The Definitive Guide to Improving WordPress Forms Conversion

Are Your WordPress Forms Converting as Well as They Can Be? Chances Are They’re Not. You Can Do Better!

Your WordPress forms are the best digital communication link you have with your audience. They bring people into your sales funnel and onto your mailing lists, allow guests to register for events, purchase products and services, and perform a litany of other critical functions. Even the humble contact form is essential.

Forms are a foundational part of your WordPress website.

And people walk away from them every day.

You may have noticed discrepancies between people visiting a page and filling out your form. Dropping submissions counts may have caught your attention, and you’re exploring how to turn those around. You may just be wondering why you don’t have more submissions in the first place.

It’s not just you. It’s a universal dilemma, and there is a solution.

This definitive guide to WordPress forms conversion will dive into what makes a high-converting form work. We’d love to share our knowledge and experience with you through our form conversion optimization tips! 😉

Make Your Form Noticeable and Approachable, or Everything Else You Try Will Be a Waste.

Understanding how users interact with your WordPress forms is the first step toward building forms that convert well. Let’s explore the idea of Interaction Cost and shed some light on how a visitor tends to interact with your page on first contact. That moment of first contact is absolutely critical — this brief handful of seconds is when visitors decide whether they’re sticking around or moving on.

Most People Don’t Read. Use That to Get Your Form Noticed!

Your readers probably don’t read. Sounds paradoxical, but it’s true. Only around one in five visitors reads web pages line by line.^[1] Everyone else scans. Understanding how this works means you can take advantage of it.

Eye-tracking studies show that most viewers scan in an F-shaped pattern down the page.^[2] Remember this when building your form and placing it on a page!

Two takeaways here:

1. Place your form somewhere where it will get noticed as a user scans the page.
2. Make the form itself easily scannable. This is easy for short forms, but harder for larger ones. For tips on making larger forms easier, check the next couple of sections!

If You’re Not Considering “Interaction Cost,” You’re Losing Submissions.

In simple terms, interaction cost is the amount of work a visitor has to put into something to get it done. As a guest scans down a page and your form catches their eye, their decision to interact with it or not is affected by how much time they feel they’ll have to put into it.

That being the case, you want to keep the interaction cost as low as possible. Here are the main factors that contribute to or raise cost:^[3]

• Reading
• Scrolling
• Clicking
• Typing
• Memory load ­(how much a user is being asked to remember)

You can’t eliminate all of these. You don’t want to. Just minimize them wherever possible. For instance, keep field labels short and to the point and keep your form clean and scannable. In short, being a minimalist maximizes WordPress forms conversion.

For Forms That Absolutely Must Be Long and Involved, Try These Two Tips to Vastly Improve Conversion.

1. Break your form into parts/pages. Keep the first part short and straightforward, then present the other segments. Once users have begun to invest in the form, they’re more likely to complete it.
2. Allow users to save their progress so that they don’t have to start from scratch when life inevitably interrupts them.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Do These Two Things.

Two prevalent mistakes we see frequently that raise interaction cost and drive away users:

1. Putting field labels in weird places
2. Overusing ghost/placeholder text

Why are these problematic?

Labels should almost always be placed above the field. This approach enables effortless association between field and label, and is much easier for the user to process. See for yourself in these two images^[4]:

Labels above the input fields:

Labels above the input fields:

Labels to the left of the input fields:

When labels are above the fields, the user has to do much less visual processing.

Ghost/placeholder text should also be avoided for the following two reasons:

• When users scan your form, their eyes are drawn more to white space than text. To help your users find the next field quickly, leave fields that still need their attention blank.
• Ghost text disappears as soon as the user starts typing in the field. Whatever you’re trying to communicate with it has to be remembered by the user once it’s gone, raising the interaction cost.

Complexity Kills WordPress Forms Conversion.

Focus and simplicity are key to WordPress forms conversion. The smaller, cleaner, simpler, and faster your form appears to be, the better the form conversion rate you’ll have. There are a few ways to nail this impression, even with longer forms!

How Many Fields Are Too Many?

