Designing effective forms is essential to increasing user experience, generating leads, and promoting conversions. You have all the resources you need to design forms that are easy to use, visually appealing, and functional with Happyforms and The Theme Foundry. To assist you in creating polished, business-like forms for your WordPress website, we’ll go over five best practices for developing forms with Happyforms together with The Theme Foundry in this blog post.
Best Practices make forms Perfect!
Keeping it Simple and Straightforward
The easiest forms for users to complete are the finest ones. Form completion rates rise when forms are simple to use and guarantee that users are not overwhelmed.
Limit Form Fields: To save labor and user fatigue, only ask for the information that is necessary.
Organize Logically: To establish a smooth flow, group related fields together.
Use Clear Labels: Users will be able to understand exactly what information is needed.
Match with the Site’s Theme
A well-designed form should fit in with the overall layout of your website, giving visitors a unified and consistent visual experience.
Color Coordination: Coordinate the form’s color scheme with The Theme Foundry’s primary and secondary colors.
Button Styling: Customize your submit buttons to stand out while maintaining consistency with the overall design.
Padding and Spacing: Use ample white space between fields.
Add a Clear Call-to-Action
The submit button on your form should clearly communicate what the user is doing.
Use action-driven Text: Put some useful words on the button, such “Get Started” or “Submit Request.”
Make the Submit Button Stand Out: Use a color that complements the theme of your website but contrasts with the rest of your form.
Minimize Required Fields
Requiring too much information might be burdensome and decrease the number of forms submitted.
Only ask Essential Information: Keep the number of essential fields to a minimum.
Include Tooltips: Give consumers information in fields where they might require it.
Testing Before Launching
It’s crucial to test your form before it goes live to make sure it looks fantastic and works as intended.
Cross-browser Testing: Examine the behavior of your form in various browsers.
Functionality Test: Make sure all fields and buttons work as expected.
Form Submission Test: Make that form submissions are emailed, stored, and integrated with your CRM appropriately.
Let’s Wrap Up
These practices can assist you in creating forms that improve user experience, guarantee accessibility, and blend in with the aesthetics of your website. Reduce the number of needed fields, include a call to action, keep things simple, make sure the design is consistent, and test everything before releasing it.
Try Building with Happyforms Today!
Download Happyforms plugin for free and create effective, user-friendly forms for your website in a matter of minutes. Happyforms will improve your WordPress experience, whether you’re handling surveys, generating custom forms, or gathering leads!
Start designing effective, user-friendly forms for WordPress using Happyforms, an effective and user-friendly form builder. Explore features that boost functionality and elevate the user experience overall to get the most out of the plugin. These five essential tips will help your forms stand out.
Come and let us learn these tricks!
Minimalist Forms Using the Show/Hide Field Label Feature
Happyforms’ “show and hide labels” function lets you construct minimalist forms by hiding labels that aren’t necessary.
How to Use: When field labels are self-explanatory or user guidance can be obtained from placeholders inside the fields, hide the field labels. This keeps your form clear and organized.
Why It Works: Reducing visual distractions helps consumers concentrate on filling out the form. Additionally, minimalist forms often load quicker and have a more professional appearance.
Utilize Conditional Logic
By using this technique, you may display users with just the fields that are essential depending on their responses, avoiding overwhelming them with too many options.
How to Use: Establish conditions so that some fields only show up when a particular response is chosen. For example, if the user selects “shipping required,” then the shipment information inquiry should only come up.
Why It Works: Because conditional logic makes the form appear more individualized and shorter, it lowers form abandonment. Additionally, it increases the accuracy and general efficiency of data collection.
Multi-Step Forms for Longer Forms
Long forms are divided into digestible pieces by multi-step forms, which walk users through the process step-by-step and reduce the sense of overwhelm.
How to Use: Using the page break field, divide your form into several pages or sections, with each one concentrating on a certain type of question, like payment information, preferences, or personal details.
Why It Works: Because they lessen form fatigue, multi-step forms increase completion rates and the division improves the user experience overall by making complex forms easier to understand.
Use File Upload for Better Interaction
Your forms become even more functional when you include a file upload feature that accepts documents, photos, and other types of material.
How to Use: To enable users to submit additional files, like resumes for job applications, ID scans for verification, or photos for feedback surveys, add a file upload field.
Why It Works: This increases the flexibility of your form especially for registrations or applications that call for more documents.
