdraftPlus creates a backup it will send you an email notification.

Once you’ve done all that, click on ‘Save Changes.’ UpdraftPlus will now backup your site to Google Drive automatically.

If you don’t get any emails from UpdraftPlus, then it’s a good idea to check that the plugin is successfully creating backups in your Google Drive.

If you’re using the free version of UpdraftPlus, then you should find a new ‘UpdraftPlus’ folder in your Google account.

Simply open this folder to see whether it contains any WordPress backups.

In the following image, you can see an example of how a few backups may look in your Google Drive account.

If UpdraftPlus is creating its backups successfully, but you’re not receiving the email notifications, then there is most likely a problem with how your emails are configured on your WordPress site.

You can see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending emails to ensure they are sent correctly.

How to Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive Manually

Automated backups are a great way to protect your site. However, even after creating an automatic schedule you may sometimes still need to create a manual backup.

It’s a good idea to create a manual backup before making any big changes, such as updating your version of WordPress. You might also create a manual backup after publishing lots of new content.

To create a backup your WordPress site on Google Drive manually, go to Settings » UpdraftPlus Backups. You can then simply click on the ‘Backup/Restore’ tab.

To go ahead and create a manual backup now, you just need to click on the ‘Backup Now’ button. UpdraftPlus will show some basic settings that you can use to configure the manual Google Drive backup.

As with an automated backup, UpdraftPlus defaults to backing up all of your files and the WordPress database. It will also use the same remote storage location that you use for your automated backups. For us, this is Google Drive.

The default settings should be good enough for most websites, so when you’re ready click on the ‘Backup Now’ button.

Restoring Your WordPress Backup with UpdraftPlus

Creating backups with UpdraftPlus is easy, but the really useful part is the ability to restore them from Google Drive with the same ease.

If your WordPress site was hacked or you just want to start fresh, then the first step is deleting everything and installing WordPress again.

Once you’ve done that, you will need to install and activate the UpdraftPlus plugin again on your new WordPress website. If you need help, then please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to Settings » UpdraftPlus Backups page and click on the ‘Settings’ tab.

In the ‘Choose your remote storage’ section, click on Google Drive.

You can now follow the onscreen instructions to give UpdraftPlus access to the Google account where you saved all of your website’s backups in Drive.

After connecting UpdraftPlus to your Google account, click on the ‘Backup/Restore’ tab.

UpdraftPlus will now scan your Google Drive and list all the backups that it discovers. Once complete, you can simply find the backup that you want to restore and click on ‘Restore.’

After that, choose the components that you want to restore. If you are restoring to a fresh WordPress installation, checking all the boxes is probably the best idea.

After choosing your components, go ahead and click on the ‘Next’ button.

UpdraftPlus will now get all the files that it needs to restore the WordPress backup from your Google Drive.

Once it’s successfully imported all the files it needs, you just need to click the ‘Restore’ button. UpdraftPlus will now restore your backup from Google Drive.

This may take a few minutes depending on the size of your backup, and the speed of your Internet connection.

Once it’s finished, you’ll see a ‘Restore Successful’ message at the end of an Activity log. At this point, you can click the ‘Return to UpdraftPlus configuration’ button to return to the settings and finish things up.

That’s it! You’ve now successfully restored your WordPress website from Google Drive.

We hope this article helped you learn how to backup your WordPress site to Google Drive. You can also go through our ultimate WordPress security guide and the most common WordPress errors and how to fix them.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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