Three to five fields seem to be the “sweet spot” for successful WordPress form conversion. This concept is supported both by our own experience and industry research.^[5] With fewer than three your users may overlook the fields entirely, and with more than five fields conversion drops steadily field by field.

This doesn’t mean every form should contain three to five fields, but it does establish a baseline rule of thumb. The fewer fields you can get away with, the better.

These Fields Specifically Can Kill Your Conversion Rate.

The fields you use make a much bigger difference than you might expect!

Text area fields, selection boxes, and similar fields require greater interaction than simpler fields. When users see these, their perception of how long the form will take to complete immediately increases.

For example^[5]:

• Conversion rates drop incrementally after three text box fields but remain reasonable until around 8-12.
• Text area fields (those usually accompanied by a rich text editor for larger text submission) plummet after just 2. Conversion drops by 50% from just two to three!
• Drop-down fields fare only slightly better, with a sharp decrease in conversion after the first and a steady decline thereafter.

So ask yourself: if this information has to be collected in this form, can it be collected in a cleaner way, like replacing dropdowns with radio buttons or checkboxes? As importantly, how can a longer form be creatively presented to the user to avoid the intimidation factor of a mile-long form? We mentioned that answer above already, but we’ll hit it again below!

How Can a Longer Form Still Convert Well? These Two Tricks Can Save Your Conversion Rates.

Presentation matters! You want to avoid smacking your user in the face with a mile-long form at first contact at all costs. Sometimes you cannot boil a form down to a small handful of fields. You can still get excellent WordPress forms conversion with longer forms, though with these two tricks:

1. Break your form down into multiple pages. Splitting your form into multiple pages of three to five fields per page avoids the intimidation factor of a long single-page form. It’s much more palatable to make first contact with a four-page form with five fields per page than a single page with 20 fields! Multi-page forms have a 300% higher conversion percentage than long single-page forms!^[6]
2. Hide fields that are not directly relevant to all users. A form logic solution like Conditional Logic allows you to set specific fields to be hidden by default, displaying them only if and when a user needs them.

Who Are You Building Your Forms For? If You Can’t Answer That, You’re Not Going to Convert.

Your form is a stage, and your users’ first glance of what’s on that stage is critical to whether they will sit down and watch the performance or turn around and walk out the door. On average, 99 out of 100 people walk away from a contact form without giving it a second thought.^[7] That’s a terrible metric. What can you do to improve it?

If you are looking to build a successful form, from a three-field contact form to a multi-page masterpiece, you need to know your audience to hook them into sitting down, and then you’ve got to keep them in their seats until the end. Here are three ways to do it.

Who Are You Building For? Get to Know Your Audience!

We reach almost the whole world with the web, and your primary audience is somewhere in that mass of humanity. Connecting with people is much easier when you know something about them.

Tailoring content to the user is a tried and true strategy for major retailers that you can easily implement yourself. So, who are these people and where are they coming from!?

Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for understanding your audience and, in turn, boosting WordPress forms conversion. Know where in the world the majority of your audience visits from, what search or page led them to you, whether they’re a repeat or first-time visitor, see just how many are connecting from mobile or desktop, what operating system and browser they use, and much more.

There are a ton of plugins on WordPress.org that will integrate Google Analytics with your WordPress website. Specifically for tracking forms and boosting WordPress forms conversion via Google Analytics, we strongly recommend IntelligenceWP.

Build for Mobile Devices or You’re Possibly Turning Away Over Half Your Audience.

There is no question that mobile platforms are now a significant part of how your form will be viewed. The number of mobile users online has grown to over 4 billion in 2020, with more than 70% of all web traffic coming from mobile devices. ^[8] Your form must be mobile-friendly, so choosing a forms plugin fully optimized for mobile presentation is a must.

Here are some best practices for online form design targeting mobile devices:

• A form that presents cleanly and crisply in a mobile format will look great on a desktop, too, but not always the other way around.
• Field labels must be at the top of the field, never to the left or right! Your users have limited horizontal screen space, so don’t make them scroll left to right in addition to up and down.
• Dropdowns are evil. Don’t be that guy or gal who makes your users scroll through 100+ fields of a Country drop-down on a mobile screen if you can avoid it.
• Each additional field on a mobile is especially painful. Eliminate nonessentials.

