Event registration forms have a problem that most form plugins don't account for: people's plans change.
Someone registers for your conference in January. By March, their dietary requirement has changed, they've decided to bring a guest, or they want to swap from the afternoon workshop to the morning session. They email you. You manually update the entry in Gravity Forms. You both move on.
Multiply that by 200 attendees and it stops being a minor inconvenience and starts being a real operational problem.
What Most People Do (and Why It Doesn't Scale)
The typical approach is one of these:
Option 1: Handle it manually. Attendees email or call, you find the entry and update it yourself. Works fine at small scale. Falls apart fast.
Option 2: Give attendees WordPress accounts. They log in and edit their submission through GravityView or a front-end editor. Secure, but heavy — you're managing accounts for people who just want to change one field.
Option 3: Send a new form. Create a separate "update your registration" form and manage duplicate entries. Fragile and confusing.
None of these is great. There's a better way.
The Self-Service Approach: Return Links
A return link lets an attendee click back into their specific registration — pre-filled with their original answers — make their changes, and resubmit. No account, no password, no manual intervention from you.
Here's what the workflow looks like in practice:
- Attendee submits your Gravity Forms registration
- Confirmation message includes: "Need to make changes? Use this link to return to your registration: [link]"
- Attendee bookmarks it, or finds the original confirmation email whenever they need to update
- They click, the form loads with their answers, they make changes and resubmit
- You see the updated entry in Gravity Forms — same entry ID, updated fields
Setting This Up With Gravity Forms
You can implement return links on any Gravity Forms registration using the ReEntry for Gravity Forms plugin. Here's the setup:
Step 1: Install ReEntry
Download and install ReEntry for Gravity Forms from lunr.pro/plugins/reentry. Activate it. That's all the installation there is.
Step 2: Create Your Return Page
Create a new WordPress page — call it something like "Update Your Registration" — and add the shortcode to the page content. This is the page attendees will land on when they click their return link.
Step 3: Enable ReEntry on Your Registration Form
Open your event registration form in the Gravity Forms editor. You'll see a new ReEntry tab in the form settings. Enable it, select your return page, and set your link expiry (we recommend "never" or a date after your event).
Step 4: Update Your Confirmation Message
In your form's confirmation settings, add the ReEntry merge tag to your confirmation message:
Need to update your registration? Use this link:
{reentry_link}
You can also add it to your notification email so the return link lands in their inbox.
That's the entire setup. From this point forward, every new registration will automatically include a return link.
What Fields Should You Allow Editing?
By default, all fields are editable on return. For most event registrations that's fine — you want attendees to be able to fix anything.
If you're on ReEntry Pro, you can lock specific fields so they can't be changed on return. This is useful for things like:
- Name fields — prevent substituting a different attendee once someone registers
- Email address — if you're using email for access control or communications
- Registration type — if pricing differs and you don't want field changes to bypass payment
Handling the Return Submission
When an attendee resubmits via a return link, ReEntry updates their original entry in place by default. The entry ID stays the same, the timestamp updates, and you can see the change history in the entry detail view.
If you prefer to create a new entry on each return submission (useful if you want to preserve a complete audit trail), that's also a per-form option in the ReEntry settings.
A Note on Link Expiry
For event registrations, we recommend setting expiry to "never" or to a date a week after your event closes. You don't want an attendee unable to update their meal preference two days before the event because their 30-day link expired.
Event registration is one of the highest-value use cases for editable form submissions. If you run regular events and currently handle update requests manually, ReEntry can eliminate most of that overhead for free.
Download ReEntry for Gravity Forms at lunr.pro/plugins/reentry.