Turn Your WordPress Website Into a Lead Generating Machine
Your fantastic website runs on WordPress and your CRM of choice is Salesforce, but you just can’t seem to get the two applications to play nice together.
Fret no more, in this daily tip we’re going to show you how to integrate WordPress and Salesforce, and turn your website into a lead generating machine!
A note before we start: We’ll be using the Web-to-Lead feature of Salesforce, which requires you to be using their Group Edition platform, or higher.
Why Integrate WordPress with Salesforce?
The benefits of using a CRM to track potential leads and customers are numerous – too numerous to list in this article, but it is safe to say that businesses which track and analyze sales perform much better than businesses which do not.
There are a few plugins out there which connect the two platforms, and even a few applications on the Salesforce side of things, but they are usually premium offerings sold at ridiculously high prices. Effectively, this puts them out of reach for the person just starting an e-commerce site.
WordPress is a fantastic web platform, and it is probably used for most of your front-end sales process. And because WordPress is not exactly the smoothest running CRM, your customer data is either ignored completely, or kept solely on Salesforce (and then ignored).
And that’s exactly why Salesforce makes the Web-to-Lead form available to us.
Salesforce Web-to-Leads
Your Salesforce account includes a feature called Web-to-Leads, which lets you design a form with contact fields you wish to track, and then gives you the HTML code to install that form on nearly any website – including your WordPress powered blog.
Creating a Web-to-Lead Form
Log into your Salesforce account and locate the SETUP menu. It will be located in the drop down menu that is your name in the top right corner of the site.

Once there, on the left sidebar admin panel, navigate to APP SETUP, underneath the “Customize” option choose “Leads” and then **Web-to-Lead.**
In your Web-to-Lead settings, make sure Web-to-Lead is enabled. If not, click the edit button and enable it. Save your changes and return to the Web-to-Lead settings area.

Click the “Create Web-to-Lead Form” button to create a new form for usage in your website.
In the box on the left you’ll see all the fields available for usage. The box on the right shows the fields you’ve selected for the actual form.
Underneath the boxes you’ll see space to enter a URL. This is the page to which you’ll be redirecting users after they fill out the form on your site. It’s not required, but it’s a nice touch to bring users to a page that lets them know the form has been submitted successfully and that you’ve received their info. Of course, this requires you to already have that page operating on your site.
When you’re happy with the fields and have filled out the redirect URL, click the “Generate” button.
Copying the Web-to-Lead Form Code
Salesforce automatically generates the required HTML code to produce the web-to-lead form. Highlight the code in the window, copy it, and visit the WordPress post or page on which you’d like that form to appear.
Editing the Web-to-Lead Form in WordPress
Take the code from Salesforce and paste it into the HTML code area of your post or page editor. In WP 3.5, that area of the post / page editor was named “text” and its tab can be found at the top right of the editing area.
Unfortunately, Salesforce gives us some extra code that is not needed. These are commented lines and a definition of character set, which WordPress already defines.
Therefore, you can delete everything before (but not including) this line:
{code type=php}