Proper web design for forms is essential for getting the most out of your website. Placing forms on your website will allow potential customers to easily get in touch with your company and streamline your lead generation efforts. However, just placing forms on your website for the sake of doing so will not get your business the results you're after.
When it comes to web design for forms, you must take into account best practices and the user experience. In this post, we’ve highlighted 5 tips to help you design high converting forms for your website. These best practices are simple to implement and will ensure your website generates as many leads as possible.
Keep Form Fields to a Minimum
It’s a well-known fact in the web design industry: more form fields are directly correlated with lower conversion rates. People are busy, and they don’t want to spend too much time filling out forms. Also, with online privacy at the forefront of consumers' minds today, they are warier than ever of handing over personal information to businesses.
To maximize the number of form submissions your company will receive, we recommend only asking for the information you absolutely need from a prospect at that stage in the buyer's journey.
For example, let’s say you are using a piece of content such as an ebook to generate leads. We would recommend only asking for their name and email address in exchange for a free download. This will give you enough information to ensure you can still move them down your sales funnel while still encouraging many downloads.
Place Forms Strategically Throughout Your Website
Placing forms in as many places as you can on your website will not lead to more conversions. In fact, it will lead to a bad user experience and likely annoy your website visitors.
To get the most out of the forms on your website, you need to place them in strategic places. For us at Inbound Web Development, this always means placing forms on pages of your website where someone visiting shows a heavy interest in doing business with you.
Service or product pages are great places to start so you can encourage an impulse form submission. Homepage forms also work well, as sometimes someone just quickly pulls up your website looking to get in contact with you.
Clearly Label Required Form Fields
A simple web design for forms best practice is to always mark what form fields are required. Nothing will annoy your website visitors more than not labeling what fields are required on your form. This will leave them frustrated and less likely to convert since they will be annoyed that they have to go back and refill the form when they thought they had completed it.
Labeling what fields are required will help boost conversions. People will see that they don’t have to offer all their information or spend as much time filling out the form, leading to more people actually doing so.
Write Helpful Form Hints
Form hints are the placeholder text you often see in a form field before you click into it. While they can help encourage conversions by clarifying the information needed or explaining why it’s necessary, it’s also a subtle way for your brand identity to shine through.
We’ve seen brands write funny form hints that encourage people to keep going once they’ve started filling out a form –as if they’re running a race. Other brands have taken the opportunity to address data privacy head on and state why they need the information being asked for and what they do with it.
Depending on your brand’s personality or industry, using form hints can help you increase your conversion rates and make a positive impression on consumers.
Ensure Forms are Mobile Responsive
We can’t tell you how many times we’ve been browsing a website on our phones looking to get in touch with a business, only to discover their forms are not optimized for mobile.
Web design for forms follows many other web design best practices. Your forms must always take into account the user experience. On mobile devices, your form fields must be big enough so people can easily click into a field and type the information you’re asking for. They must also be able to clearly see what they’ve written once they complete.
Tips for optimizing web design forms for mobile include only putting one field per line and don't split them into two, ensuring they take up almost the full width of the screen, and actively resize to the size of the screen they are on so every user is able to fill them out easily.
Conclusion
Web design for forms does not need to be extremely complicated. The five tips outlined in this post are easy to implement and will help boost your conversion rates. While optimizing your forms is a relatively simple task, we recommend prioritizing this on your to-do list. Because the more leads your website is able to generate, the more likely your company will be successful.
