Gravity Form’s CSS is Mess

Posted in Plugins, WordPress

Why Gravity Forms Looks Messy Without Custom CSS — And What It Teaches Us About Software Design

Gravity Forms is a fantastic plugin for WordPress — arguably one of the most powerful tools available for building complex forms, handling conditional logic, payment gateways, and user flows. It’s a backbone for thousands of professional websites.

But if you’ve ever tried to simply change the color of a submit button or make minor visual tweaks, you may have quickly discovered something frustrating:

The front-end CSS structure of Gravity Forms is a tangled mess.

What’s the Problem?

At its core, Gravity Forms suffers from front-end technical debt — layers of CSS classes and structures that have built up over many years without a clear, unified strategy for styling.

Here are the biggest issues developers encounter:

  • Overly Specific and Redundant Selectors
    You aren’t just styling .gform_button. You also have to contend with .gform_footer input[type="submit"], .gform_page_footer input[type="submit"], .gform_next_button, .gform_previous_button, and so on. A simple button might inherit from multiple conflicting rules.

  • Excessive Nesting and Divitis
    Forms are wrapped in deeply nested <div> structures, often with very generic class names. This makes even simple layout adjustments more complicated than necessary.

  • Inline Styles and Late Loading
    Some add-ons or features inject inline styles or load additional CSS after your theme styles. This forces you to use !important or custom overrides just to get basic changes to stick.

  • Lack of Modern CSS Methodologies
    Gravity Forms predates modern systems like BEM (Block Element Modifier) naming, SCSS variables, or even basic mobile-first design principles. As a result, its CSS is harder to scale, harder to debug, and prone to style collisions.

Why It Happens

Gravity Forms was developed with a back-end engineering mindset — focusing heavily on features, logic, integrations, and reliability.

Front-end CSS architecture, by contrast, demands an entirely different discipline:

  • Maintainable, predictable styling rules

  • Lightweight and scalable structures

  • Clear separation between functionality and appearance

In other words, even highly capable development teams can create world-class functional software that has weak structural styling — because it’s a different skillset entirely.

How to Solve It

If you need clean and reliable styles for Gravity Forms, the best solution is:

  1. Disable their Default CSS
    Add this to your theme’s functions.php:

    php
    add_filter( 'gform_disable_css', '__return_true' );

    This tells Gravity Forms not to load their default styles at all.

  2. Write Your Own Minimalist CSS
    Create clean, targeted styles that match your site’s design without fighting old code.

    Example:

    css
    .gform_wrapper input[type="submit"],
    .gform_wrapper button[type="submit"] {
    background-color: #4c7966;
    color: white;
    border: none;
    padding: 12px 24px;
    font-size: 16px;
    cursor: pointer;
    transition: background-color 0.3s ease;
    }

    .gform_wrapper input[type="submit"]:hover,
    .gform_wrapper button[type="submit"]:hover {
    background-color: #096b42;
    }

  3. (Optional) Use Form-Specific Classes
    Gravity Forms allows you to assign custom CSS classes to each form or button, allowing even finer control without global overrides.

The Bigger Lesson

Gravity Forms’ CSS mess isn’t an isolated example.
It’s a valuable case study in software design:

Different areas of software require different types of craftsmanship.

An excellent database engineer or back-end developer isn’t automatically a great front-end designer — just as a great UX designer may not write a scalable API.

When evaluating software, it’s worth asking:

  • Does it solve the problem well?

  • Is it easy to maintain and modify later?

  • Was it designed with the full stack in mind, or just one part?

Gravity Forms is still a fantastic tool — but like many tools, it benefits greatly from customization to fit professional front-end standards.