Alun says: “My number one tip for 2026 is that there is no point in perfecting your SEO if people are getting to your site and seeing a horrible form that causes them to drop out.

Make sure you're spending time understanding your form, and identifying issues that are causing abandonment.”

What are the typical differences between a well-converting form and a poorly converting form?

“Typical ones are: number one, it's broken, technically. That's an issue. That happens more than you'd expect. Number two is probably you're asking people questions that they don't want to answer, and they feel are irrelevant.

For example, I'm sure you've been on a form, and they've asked you for a phone number, and you're like, ‘Why are you asking for my phone number? I'm just ordering something online. I do not want to get spammed.’ Therefore, people get annoyed, get suspicious, and drop out.

That's number two – as well as some general user experience problems where you've just designed the form badly or executed it badly, and enough people get annoyed that they leave. So, you're just leaving money on the table. You're wasting money.”

We'll try and come to all of those areas in slightly greater depth there.

You started off by talking about the form being broken. Now, I have often set up a form using a WordPress plugin on a WordPress website. Is that a common way to do it, and what are the issues that tend to be the case when something is broken?

“When something's broken, either it's something technically you're unaware of, or typically it's the submit button. It is not working. Actually, sometimes, it's that people perceive it to be broken, even if you wouldn't think it was broken. Typically, that's because your error messages are not showing.

I'm sure you've been on a form, you get to the bottom, you click ‘submit’, and it doesn't work. Eventually, you work it out. You scroll three pages to the top, and it gives you a list of five error messages. You're like, ‘Oh, that's the problem there.’

Your designer might not think that's broken, but to the user, it does feel broken. So, there'll be a non-zero number of people who just think, ‘Ah, forget this,’ and leave.”

How do you know what a good conversion rate is for forms? Obviously, depending on the number of fields that you have and the audience that you have, it may differ wildly.

“Absolutely. On our website, we've got benchmarks for different form types and different industries. However, as you've correctly alluded to, you've got to be very careful because, really, the only benchmark you should be looking at is against your own benchmark.

Look at what you did last month, and is it better than what you did last month? You can go into a black hole of what's a good conversion rate, but the reality is that every form is different. So, what you really need to be doing is just judging yourself against how you performed the month before.”

It would be good to get your thoughts on what you feel is necessary in terms of fields for different situations, because obviously, if someone's signing up to an email newsletter, then perhaps you just need a first name and email address, or even just an email address.

If someone's signing up for a product trial, then perhaps you need to capture more information, maybe a work email address, perhaps even a physical address as well.

Starting off with the email newsletter, do you think it's always necessary to capture the first name as well as the email and another field as well?

“The general rule of thumb (and also the legal rule of thumb, if you look at GDPR) is only collect the amount of information that you need and no more.

Now, people like to have the name because it helps them mail merge, and that’s kind of okay. Most people don't object to that, but equally, if it’s an email newsletter and you just want to keep it simple, I'd advise just asking for the email address. Get people to sign up. That's the quickest way to do it.

Generally, as you have a more complex form, you do need to ask for more things, but you just need to be careful about why you're asking for them. Too often, we see forms where the marketing department or the compliance department is asking for all sorts of things.

Before you know it, you've got a Frankenstein's Monster of a form. You're asking people what their hobbies are and when their insurance expires, and you're just going to lose customers there. You just have to always take it back to the customer: What do they expect to have to answer in return for what you're giving them?

No one likes filling out forms. People don't do it for a hobby. They do it because it's a necessary chore to get to what you are offering them.”

In your experience with signing up to receive an email newsletter, is there any noticeable conversion rate reduction when you ask for a first name as well as an email address?

“At that level, no, we've not seen it, because people expect it. The expectation is that it's not unreasonable.

To give an example I alluded to earlier on, if you were to then ask for a phone number as well, you would see a massive drop-off because people will be like, ‘I don't expect to give my phone number to sign up for an email newsletter. I'm okay giving my name, but not a phone number – not to you – because there's no explanation.’

It's all about what is relevant for that particular form.”

What about for a SaaS website? If someone's signing up for a software trial, is it expected and reasonable to ask for a phone number and many other fields in that situation?

“Nowadays, not really. You will get people dropping out because of it.

Again, with anything digital, we see that, apart from the password field, the phone number field is the most common reason that people drop off, because they just hate giving it out. If you're asking for it, even in a B2B context, people just don't want to do it. They want to give you the minimum level, and usually that’s just an email address. You might need to set up a password in certain cases, or you can sign up with Google.

It's just about minimising the friction, because otherwise, the more you add into it, the more chance you've got of annoying someone and getting them to drop out.”

I was interested that you started off the previous sentence with ‘apart from the password field’.

Does this mean that if you're signing someone up to use a platform and you ask them to select a password, you'll have a lower conversion rate than if you generate a password for them and make them aware of it after they've automatically signed in?

“Yes, potentially. The password field can trip people up. It's got about a 10% abandonment rate on average, for various reasons.

Often, it's not executed very well. I'm sure you've been asked to create a password, you put one in, and only then does it tell you, ‘Oh, well, you need a special character, a capital letter, minimum 10 characters…’ and you've not told people at the start. Or it's hidden behind a mask, so you can't see what you're putting in, and you're being asked to confirm it.

Eventually, people get annoyed and drop out, and people end up forgetting it anyway. It's one of the bigger points of friction that you will see on any form. Obviously, a lot of forms don't ask for it, but SaaS products, as you say, typically do. That's why you will see more and more offering ‘Sign up with Facebook’, ‘Sign up with Google’, etc., because it cuts that out. It's just one click, and you're done.”

When you talk about form analytics, what are you referring to within that?

