How to Add an Age Restriction in WordPress Forms

Want to limit your form entries to users over 18? With Formidable Forms, you can easily add an age restriction in just three steps!

When you feature forms on your website, you can get useful feedback from your online visitors. Public forms also allow anyone to submit information. This can result in a ton of spam entries from bots or in entries from users outside your target audience. Age verification is useful tool to ensure form submissions are coming from the correct target audience.

While spam prevention tools have become commonplace in most modern form builders, age checks to prevent children from submitting a form are less common.

Fortunately, it’s easy to add an age restriction to forms on your WordPress site. age checks are useful for surveys, event sign-ups, and job applications that need responses from adults. By setting the minimum age to 18, you can weed out responses from children or teens.

In this post, we’ll discuss why you might want to set an age restriction on your forms. Then, we’ll show you how to do this in WordPress using Formidable Forms. Let’s get started!

Why you might want to add an age restriction to forms

When building online forms or allowing user-generated content, you should consider setting an age restriction. If you take this route, only adult visitors will be able to submit responses or add content to your site.

You probably want to reach a wide variety of online users, so you might hesitate to put any limits on your forms. However, there are many benefits to restricting your submissions by age.

For instance, if you want to target an adult audience, it's important to only allow responses from people over 18. This can tell online viewers that you're specifically looking for adult entries.

For example, you might want to set up a job application form. Since you won't want children to apply, it can help to set an age limit on submissions:

Alternatively, your website might not be kid-friendly. If you don't want any children to stumble across any mature content, it's best to add an age checker. Adding a simple age verification system can help ensure that a younger audience doesn't view or purchase anything intended for adults.

Here are a few more cases where you might consider using an age-restricted form:

• Event registration
• Online payments
• NPS survey questions for older users

It's important to keep in mind that people can lie on your forms. Even after setting an age restriction, users can say that they're older than they actually are. However, setting age restrictions can still prevent many kids from submitting responses.

How to set age restrictions on your WordPress forms

Now that you know about the benefits of creating age-restricted forms, let's discuss how to do it. For this tutorial, you'll need a Business or Elite version of Formidable Forms installed and activated. While there is a free version of Formidable Forms, it lacks the pro version features needed to add an age gate set to your forms.

There are a few WordPress age verification plugins available, but these free plugins don't integrate well or include the customization options many WordPress websites require.

Step 1: Install the Datepicker Options add-on

If you choose a Formidable Business plan or higher, you can automatically access the Datepicker Options add-on. This tool will add more features to your date fields, including minimum and maximum entry dates.

To start using the Datepicker Options add-on, open your WordPress dashboard. Then, go to Formidable → Add-Ons. Here, look for Datepicker Options:

Finally, click on the Activate button.

Step 2: Create a form with a date field

Next, you'll need to add a new form. To do this, navigate to Formidable → Forms → Add New:

Then, choose a pre-designed template. As we mentioned earlier, date restrictions can be effective on user registration forms, job applications, and surveys. All of these options are included as Formidable Forms templates:

After you select a template, you can start customizing your online form. Although a pre-designed template will already have some basic fields, you can drag and drop additional fields from the list on the left.

To set an age restriction, find the Date field. This should be under Advanced Fields:

Drag and drop this field anywhere on your form.

Step 3: Set a maximum date

Next, click on the Date field to open its Field Options. At the top of this section, give it a name. We'd recommend setting the field label as "Birthday" or "Date of Birth" so users know the information they should enter.

To make sure users fill out this field, check the box next to Required. This will prevent anyone who leaves this field blank from submitting an entry:

By default, your form will automatically set up a Year Range. In the first value, you'll need to enter the start year. This will depend on what you want to set as the oldest birth year.

For example, you could write "-60" to include dates for the past 60 years. This will place your first date as 1962.

For the End value, enter "-18". By doing this, you'll include dates up until 18 years ago. Here's how the new age range should look:

Then, scroll down to the Advanced section. Select the option to Set specific minimum and maximum dates.

For the Maximum field, choose Current Date. Then, in the text box that appears next to it, enter "-18 years". This will set the age restriction to users over 18 years old:

After this, click Update. Then, you can preview the form and test its Date of Birth field. If you enter a date within the last 17 years, the form will display an error message. You can edit the error message to anything your would like:

Once you've finished customizing your form and tested its settings, you can embed it anywhere on your website. You can even add your form to a pop up window to create an age verification popup on your blog posts.

Conclusion

When you're creating custom online forms, it’s important to think about your target audience. If you want only adults to respond, you can set a restriction based on age level. Narrowing your results to users over 18 can help you receive more qualified entries. 

To review, here’s how you can set an age restriction on your WordPress forms using Formidable Forms:

1. Install and activate Formidable Forms and the Datepicker Options add-on.
2. Create a form with a date field.
3. Set a maximum date.

With Formidable Forms, you can easily set age limits and encourage entries from the right people. To access the Datepicker Options add-on, check out our Business and Elite plans!

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