Migrating From Legacy PayPal Add-Ons to the PayPal Checkout Add-On

Overview

The PayPal Payments Standard, PayPal Payments Pro, and PayPal Pro add-ons for Gravity Forms are legacy add-ons that rely on deprecated PayPal APIs. While they may continue to function for now, PayPal no longer develops or maintains the APIs that these add-ons use.

We strongly recommend migrating your forms to the PayPal Checkout Add-On, which uses PayPal’s modern, actively supported API.

Note: Continuing to use these legacy PayPal Add-Ons may result in payment failures or disruptions due to API-level changes outside of Gravity Forms’ control.

This guide walks you through the migration process in a clear, step-by-step order. Not all legacy PayPal add-ons require the same changes.

By the end of this guide, you will have:

  • Decided whether to duplicate your form or edit it in place.
  • Installed and connected the PayPal Checkout Add-On.
  • Updated any legacy payment fields, if required.
  • Created a new PayPal Checkout payment feed.
  • Double checked your Email notifications event setting.
  • Tested your form before going live.
  • Disabled or removed the legacy PayPal add-on.

Step 1: Decide Whether to Duplicate or Edit Your Form

Before making any changes, choose how you want to approach the migration.

Option A: Duplicate Your Form

Duplicating your form allows you to make all changes safely without impacting your existing data or live submissions, therefore we recommend proceeding this way.

To duplicate

  1. Go to Forms → Forms.
  2. Hover over the form using the legacy PayPal add-on and click Duplicate.
  3. Rename it (for example, Payment Form – PayPal Checkout).

Option B: Edit Your Existing Form

If you prefer to keep all sales data within a single form, you can edit the existing form directly. This can impact your entries and live submissions (e.g. missing payments while you are changing the form and feeds), so if you decide to go this route it’s recommended to test your modifications on a staging clone first.

Note: When you delete a field, all data previously captured for that field is also deleted from existing entries. Export entries before editing if you want to preserve historical payment-field data.

Step 2: Install and Connect the PayPal Checkout Add-On

Install the PayPal Checkout Add-On.

  1. Go to Forms → Add-Ons.
  2. Locate PayPal Checkout and click Install
  3. Click Activate

Connect the Account.

  1. Go to Forms → Settings → PayPal Checkout.
  2. Select the Environment mode, Sandbox is recommended for testing.
    Note that PayPal requires the use of Sandbox accounts for this mode, these can be created from a free PayPal Developer account by going to the Testing Tools > Sandbox Accounts menu.
  3. Click Connect Account. This will open the PayPal site popup.
  4. Follow the prompts from PayPal to authorize and link your account.
  5. Once the popup process is finished and you are back to your site. Verify the connection shows as “Connected.”

Step 3: Replace the Legacy Credit Card Field (If Applicable) and remove legacy feeds

Depending on which legacy PayPal add-on you used, your form may contain a field that is no longer supported or needed. You also need to delete old feeds if you are editing an existing form.

PayPal Pro or PayPal Payments Pro Migration

These add-ons used the Credit Card field to collect card data on-site, which is deprecated. The PayPal Checkout Add-On uses PayPal’s secure checkout experience and Smart Payment Buttons to handle card entry and other payment methods.

  1. In your form, delete the existing Credit Card field.
  2. Add the PayPal field to the form.
  3. Save your form.

Finally, if you are editing your live form, delete the PayPal Pro or PayPal Payments Pro feeds your form may be using.

PayPal Standard Migration

PayPal Standard forms use only Product fields, and these fields continue to work with PayPal Checkout and do not need to be replaced.

The PayPal Standard Add-On does use feeds, and even though no form fields need to be removed, you will still need to add the PayPal field, create a new PayPal Checkout feed and remove the existing PayPal Standard feeds.

Creating the new PayPal Checkout feed is covered in Step 5.

Note: In all cases the new PayPal field must be added to the form before you can create a new feed (step 5).

Step 4: Review Product and Pricing Fields

All of your existing Product and pricing configurations should remain intact and continue to function correctly after switching to the PayPal Checkout Add-On. This add-on automatically recognize and use existing Product, Option, Quantity, Shipping, and Total fields without requiring you to recreate or remap them.

However, it is recommended that you still check that.

  • Product fields are still correctly configured.
  • Prices and options display correctly.
  • Conditional logic still behaves as expected.

Step 5: Create a New Payment Feed

Like the legacy PayPal add-ons, the PayPal Checkout Add-On also requires a feed to handle payment processing.

  1. Go to Form Settings → PayPal Checkout.
  2. Click Add New.
  3. Choose a transaction type (Products and Services or Subscription).
  4. Map any relevant fields (for example, Email, Name, Billing Address).
  5. Save your feed.

You can check our PayPal Checkout feed settings documentation if you need clarifications about any feed setting.

Step 6: Double check your Email notifications event setting

As you may know, by default email Notifications added to a form use the “Form is submitted” event. When using payment add-ons, you may want to trigger notifications only when the payment or subscription is completed.

This can be done easily for forms with an active payment feed by using the Event setting in your notifications.

In most cases, you will want to use at least one of the following events:

  • Payment Completed. This event is used for Product and Services feed, and ensures the notification is triggered only when PayPal informs your site the payment was successfully completed.
  • Subscription Created. Similar to the previous one, this event will make the notification to be triggered only when PayPal informs your site the subscription was successfully created.

For more information about other events available and their purpose you can check our Notifications Events guide.

Step 7: Test Your Form

Before going live. Submit test entries using Sandbox Mode and confirm that:

  1. Totals calculate correctly
  2. Transactions complete successfully
  3. Notifications using payment events are triggered as expected

Step 8: Go Live

When everything looks good and the testing is complete, be sure that:

  • If you duplicated the form, you replace the original shortcode or block with the new one wherever it’s embedded.
  • You need to switch from Sandbox to Live Mode in the add-on settings to begin processing live transactions.

Note: If you edited the existing form, no embed changes are required.

Step 9: Deactivate & Remove the Legacy PayPal Add-Ons

After your new payment add-on is configured, disable or delete the old PayPal add-on feeds.

Once all of your forms have been successfully migrated to PayPal Checkout Add-On, we recommend that you also deactivate and delete the PayPal add-ons from your site:

  • Deactivate the legacy PayPal add-on in use from Plugins → Installed Plugins.
  • Delete it from your site to avoid running deprecated code.