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Yourself!

No one will be excited about filling out something that looks like a government-issued paper form transcribed to the web. Also, it needs to be said that your form is the absolute worst place on your site to use canned stock photos! Just don’t. It kills WordPress form conversions.

You can do a few simple things to give your form a unique personality and help build trust.

Use Company Branding.

This lets the user know they’re in the right place and with the right people and immediately removes any ambiguity for “Did I just click the right link?” and “Is this where I order Product X?” type questions.

Offer Your Contact Information Before They Give You Theirs.

You’re including branding, so back up your brand with contact info. This reassures the user that there is a real company/organization with a traceable address and contact information in case anything goes wrong or doesn’t work out as expected.

Put a Face to the Name.

Imagery that lets the user see the people behind the form will go a long way in making the user feel comfortable. Put a picture of yourself or your team somewhere as a subtle reminder that we’re people too, not just a faceless organization.

Customize Your Form to Your Audience.

If you find that most of your users are from a particular region, consider incorporating art and imagery to make them feel at home. If most users land on your form after searching for musical instruments, customize your form appropriately. Certainly, be careful not to alienate anyone with your selections, but do go out of your way to make as many people feel at home on your page as possible to improve WordPress forms conversion.

People Will Be More Inclined to Give You Info if You Establish Some Level of Trust.

In the eyes of every first-time user, you are an anonymous entity on the internet asking for some degree of personal information. That’s not a comfortable position for many people, and overcoming that innate fear is up to you. Here’s how to do it and boost your WordPress forms conversion!

Changing Your Approach to Forms Can Make a Big Difference.

First off, how do you look at web forms? What’s their purpose?

You want information from your users: access to their inbox, payment info, whatever your goal is. The burden is on you as the form builder to assure them that their trust can be placed in you. Otherwise, you’re not going to convert a contact form… let alone have them send you credit card information!

When making a contact form, don’t try to go all in for as much user info as possible with your form. Instead, look at it as a brief, respectful request for access and gather more information later as it’s needed.

Respectfully requesting access is the key element. It doesn’t matter if your form is convenient to fill out if I can’t rest assured that you won’t spam the daylights out of me if I give you my email address!

Be humble and respectful. Convey humility and respect by demonstrating awareness of potential user concerns and showing that you have already addressed them. Below, we’ll detail some ways to do just that (and some techniques to avoid)!

These Things Make You Look Like a Stalker. Don’t Do Them.

What’s in your form? Unnecessary fields don’t just lower WordPress forms conversion by lowering convenience. Specific fields can put your users’ guard up and turn them away from your form altogether.

What fields are those? Pretty much anything that asks for personal information that isn’t easily seen as directly relevant to the purpose of the form. Some things should never go on a form without reasons that are clear and compelling to the user:

• Phone number (Pro tip: No one wants phone spam from sales reps. Even including this as an optional field looks suspicious, and making it a required field will be a deal breaker for many.)
• Home address
• Gender
• Age/Date of Birth
• Any family or medical information
• Employment or financial information

There are many good reasons that you may ask for any of these. Just make sure that, if necessary, you are transparent about the reasons, and if you don’t need it, don’t ask.

Do You Need a Privacy Statement?

Reassurance in the body of the form that user data will remain private goes a long way in increasing the form conversion rate if you do it the right way. It can also harm you if you don’t. Done right, a privacy statement will boost conversion.

Wording is key! Essentially, you want to reassure the user that their information is private and will not be shared without invoking the specter of spam (I’d like some credit for that phrase if you’re going to steal it for a band name, please). Forms with a privacy statement that specifically mentioned spam lowered conversion by almost 20% over nine days compared to a control.^[9]

Conversely, the phrase “We guarantee 100% privacy. Your information will not be shared” boosted conversion by almost 20% over 12 days compared to a control. The phrase “100% privacy. We keep all your personal information secret” had no statistically significant impact.

If you’re going to include a privacy notice, its purpose is to reassure and comfort. Avoid invoking negative imagery.

Do “Trust Elements” Help or Hurt?

