Last reviewed: April 2024
It’s a common design pattern to route visitors to a new page when they successfully submit a form. But figuring out how to get that route working can be tricky. Do you need a _redirects file? (Spoiler alert: no.) Are your form attributes set up correctly to work with Netlify? When you’re deciding which routing functions to use, do you start at the framework (React, Vue) level, the static site generator (Gatsby, Nuxt) level, or somewhere else?
This post links to examples of custom success pages with two popular static site generators: Gatsby (React) and Nuxt (Vue). You’ll see that many of the elements of these forms are exactly the same! And once you get the hang of the similarities, we hope it’ll become easier to understand the differences and apply what you learn to other frameworks that we don’t cover here. There’s also a separate post all about Netlify forms that I highly recommend checking out: [Support Guide] Form problems, form debugging, 404 when submitting and keep in mind that what follows are just a few ways to do forms on Netlify. There are certainly other ways, and we’d love to hear how else you’re doing custom success pages.
Sample code
If you want to cut to the chase, the code is here and both examples include comments that link out to additional references:
Note that these are bare bones examples of forms that only accept text—not files—so they use the "Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" HTTP request header. This is why they both require a URL encoding function, explained below. These examples don’t implement fancy things like file submissions or reCAPTCHA; the idea was to focus mainly on the custom success page.
Putting the pieces together
At a high level, the pieces you need in order to submit text and then route to a custom success page, regardless of what framework you’re using, are:
- The form body
- The POST request
- The route to the success page
- The success page itself
The form body
- This is covered extensively in the support guide linked above and in our docs.
The POST request
- You need to send specific
Content-Typeheaders that differ depending on what kind of content users are submitting in your form. These are described in the [Common Issue] above. - You need to encode the form! This snags many a Netlify form builder. In the examples above, you’ll see two slightly different encoding functions that do the same thing: they take in your form data and encode it as a URL.
The route to the success page
- In both code examples above, you’ll see that the routing step happens in the
handleSubmitfunction and nowhere else. - The functions themselves differ by framework and static site generator.
- With Nuxt, you can use Vue’s
this.$router.push - With Gatsby, you can use the
navigatehelper function, which uses the Reach Router library under the hood: Reach Router: Next Generation Routing for React - For other stacks, I would start by looking at the docs for the static site generator. You’re looking for programmatic or dynamic routing, and there is usually a concept of “pushing” the new route to your browser’s history. If you don’t find what you need there, it’s time to look to the framework for the idiomatic way to do client-side routing. Remember: if you end up reading docs about server-side routing, stop what you’re doing and slowly back away into the bushes! Netlify (and the JAMStack in general) prerenders your site and serves the site’s static files from a CDN; there is no web server at runtime.
- With Nuxt, you can use Vue’s
The success page itself
- In both Gatsby/React and Nuxt/Vue, this lives in
/pagesalongside your primary “home” page. There are tons of ways to make this page—with or without components, with functional or class components, with or without additional methods or styling. All of that is up to you, but the page itself does need to exist and its name needs to correspond to the route in yourhandleSubmitfunction.
There you have it! A few ways to do forms with custom success pages on Netlify. We know there are many other ways (like adding an action attribute to the <form> tag which is covered in our docs), so let us know below how you’re doing custom success pages for your Gatsby/React and Nuxt/Vue forms.
And as always, if you need help troubleshooting, please create a new post, and we’ll do our best to unstick you.