Publish a form

By the end of this page you will know how to put a saved form on a page or post, preview it before anyone else can see it, and find every page a form is already on.

Prerequisites

A saved form. See Getting started if you haven’t created one yet.

Get the shortcode

Every form has a shortcode that looks like this:

[trazoforms id="1"]

You can copy it from two places:

• TrazoForms → Forms: the Shortcode column shows it for every form, with a Copy shortcode button next to it.
• The builder: it’s shown next to the title in the toolbar, once the form has been saved at least once. There is no copy button here — select the text by hand.

Paste it anywhere WordPress renders shortcodes

• Block editor: paste it into a Shortcode block, or directly into a Paragraph block.
• Classic editor: paste it directly into the content.
• It also works in a text/shortcode widget or in a Site Editor template, using the same shortcode — but see the note about “where a form is used” below.

The shortcode only takes a form’s id; there are no other parameters. Things like the form’s CSS class or whether its title is shown are settings on the form itself (see Design), not shortcode options.

Preview before publishing

Two buttons show a real, working copy of the form without publishing it anywhere:

• TrazoForms → Forms, the Preview button on each row.
• The builder toolbar, once the form has been saved — it shows the last saved version, so save your changes first if you want to check them.

The preview page says so explicitly: it’s visible only to you, and anything you submit on it is saved as a real entry, so don’t fill it in with data you don’t want to keep.

Find where a form is already used

TrazoForms → Forms lists the published pages and posts that contain each form’s shortcode, right under its Preview button. This list:

• Only looks at published posts and pages, and only at shortcodes typed directly into their content.
• Does not detect a form placed in a widget or a Site Editor template — it still works there, it just won’t show up in this list.
• Is refreshed automatically whenever a post is saved, deleted, or its status changes, though it can take up to an hour to catch a change made some other way.

Edge cases

• The same form twice on one page: nothing stops you, but avoid it. Once the first copy is submitted, the second copy on the same page shows an empty, unsubmitted form again instead of its own confirmation.
• A full-page caching plugin: WordPress’s own security token on each form expires after 12–24 hours. If a page is cached longer than that, a genuine submission can be rejected and the visitor asked to try again. Keep cache lifetimes under that window for pages with forms, or exclude those pages from the cache. See Availability and spam for how the anti-spam timing check itself stays cache-safe.
• Multi-page forms (Pro): published the same way, with the same shortcode — there’s no separate step. See Multi-page forms.

Next step

Continue to The builder to see how the editing screen is organized.