How to Require an Email Sign Up Before Free Download on WordPress (No Coding Required)
This article will walk you through a FREE, no-code way of gating your downloads in WordPress using the Forminator and Lana Downloads Manager plugins.
WordPress is a pretty excellent content management system, and it powers nearly 35% of the internet as of 2020. If you’re a blogger, there’s a good chance you’re either on (or have been on) WordPress for your personal or business sites.
Likewise, a great way to get email signups and traffic are to offer a valuable, free download as part of your site. This freebie can be anything that relates to your content and can be as creative or practical as you please. A PDF guide, some free desktop or Zoom backgrounds, anything you can put in downloadable form can be used as a freebie to get you traffic.
So, then, how does one go about setting up a free download in exchange for an email address sign up on WordPress? I’m sure you’ve seen other sites that offer this, but there doesn’t seem to be a native way to accomplish this in WordPress without a few plugins. So, let’s dive in and set up our first email-gated download!
Starting fresh
For this tutorial, I’m going to start with a fresh copy of WordPress 5.5 using the free Twenty Twenty theme. Keep in mind that your theme may render front-end CSS differently, so your forms and posts may look slightly different from mine, or even behave slightly differently.
Getting the plugins
The first thing I’ll do is download the plugins we need. Don’t worry, both of the plugins we are going to use are free and super simple to administer.
We’ll start with Lana Downloads Manager. Log into your WordPress site and go to Plugins > Add New. Search for “Lana Downloads Manager” and click “Install Now” then “Activate”.
Lana Downloads Manager will allow us to upload our downloadable freebie (in my case, a PDF) and will help us manage download counts, etc. I’ve found that using this plugin is far superior to just placing a link to your download on your site for people to copy and paste.
Second, we will download Forminator, a tool that will help us create our email signup form. Search for “Forminator” and you should see a result similar to below. While Forminator offers a premium option, we won’t be needing it for our purposes.
Perfect, now it’s time for some setup!
Setting up your download
Using Lana Downloads Manager to set up your downloadable freebie is simple. In your WordPress control panel, scroll down to Downloads (a new menu option) and click “Add New”.
Give your download a title (mine is ‘My Great Freebie PDF’) and then scroll to the bottom of the form where the upload file option is. Find your PDF (or other files) on your local computer and upload it here. When done, click “Publish”.
Please take note of the download permalink for this post, as we will be using this in our post later. Here’s what mine looks like: Download Permalink: http://localhost:8888/download/7/
Now you’re ready to make your form then hook the two together in a post!
Creating Your Form
Your form will be simple; it will ask for an email and name, and that’s it. This is just a quick, simple way for us to gather email addresses for our mailing list in exchange for our free download.
In your WordPress control panel, scroll to the bottom of the left-hand menu and click the new “Forminator” menu, then click “Forms”. On the landing page, we’ll click “create” to make a new form.
For the form template, we are going to choose “blank” and the name will be something simple like “free download signup form”.
On the edit page, we will click “Insert Fields”.
I’m going to choose Name and Email as my two fields, then click “Insert Fields”. You should now see the two fields listed on the page.
Let’s edit each of these fields to make a few tweaks by clicking the gear to the right of the field. We’ll start with the email field. Let’s remove the label (I prefer to use placeholder text over labels) and change the placeholder to “Enter your name”. On the settings tab, click “required” to make this field required.
Hit Apply, then edit the email field and make similar changes. Remove the label, change the placeholder to “Enter your email”, and go to the settings tab and mark as required.
Finally, let’s edit the submit button text. Below your fields, there should be a “Send Message” field to edit. Edit it and change the name to “Download Now”.
Perfect, now the form fields are just the way we want them. All we have to do now is edit the appearance and behavior of the form.
Under Appearance, change the Design Style to “None” to make it match your theme’s styling. This is an optional step, but one I preferred.
Now, under Behavior, change the Submission Behavior to “Redirect user to a URL” and in the Redirect URL enter the permalink from the Lana Downloads Manager. Mine was http://localhost:8888/download/7/. Change the Redirection Option to “Redirect on new tab and hide form on the form page”.
Click publish and our form is ready. If you want to get fancy, you can use the Integrations menu option on the form to hook it up to Mailchimp directly. For now, I’m going to skip this step and just accept the form results and have them emailed to me.
One last step: grab the shortcode for the form we just created. If you go back to Forminator > Forms, you can click the gear next to your form and click “Copy Shortcode”. We’re going to need this in the next step.
Connecting the form and the download
Now it’s time to set up our page/post and hook everything together. I’m going to create a Page to use as a landing page for my download. I’m going to title it “Free Download” for this example.
Next, I’m going to add an empty “Media and Text” block. You can use any type of text block, but I like the layout of this one.
For the image, I’m going to upload a JPG of the front of my ebook cover. In the text are is where the magic is about to happen!
Start by adding a little introductory text, something like “Download Our Super Cool Ebook!”. Now, we are going to add a “shortcode” block below that text and enter the shortcode we copied earlier. It should look something like this.
Perfect! Time to preview our page!
Looks beautiful! But how does it work? Give it a shot. Fill in your name and email and click “download now”. The form should submit, a new tab should open for a split second, then the download of the file should prompt you to save it to your local machine!
Recap
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that it helped you overcome an obstacle that I faced early on in my blogging ventures.
Did the tutorial work for you? Do you know a better plugin, or even a better strategy all around? Let me know with a comment!
