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Why Your Formidable Forms Dropdown Field Won't Stay Unselected (And How to Fix It)

29 threads Sep 16, 2025

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Have you ever carefully configured a dropdown field in your Formidable Forms form to have no default selection, only to find the first option mysteriously re-selected the next time you check? This common issue can be frustrating, as it may allow users to bypass a required question. This guide will explain the most likely cause and walk you through the steps to resolve it.

Why This Happens

Based on common support scenarios for the Formidable Forms plugin, this specific behavior—where a saved change to a field's default selection does not persist—is often not a bug in the form builder itself. The most frequent culprit is a caching mechanism on your WordPress site.

Caching plugins and server-level caching are designed to improve site performance by storing static versions of your pages. However, they can sometimes serve an outdated version of your form's configuration instead of loading the freshly saved data from the database. This creates the illusion that your changes were not saved when, in fact, they are being hidden by the cache.

How to Troubleshoot and Fix the Issue

Follow these steps to identify and resolve the caching conflict.

Step 1: Clear All Caches

Start by clearing the cache in any caching or performance plugins you have active (e.g., WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache). Also, clear any server-level cache if you have access to it (e.g., through your hosting provider's control panel like cPanel). After clearing, revisit your form editor to see if the change is now correctly displayed.

Step 2: Disable Caching Plugins Temporarily

If clearing the cache doesn't work, the next step is to perform a conflict test. Temporarily deactivate all caching and optimization plugins on your site. Then, go back to your form, re-save the dropdown field with no default selection, and check if it now saves correctly.

Note: Remember that disabling caching plugins will affect your site's performance. This is only a temporary test to identify the issue. You will reactivate them later.

Step 3: Reactivate and Reconfigure

If the problem is resolved with caching plugins off, you have confirmed the source of the issue. Reactivate your caching plugins one by one, testing the form after each activation to see which one causes the problem. You may need to adjust the settings of that specific plugin to exclude your form editor pages or form display pages from being cached.

What If It's Not Caching?

If the problem persists even after disabling all caching, a less common possibility is a conflict with another plugin or your theme. To test for this, follow a general conflict resolution procedure:

  1. Temporarily switch to a default WordPress theme (like Twenty Twenty-Four).
  2. Deactivate all plugins except Formidable Forms.
  3. If the field now saves correctly, reactivate your plugins one by one to identify which one is causing the conflict.

By systematically testing for caching and conflicts, you can almost always identify the reason a dropdown field refuses to stay unselected and restore the intended functionality to your forms.

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