How to Create Stripe Donation Forms on a WordPress Website

But don’t mistake its free-ness for weakness. It’s actually one of the best Stripe integration solutions for WordPress on the market, with features like customizable forms, multi-currency support, and seamless payment processing. Adding donation forms is just one of its features – and I’m going to show you exactly how to set them up.

Let’s jump right into it.

The process explained

To pull this off, you’ll need three things:

• Access to your WordPress site
• The WP Full Pay Plugin
• A Stripe account

As I said, it’s straightforward. Here’s what you need to do…

Step one: install and activate WP Full Pay

After you log into your WordPress site, head straight to the wp-admin menu on the left and hover your mouse over Plugins. Then click on Add New Plugin.

On the next screen, type “WP Full Pay” into the Search Plugins bar. Once you see it populate, click on Install Now, followed by Activate:

Step two: connect your Stripe account to WP Full Pay

After activating the plugin, you’ll be prompted to link your Stripe account to WP Full Pay:

This step could potentially be the most time consuming part of the entire process. It really depends on if you have an existing Stripe account. If you do and it’s connected to the same organization that you plan to accept donations for, then the process will go faster. Otherwise, you’ll need to add all of the information related to it:

If you do fall into the I-don’t-have-a-Stripe-account-yet category, then be prepared to set aside a few minutes to complete this.

Also, make sure to have all the necessary legal information pertaining to your organization handy because they ask about everything. Although it can feel a bit cumbersome, it’s to be expected. Anything involving financial transactions is heavily scrutinized so there is no way around it.

Step three: create your first donation form

After you’ve connected your Stripe account, you can get to work on creating your first donation form.

💡 Technically speaking, you can also exit the Setup Wizard and create your donation form first, but it obviously won’t be fully functional until you complete the link with Stripe. I’m mentioning it in case you work as part of a team and some other person has the information required to complete the Stripe setup. While you wait for them, you can still get ahead on the process and have everything ready to go for when they complete their part.

Add a new form, name it, set the form type, and choose a layout

To begin, hover over WP Full Pay in the wp-admin menu, and then click on Payment Forms → ADD FORM:

Next, give your form a name.

The Identifier field will be auto-populated based directly on what you type into the Display name field. The purpose of it is to add a tag to the shortcode associated with the form. This shortcode is how you will insert the donation form into whatever pages or posts you want – we’ll cover that later.

For now, I recommend not using the auto-populated identifier because it will most likely be unnecessarily long. Instead just put a word like “donate” or “donate1” if you plan on having several forms.

Below this, it asks you to choose your Form type, which is so obvious that it doesn’t require an explanation.

The only other thing left is to choose the layout – Checkout or Inline.

One of the biggest differences between the two is that the Checkout version is going to give you a smaller form, while the Inline version will give you a bigger form.

Of course there are other differences as well. For example, choosing Inline will let donors complete their entire payment process on the page, whereas going with Checkout will redirect them to a dedicated Stripe-hosted page. Check out this knowledge base article for a full breakdown of the layouts.

For this tutorial, I am going to choose the Checkout option, but feel free to choose the one that works best for you. It won’t affect anything else about the remaining steps we’re going to cover.

Set your currency and suggested donation amounts

On the next tab – PAYMENT – you can choose from a very long list of world currencies. When I say long, I mean that it is highly unlikely that you won’t find whatever currency you’re looking for.

In addition, you can add suggested donation amounts and check off an option to allow donors to set their own custom amount.

💡 Pro tip: On the page where you’ll be inserting the form, consider adding short descriptions of what each suggested amount will accomplish. Something like “$50 provides meals for five families” will help donors understand their impact and could increase your conversions.

Near the bottom, you’ll find additional customizations, including the ability to set donation frequencies and to generate an invoice for those who make a donation.

Adjust the appearance of your form

The Appearance tab contains several ways to make your form more inviting and on-brand. Let’s run through the key settings:

First is the form button text. The standard “Donate” works fine, but you can also add {{amount}} to show the person’s selected amount right on the button. This adds a nice touch of last minute confirmation that they are donating the amount they intended.