Are you talking about just looking at the back end of the form to see what's happened? Are you saying to set up some kind of goals in GA4 or something else?

“Yeah, so there are different ways you can do it. You can set up a specialist product like Zuko Analytics, which will basically track the form behaviour and give you all the insights and analytics of where people are dropping off, and give you ideas as to why they're dropping off.

You can try and use Google Analytics. It's not designed for forms specifically, but there are aspects you can do.

Essentially, as long as you've got something that tells you, as a starting point, where your biggest drop-offs are, that gives you a place where you can start generating hypotheses – e.g. that people are dropping off on the phone number because they don't want to give it. So, for example, let's test if we make the phone number optional, does that have an impact on completion rates?”

Okay, brilliant, so doing split testing on forms seems like a wonderful idea.

“Yeah, no, definitely. We see that all the time.

Again, as with any aspect of a website, split testing just allows you to see whether the changes you make are meaningful or not.”

Is there any way that you can acquire all the data that you require without having a form at all, or perhaps automatically populate the form with the data somehow?

“It depends, but yes, you'll obviously see Google, Amazon, etc. If you're storing your details somewhere else that's trusted, that's a way to cut out the friction for something simple, like a simple signup.

Obviously, if you're applying for something like a mortgage, a lot of financial services companies use analytics because they have to ask a lot of questions, and you can't just take that from somewhere else.

If you're asking for someone's income, if you're asking for sensitive information about the family, etc., you need to be able to ask that, and you need to be able to ask it in a way that doesn't unnecessarily put them off.”

I'm just thinking about what you offer within Zuko Analytics as well, and obviously, you integrate with many different platforms.

Do you have a preferred form provider that you feel, out of the box, simply gives a slightly better conversion rate?

“In terms of the out-of-the-box stuff, HubSpot Forms does quite well, as does JotForm. We kind of like those ones.

However, what none of the out-of-the-box ones do is really give you control over your error messages and validation. You've got to live within the rules that they give you, which isn't necessarily right.

We see that most of our customers actually have built their own forms because they have specific needs. They might be financial services, so they need to build their validation in a certain way.

Typically, if you can build a form yourself within UX design principles that will mean people don't drop out, we'd go for that. However, if you just need a quick lead gen form, potentially something like HubSpot or JotForm will enable you to give a relatively frictionless form that's fairly standardised.”

Should many websites have hundreds of different forms on their website, or are you generally better off having a fairly singular call to action and driving people towards that?

“Typically, we find that call to action depends on the sector.

For example, going back to SaaS, you might have a contact us form, a demo form, or a signup form – and that's pretty much as far as you could go. If you're a bank, you might have 20 different forms because you've got 20 different products, which may be similar, but will ask subtly different questions.

Generally, it depends on your purpose. If you're looking at a call to action on the website, you probably only want to go for one

Again, with SaaS, you probably just want to drive people to your signup form or to your demo form, depending on which is better for you, and then just allow them to find things like contact forms more organically.”

What are the typical biggest UX mistakes that you see with form design?

“The biggest UX mistakes: number one is probably dropdowns – particularly on mobile.

You might have a dropdown which has got 200 options, and it's not searchable. That's obviously one where, if you watch people do it, they get so frustrated going up and down, etc. You’re scrolling to the top, then scrolling to the bottom. That's a simple one that can be mitigated. If you have a search, just add a searchable dropdown, or don’t use dropdowns at all.

We see people try to use dropdowns for like five options. You don't need that. You could have radio buttons where you just select which one's most appropriate. In, say, the mobile environment, that's just one tap and people are done.

Another common one is just around error messages, which I touched on before. It's validating them at the right time. You can either be too early or too late with error messages. Sometimes you try to type your email address into a form, and it tells you, ‘Oh, it's wrong,’ and you're like, ‘I'm not finished yet. Come on, give me a chance!’ which is annoying. Equally, you get one where they don't validate it until right at the end, and it gives you a message right at the top, and you can't find it, which I talked about before.

The best time to validate an error message is when someone's typed in their answer and moved on to the next field. Then, if you immediately tell them whether it’s right or wrong, they've got the feedback immediately, and they can make a change straight away rather than wait.

Next time you look at a form, you might actually notice if someone does that well, which normally you don't necessarily think about.”

I noticed that you've got a chatbot on your website. Do you try to get people engaged, to begin with, through a chatbot and then perhaps ask for someone's details after that? Does that make it more likely to get their details?

“Well, the chatbot is primarily to give them a simple way to contact us. They could email us, but it's just another route to us.

Obviously, yes, it does warm it up, because the biggest issue with forms is getting those personal details. People don't like giving them to you; therefore, (for us anyway) it's a message of answering questions before people have to commit.

They don't have to tell us who they are. They can ask the questions, hopefully we'll answer them, and get them to a place where they're happier to sign up to either a demo or a trial.”

Does having good form conversion rates assist with SEO?

“I'm not an SEO expert in that sense, but technically probably not. However, it does amplify your SEO.

What we find is, consistently, when we look at conversion rates, we see that organic traffic in general converts better than paid traffic. So, obviously, if you can make the organic traffic even more efficient by improving the completion rate of your forms – making no avoidable errors which are causing people to drop out – and you pull that lever, you're going to get more out of your SEO.

But I couldn't necessarily say that it would technically make your SEO better and you'd get better rankings from having a good form, just purely by making a couple of changes.”

Alun, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“My key takeaway is: don't chase around the margins for certain activities when you've got a big lever you could be pulling.

That lever, essentially, is taking a look at your form and seeing if you are losing people unnecessarily and leaving money on the table.”

Alun Lucas is Managing Director at Zuko Analytics. Find out more over at Zuko.io.