Introducing Form Marshal: form privacy, with a paper trail

A website form can look harmless and still ask for information it should not collect.

A contact form becomes an intake form. Someone adds a date of birth. A text box invites a visitor to describe a medical concern. The answers may end up in a WordPress database, an email inbox, or another connected tool.

The page still looks like an ordinary form. The questions have changed what the team needs to review.

I built Form Marshal to make that review easier. It is now available in the WordPress Plugin Directory, with a separate paid add-on, Form Marshal Pro.

Start with the questions your forms ask

Form Marshal checks forms for likely health and personal-information concerns. It looks at field types, labels, descriptions, placeholders, choices, and other form details. Its findings give you a reason to review a field, rather than leaving you with an unexplained warning.

It works with Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, WPForms, Contact Form 7, Fluent Forms, and Forminator.

The free plugin includes the core tools:

• Findings and basic admin reports.
• Warnings while a form is being edited.
• Rules for flagging or blocking forms.
• Time-limited exceptions for cases that need an approved path forward.
• Tools for reviewing and managing stored entries.

Those tools belong in Free. Pro adds ways to share and oversee the work.

Pro gives the findings somewhere to go

Finding a concern is one step. Explaining it to the people who need to act is another.

Form Marshal Pro adds reports you can print, save as PDF through your browser, or download as Markdown. They show form status, finding reasons, stored entry counts, data destinations, and the pages where forms appear.

You can give those reports your organization's name, logo, color, title, and footer. Keep the default design if it works for you. The privacy and compliance disclaimer stays either way.

Pro also adds daily email summaries, an audit log export, and connections for tools your team already uses. Its event messages can be signed so the receiving system can check their source. Reports and event messages omit submitted form answers.

For WordPress multisite, Pro provides network counts and shared minimum rules. That oversight applies within one multisite network. It does not create a central dashboard for unrelated WordPress installations.

A finding still needs a person

Form Marshal is a privacy control, not a compliance guarantee.

Neither plugin certifies HIPAA compliance or replaces a privacy and security review. A flagged field needs context. What is the form for? Does the organization need that information? Where will it go? What rules should apply?

The plugin helps surface those questions and apply the policy you choose. Your team still makes the decision.

Start on a test copy

If you try Form Marshal, start on a test copy of your site.

The free plugin defaults to blocking forms classified as collecting health information. For an initial review, use Flag mode so you can inspect findings before changing what visitors can submit.

The Free setup guide walks through that process. There is also a form review checklist you can use to record the owner, reviewer, and next action.

You do not need Pro to begin. Install Free, review the findings, and decide whether shared reports or network oversight would help your team.

Get Form Marshal Free or explore Form Marshal Pro.

Questions, bugs, and feature requests belong in the Form Marshal support repository. Its issues are public, so keep form answers, private information, passwords, and license keys out of them.