For the product name and description, keep it straightforward but compelling and transparent.

⚡️ Power feature: If you want to show progress toward your fundraising goal, simply check the “Show donation goal” box and put in your target amount. Nothing motivates donors quite like seeing that progress bar fill up! 💰 It’s a powerful psychological tool that you’ll see showcased on major fundraising platforms like GoFundMe and Kickstarter, and with WP Full Pay, you can take advantage of it too!

Finally, the Locale settings make sure your form feels familiar to donors worldwide. Numbers and currencies look different across regions – dots or commas for decimals, currency symbols before or after amounts. Pick what your donors would expect to see in your corner of the world.

Add optional form fields

Moving on to the FORM FIELDS tab, you’ll find some useful ways to gather extra information from your donors. At the top, there’s a section for basic customer data like billing address and phone number – check the boxes for any fields you need.

Under Consent, you can set up a Terms of Service checkbox. Not only is this smart from a legal standpoint, but it helps build trust with your donors. You can customize both the checkbox label (including a link to your terms) and the error message that appears if someone tries to submit without checking it.

If you need to collect other specific information, there’s a Custom fields section that lets you add your own input fields.

Enable donation receipts

The next tab is EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS. Here you can enable receipts to be sent to anyone who donates to you. There are two options: have the WP Full Pay plugin send an email or have Stripe send an email.

You can even turn on both. For most donation-related purposes, one will probably suffice, but the reason there are two is because there are some types of notifications that can only be sent by one or the other. Fortunately, donation receipts can be sent by both.

If you’re interested in a full list of the differences, check out this page.

You’ll notice that there is also a WEBHOOK tab for developers to the right of this tab. I’m going to skip over it since it’s not absolutely necessary for the purpose of accepting donations and many readers may find it complicated. However, if you’re interested in exploring this feature, there is a detailed knowledge base tutorial you can check out.

At this point you can either click on SAVE CHANGES or if you want to give everything one more look over, then feel free to do that first.

Step four: insert your donation form into a page or post

After you save your form, you’ll be brought back to the Manage forms screen, which at this point will only have your one form that you just created.

The next step is to click on the shortcode. When you click on it, it will automatically copy to your clipboard.

💡 Do you remember the identifier from earlier? If you look closely at my shortcode, you’ll notice that I named my identifier “donate.”

From here, go to Pages → All Pages (or Posts → All Posts if you want to add it to a post).

Then find the page (or post) you want to add the donation form to and click on Edit:

To add the donation shortcode to your page, go to the section of the page / post where you’d like to insert it.

Then click the + icon in the block editor. This will bring up the block search box. Type in “shortcode” in the search bar and you’ll see the Shortcode block populate:

Now just paste the shortcode from your clipboard into the shortcode block (On Mac: command + v, on Windows: ctrl + v):

After pasting in your shortcode, click the view / preview button on the top right of the toolbar to preview how your donation form will look on the actual page. This quick check helps you spot any formatting quirks before saving your work.

If everything looks good, then go back to the block editor and click Save to make it go live.

And that’s it!

Well, maybe…

A note on color schemes

If your website uses darker backgrounds, then parts of the donation form will show as nearly invisible with the default settings. Look at the example above: “Donation amount” and “Donation frequency” are barely readable, and even the progress bar text is struggling to stand out.

Luckily, you can adjust the color settings of your form with some CSS tweaks. There’s a knowledge base article that breaks it down in detail.

Final bit of advice

I’ve walked you through the basic process of setting up a donation form here and for most of you, this will cover the bases. However, the beauty of the WP Full Pay plugin is that it’s simple enough when you need to be, but it can also be complex if necessary.

In other words, it adjusts to you.

If you do happen to be a power user and need it to do some of the more fancy things that it’s capable of, then I highly recommend diving into the knowledge base that I linked to a few times throughout this guide.

Other than that, my last piece of advice is to test your form thoroughly. I mean really test it. It’s better to catch any quirks now than to have a frustrated donor emailing you later.

Do you have any questions? Drop them in the comments below. I’ll be glad to help you out.