You do everything you can to build a website that will lead visitors to conversion. As you study the analytics, you’re excited to see that the user journey you’ve created is being taken by those visitors, time and time again. However, there’s something keeping them from converting. Find out what it is in this advanced contact forms guide.
The contact form is a critical part of your visitors’ journey.
Even if you’ve effectively sold them on whatever the website has to offer, a contact form could realistically ruin the experience for them if not executed well.
Broken buttons, confusing fields, too many steps, a disorganized interface… Heck, even the placement of the contact form could disrupt the user experience.
There’s a lot that can go wrong, and in this article we’ll be doing our best to educate you on how you can avoid these things.
More specifically we’re giving you our…
6 Rules For Building the Perfect Contact Form
But hold on, quick PSA first…
Before we go any further, you should know this is an advanced look into the world of WordPress contact forms.
If you want a simple introduction, our getting started with contact forms post is a great place to start.
Then, once you know you need to create more contact forms for your site, the next step is choosing the right contact form plugin to make life easier.
Once you’ve done those things we reckon you’ll be ready and primed for the advanced in-form-ation (heh) that follows.
Moving on…
User logins. Membership sign-ups. Email subscriptions. Quote requests. Questionnaires. Support requests. Order and payment forms.
There are a bunch of different ways to use contact forms on a WordPress site. What doesn’t change, however, are the rules you must abide by if you want the contact form to perform well.
A Google eye-tracking study published in 2014 showed that following the most basic usability guidelines for form design will significantly improve the user experience.
Specifically, when a contact form abides by all the rules, 78% of users can complete and submit them in a single try. When a contact form violates those rules, however, only 42% are able to do it in one attempt.
Curious to know what those rules are? Then keep reading.
Rule #1: Focus on Alignment
As you’ll see in some of the other rules here, people are often concerned with the length of contact forms, which is what often leads to bad design choices.
Take the matter of alignment, for instance.
You might see a form like this one on the BrainTraffic website and think, “Hmmm… but isn’t that a little too long to fill out?”
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This article was written by Suzanne Scacca and originally published on WPMU DEV Blog.