Best Practices for Designing Forms on your Website

Best Practices for Designing Forms on your Website

Building efficient forms can help grow your business online by connecting to your website visitors and getting them the information they need. Collecting information on your website from users is the key component to any website design and development strategy. A local or global search engine optimization company will tell you the same thing, we live in a digital world where not everyone wants to pick up the phone and call, they want answers, and they want them fast. Providing multiple contact options ensures that they have the opportunity to engage; this gives you the opportunity to sell!

Forms on your website should be designed with specific goals in mind. Are you trying to collect qualified leads? Job applications? Contact information? Comments/Questions? All of these questions can be answered and collected directly on your website. By wrapping these best from practices into your website design and development you can make your website a lead generation engine. Read on to learn about some of the best practices to follow for designing forms on your website:

1. Make clear required and optional fields

Filling out an online form on your website should be clear and concise. It’s important to get the required information you need in the first try. By setting these up-the user is unable to submit the form until they fill out all required fields. Your website design and development company can help you decipher which fields should be required.

2. What’s the reason?

Contact forms should not be the only type of form on your website. Expand your user involvement by creating forms that must be filled out in order for a user to download your latest whitepaper, webinar, newsletter, etc. By having this type of contact form, you qualify which of our website visitors seek more information. Have a clear call to action (CTA) for someone to want to download a certain resource. SEO content writing experts emphasize the importance of implementing call to actions in their writing all the time, so utilize this strategy!

3. Connect to a CRM tool

Having different forms on your website to collect data is part of any business process. Data collected by these forms can include:

  • Emails for a mailing list
  • Potential lead contact information
  • Collecting Job Applications
  • Receiving questions/comments on your products and services

An easy way to collect this data is by connecting these forms to a CRM tool. A CRM tool stores and files all of these form fields in order for you to go back and sort the information you want to see. By having one platform to collect this information you can organize potential leads, job applications, and compile a list for your email blasts and newsletters.

For more information on how to build and optimize your website forms or how to market your business overall, you can contact a global and local SEO company, Kirk Communications at
603-766-4945.