Handle Real Time Validation
Real-time validation helps users complete forms more quickly and accurately by providing immediate feedback when they miss a needed field or enter information incorrectly.
How to Use: Happyforms may be configured to provide real-time validation, which verifies user inputs including phone numbers, email forms, and required fields quickly. As soon as a user moves to the next field, they will see an error notice or correction prompt.
Why It Works: It improves form accuracy, which results in better-quality submissions and fewer follow-up emails to address errors.
A few things before you go . . .
You can significantly improve your Happyforms’ usability, effectiveness, and completion rates by implementing these five tricks. Simple contact forms or intricate multi-step applications, all of these tips will make the user experience better for you and your users.
Get started for free
Download Happyforms plugin for free to begin constructing your own WordPress forms using natural language. The best part is that you don’t even need to know how to code to use Happyforms!
If you’re ever interested in the pain points associated with WordPress, you should ask someone in the trenches of providing technical or customer support. We’ve heard it all, over and over again. One recurring theme I’ve noted since my tenure in the support forums is this: users are afraid of installing plugins.
The original tickets are usually about some feature they need on their website. I’ll pick a common example we’ve dealt with — a mailing list subscription form. A user, we’ll call her Jane — asks her theme authors, “How do I add a mailing list subscription form to my website?” and we explain, “The theme doesn’t include this kind of functionality. But you can install a plugin to do this for you.”
Jane balks, “I’m trying to avoid plugins.”
***
I’m sure the first time Jane installed WordPress, she was giddy with power. She instantly sought out a new theme to change the look and feel of the front page. Because the more modern-looking and featured themes on WordPress.org are typically well-maintained, this experience likely went pretty well for her. Change theme = success.
Next, Jane learns about plugins. Understanding that plugins add all kinds of cool things, Jane searches for a social sharing plugin. “This plugin hasn’t been updated in two years…” Well, it’s here in the search! “This plugin hasn’t been tested with your version of WordPress.” What does that even mean? Install, activate. Best case scenario? Sidebars look wonky. Worst is the white screen. What kind of experience has Jane had now? Plugins = things breaking.
Then something magical happens. Jane notices a theme that includes social sharing functions. A lightbulb goes off in her head. It will just work, and that’s all that matters to her.
***
It turns out, the WordPress plugin directory is not the greatest resource for people seeking out well-maintained plugins. Developers might initially have altruistic intentions when they added their plugin, but it’s all too easy to get overwhelmed by the demands of support and maintenance, so abandoned plugins abound. It’s one thing for WordPress folks to understand this is essentially a volunteer gig — but it’s not easily communicated to the other sixty million users out there who expect things to just work by virtue of it being listed on the website.
On the other hand, there are also so many brilliant and useful plugins out there — built by passionate, professional, and generous community members. It’s just harder for new WordPressers to sort those out in the search results.
We shouldn’t be avoiding plugins at all. In fact, I wholly advocate going plugin crazy. Just be smarter and more responsible about it. Look for plugins that have been updated in the last year (at least!). Check out the developer’s other work and suss out whether they’re valued members of the community. And…
Don’t avoid plugins, review them
Most of all, I think we all should be writing useful and insightful reviews for the plugins we’re using — when they work well, and when they don’t. Keep in mind that a review is not the appropriate place to request support. If something is broken, it’s really important to open a thread on the appropriate support forum — even if you end up moving on and using a different plugin.
If the WordPress community would be better about those two items, users would have an easier time sorting through the results for well-supported and updated plugins. I recently went through my own website plugin list and left a review of each one I’d activated and used. I even wrote a review for one I activated and liked, but ended up going with another I liked better. I explained the feature difference in my review, and I hope it’s useful to the next person whose looking for a fancy Instagram integration. ?
Here’s a template you can use for your own plugin reviews:
I installed[plugin name] on my blog/business site/portfolio.
The plugin has these features which I really like:
I wish these features could be improved upon:
These features didn’t work for me, even after I tried to get support in the forum:
Overall I would recommend/not recommend this plugin if you’re trying to accomplish __________.
***
I get that reviews and open threads in the WordPress.org forums alone won’t solve the problem of abandoned or poorly coded plugins. I know that we’ll still see unfortunate conflicts between plugins and themes. But I think as a community, we could do a lot better about flagging what we notice. Who knows, your review or your open ticket just may save some new WordPresser from the panic that goes along with their very first white screen of death. It could even save someone from getting so frustrated with WordPress that they jump ship altogether.
