Activate your Pro licence
If you're on the free plugin, skip this page — there's no licence to activate. This page covers turning on a Pro licence, and — more important — exactly what happens if it lapses, because the effect is more severe than "some features turn off."
Activate your licence
- After you activate the Pro plugin, WordPress shows the Freemius licence-activation screen.
- Enter the licence key from your purchase receipt or your account at freemius.com, then confirm it.
Once activated, SurveyX adds an Account item to its admin menu, where you can see your plan and licence status at any time.
What happens when your licence expires or is deactivated
When a Pro licence expires or is deactivated, every survey that uses a Pro feature stops being shown to visitors: its shortcode renders nothing, its own page returns 404, and the endpoint that loads it for a respondent answers with no content.
Surveys that stay inside the free feature set keep running — one question, using one of the seven free question types. Nothing is deleted either way: every survey, response and setting is still there, and renewing brings the blocked ones straight back.
SurveyX tells you this has happened. While the licence is inactive, its admin screens carry a warning naming how many surveys are affected, with a button through to your licence:
SurveyX Pro: Your licence is not active, so 3 surveys that use Pro features are no longer shown to visitors. Renew or reactivate your licence to bring them back.
Which surveys keep working
The check runs per survey, against the same rule that decides whether a survey needs Pro at all:
| The survey | While the licence is inactive |
|---|---|
| One question, one of the seven free question types | Keeps working |
| More than one question | Not shown |
| Any question of a Pro type — rating, opinion scale, date, contact info, file upload, matrix | Not shown |
A survey created before this rule existed is classified when it is asked for, not from a stale stamp, so an older survey is judged on what it actually contains.
Why the editor keeps working
The licence is checked only on the paths a respondent uses, never in the admin. You can keep creating surveys, editing questions and changing settings on an expired licence exactly as you could with an active one — the blocked ones simply are not shown to anyone until it is active again. That is also why the warning above exists: without it, the dashboard would look perfectly healthy while visitors were being turned away.
Renewing or reactivating
Whatever caused the gate — an expired subscription, a manually deactivated licence, or moving your licence to a different site — reversing it brings every survey back immediately. Nothing needs republishing, resaving, or reactivating survey by survey.
If you need a survey running before you can renew
Deactivate the Pro plugin and activate the free plugin (see Install SurveyX Builder). Free renders a survey only if it has exactly one question, using one of the 7 free question types. A survey that has more than one question, or that uses a Pro-only question type, stays unavailable on free too, even temporarily — switching editions doesn't change what a survey contains, only which edition is allowed to show it.