Form Editing Is Totally Broken

Marketing & Content Hub Lead Capture Tools
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I’ve got to say of all the things Hubspot does well, the form editor and compatability with Hubspot’s landing pages is an absolute nightmare. Getting the proper styling to show on the landing page is impossible. Why does Hubspot fall SOOOO short on this? It makes the forms useless. Other CRMs aren’t even remotely as convoluted with form building and implementing. Why does my form look totally different on the landing page than it does in the form builder AND THEN a totally different look when it’s placed on an external website. When you try to edit the form in the landing page, nothing happens. Try to edit it in the form builder? NOTHING HAPPENS. Hubspot should totally scrap this and start from zero. And yes I get that there’s a whole thing with ‘themes’ having their own styling which okay fine whatever but WHY WOULDN’T THE FORM BUILDER EDITING OVERRIDE THE DEFAULT STYLING OF THE THEME?! If I’m going to take the time to customize the style of my form, guess which style I want to show on my landing pages…NOT THE DEFAULT THEME STYLE. From my count so far there’s 4 total places where you could possibly edit a form: inside the form editor, on the landing page, under the Form settings in settings, and within the theme builder. WHY DO WE NEED 4 DIFFERENT LOCATIONS TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO EDIT ONE SIMPLE FORM??? Complete disaster.

Thanks for reading my midnight crashout.

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Hi @LaunchPadMarket and welcome to the HubSpot Community!
I am so sorry to hear about the struggle you are having with the form styling on your landing page. I can see how this can be frustrating.
And thank you for sharing your valuable feedback, it means a lot to us!
I have passed it along internally.
Do you mind sharing the theme you are using, please?
I’d love to check with our Top Experts: Hi @TomM2, @Jake_Lett and @danmoyle, do you have any tips or workarounds that could help @LaunchPadMarket, please?
Thanks so much in advance and have a great day!
Bérangère

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Hey @LaunchPadMarket I can see the frustration on this. It’s a bit of a toss-up though on who would prefer this current method.

There’s a few things you’re seeing here:

1. HubSpot forms on a HubSpot CMS page inherit your HubSpot theme’s styles. This is designed so the styling matches your theme and it’s down to the theme developer to creation options to manipulate this (which any good theme should). There’s a warning on your form that forms styles won’t be applied to your HubSpot CMS pages and it will only affect your external pages.

2. External pages use an embed code and will inherit all form styles because they’re placed within an iframe, which blocks your website’s styles from affecting this.

3. You can enable “set as raw html form” in your forms to stop all HubSpot styling and have your form inherit the styling of your website.

These are all options to provide as much functionality as possible. Unfortunately if you’re using *any* cms and *any* form builder, the product is going to be built to service as broad an audience as possible, not you specifically. This does mean you come into situations where something doesn’t make sense for you but does make sense for a broad audience. These are just compromises you need to make when using a large scale tool to do something. If you want something built for just you, you need to hire a developer which incurrs its own costs.

As someone with a decade of experience in HubSpot, and previous was on the forms product team, you’re literally the first person I’ve ever heard who wants the form styling to override their theme’s styles (I’m not a HubSpot employee right now and have no control over the product now in case you feel like shouting at me).

All themes are built with specific styles, the forms editor doesn’t offer as robust styling options as a theme developer can, it makes sense to have a theme set the tone for styles on all elements of a website within any CMS. If forms style took precedent then you would be limited to only form styles which, 9 out of 10 times will leave your form not matching your website.

I can definitely see your frustration however, I completely agree there should be an option to have a HubSpot cms page inherit forms styling. I opened a feature request on the ideas board to pass this onto the product team if you’d like to give it an upvote!

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Allow-HubSpot-CMS-forms-to-inherit-form-builder-styles/idi-p/1176274#M215466