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The contact form is one of the most important assets of almost any website. As a website owner, you want to provide your users with an easy way to contact you, provide feedback, or submit their information, safely and conveniently. In the past, publishing a personal email address was the main strategy to provide a way to contact the website owner, but that lead to all kinds of issues with spam and phishing emails to the point of people having to abandon their email addresses once and for all.
A contact form is a preferred method of providing a way for users to communicate back to you. Below a are a few tips for building an effective contact form that will help collecting all the necessary data.
Be mindful of the size of your form and keep it organized
The rule of thumb is to keep your form as short as possible, while collecting all the necessary information. For especially complex forms, use a multistep design with separate pages for different sections.
Give people a reason to complete the form
Describe what’s in it for your end user or what action will be taken upon completion of the form. For example, a simple newsletter signup form that serves the purpose of collecting email addresses, consider creating a digital asset to share with all new subscribers, or perhaps offer a discount code to your shop.
Keep forms accessible
The contact form is a web element and like all web elements is needs to be compliant with ADA Accessibility Guidelines, such as keeping the font large enough to be easily readable, keeping contrast ratio of colors sufficient, providing screen reader text, allowing navigation via keyboard only, and others.
Reduce junk emails with a spam captcha
To keep your own sanity, all your forms should be equipped with a spam captcha to reduce bogus submissions as much as possible. Thankfully, the days of old-fashioned graphic captchas that required users to solve complicated puzzles are over, and some modern captchas run in the background and are not visible to the end user.
It’s important to know that the older your form is, the deeper it was indexed by the search engines and the greater number of spam bots will attack it.
Run occasional tests
From time to time, give your form a test and especially if it seems like you unexpectantly started receiving less submissions or they completely stopped. Technology changes all the time and sometimes that might create an issue with email delivery.
In conclusion
Web forms are essential for creating site conversions, collecting data, and providing a communication channel for your users. It’s important to keep the forms in shape and not let them get outdated as this will hurt your business in the long run. Do you need some help with adding or upgrading a form on your website? Use our handy contact form below and one of our support specialists will be in touch shortly!