Trust elements are text or images that you can append to your form to boost user confidence that it is secure. A privacy statement is one of them, and like the privacy statement, you have to be careful about how you use them.

Take care not to muddy the waters — remember that you want to keep your form as focused and simple as possible. If you choose to use any of these to increase WordPress forms conversion, use them conservatively and in a way that enhances rather than distracts.

Below are some common trust elements used to boost WordPress forms conversion.

Security Emblems

Industry research indicates that these increase the form conversion rate on sales forms, but may lower conversion on other forms.^[10] [11]

Reviews

Having positive feedback from satisfied customers near the form can help sway uncertain users. Reviews from well-known and/or verifiable sources are best. An excerpt from a linkable blog post or someone tweeting about your product is better than a semi-anonymous webpage comment, and it coming from someone well-known generally or in your users’ community is even better.

Client Recognition

If your product or service has been adopted by clients that your target audience is familiar with and respects, giving them some form of recognition on or around your form can bolster user trust.

Buzz

If you have been featured in any form of media, you might consider including brief mentions of that coverage around your form to reassure users that you are an established business.

Build a Form Users WANT to Submit. Be Compelling

One of the best practices for form design is to make your form as attractive as possible. Take advantage of your form builder’s rich text editor to:

• Catch their attention.
• Reinforce the reason they’re here.
• Reassure them that they’re in the right place.
• Call them to action.
• Offer incentives for getting involved.

What does this look like in practice? The following example text snippets could very easily be placed into an HTML field and styled:

Download [offer] Here!

Downloading [offer] now and get FREE access to our ezine with regular updates on all the best new equipment and tips from the pros!  Don’t wait!

---

Register for [event] Here and Reserve your Seat Now!

Signing up now will ensure you have riverside seating and your name will be entered in our after-dinner raffle!

---

Contact Us for Fast, Friendly Support!

We believe we offer the best product possible and stand behind that belief 100%. Expect to hear back from a representative within 24 hours!

---

Call the user to action and motivate them to fill out your form in a way that offers clear value in exchange for their time. Apply these factors to your own forms, and you will see WordPress form conversion improve!

Lose the Submit Button. Seriously.

There’s a lot that could be said about people and commitment issues, and we’ll leave the majority of that to the psychologists. Believe it or not, elements of that bit of human nature are involved in WordPress forms conversion. There’s a fair amount of research supporting differences in conversion rates being influenced by the language of the submit button, and words associated with commitment fare worse than more non-committal words.

For example, ‘Click Here’ and ‘GO’ both fare better than Submit and Register in A/B comparison testing.^[12] The same research shows that Download is also a poor choice, possibly because it invokes images of popups and malware.

Use the submit button as a call to action. If you’re offering a lead magnet like a free PDF or coupon code, incentivize it here. “Get my 10% discount code” sounds much better than “Submit,” now doesn’t it?

 

Follow These Strategies and You Will See Your WordPress Forms Conversion Grow

Few things can be as irritating as trying to understand why people are not engaging with you. Your product or service might be perfect, your website might be gorgeous, and people still might not reach out or interact.

It’s a big internet out there. A whole lot is competing for the attention of the people you’re trying to reach. They have things to do and people to see, and you’re just a tiny fraction of their day, most likely. Using the tips above, you can craft forms that will occupy that niche, fraction or no.

Bring these tips to life on your website — get the free Ninja Forms plugin, browse some of our form templates, and start increasing your WordPress forms conversion rate! We’d love your feedback on this guide in the comments below. Do you have different strategies that work well for you?

1. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/
2. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/
3. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/interaction-cost-definition/
4. http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.php
5. http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6746/Which-Types-of-Form-Fields-Lower-Landing-Page-Conversions.aspx
6. http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/form-conversion-rates-whats-working-52448/
7. http://contentverve.com/sign-up-privacy-policy-tests/
8. http://www.conversioniq.com/norton-security-seal-increases-ecommerce-conversion-rate-case-study
9. http://unbounce.com/a-b-testing/shocking-results/
10. http://www.quicksprout.com/2013/01/31/how-to-optimize-contact-forms-for-conversions/