Traditional forms are ubiquitous across the internet. Most lead generation sites rely on them to collect visitor information. While they may seem innocuous, these forms actually create a significant bottleneck for your business, becoming blockers that prevent potential customers from completing their journey with you.
What a shame to spend all that time, effort, and money getting people to your website, only for them to fall at the last hurdle because your contact form is suboptimal.
Here are the main reasons why traditional forms perform so poorly:
1. High Perceived Effort
Traditional forms present multiple fields all at once, creating immediate psychological resistance and visual overwhelm. In our era of shorter attention spans, the very idea of filling out a form is abhorrent to many people.
Processing multiple questions simultaneously taxes users’ mental resources. When visitors see a wall of fields, their brain immediately registers this as work – work they didn’t sign up for when they visited your site.
2. Little Interaction
Traditional forms feel like paperwork, not an experience. They’re administrative tasks that offer no sense of achievement when completed – just a chore to get through.
There are no interactive elements to capture attention, no anticipation built into the process. Static fields are inherently boring, creating a monotonous experience where the same input method repeats without variety.
Given our increasingly shorter attention spans, this becomes more problematic every year. We need to gamify how we present information to people – we can’t just display fields and expect them to complete them.
Traditional forms typically convert around 1% of visitors if you’re lucky. That’s just one in a hundred – dismally poor performance by any standard.
3. They Don’t Tap into Behavioural Psychology
Traditional forms fail to leverage any behavioural psychology techniques. There’s no sequential commitment, no “foot-in-the-door” technique to build momentum.
Nothing is spoon-fed to users in bite-sized pieces. Instead, we present everything at once, saying “here it all is, fill it in.” There’s no element of curiosity or anticipation – it’s all just laid out as a task to complete.
There’s also no ability to personalize questions based on previous answers. If someone responds one way, you can’t adjust subsequent questions accordingly. The experience remains static and impersonal, missing opportunities to capitalize on users’ investment in partial completion.
4. Awful on Mobile
Website owners typically spend most of their time viewing and editing their sites on desktop computers, often neglecting the mobile experience. Yet in most industries today, mobile has become the more popular device for browsing.
On mobile devices, traditional forms create:
- Cramped interfaces with all fields showing at once
- Excessive scrolling requirements (which is fiddly on mobile)
- Input difficulties when typing on small screens
- Touch target problems where buttons are too small
- Context loss when keyboards appear
Modern users prefer to tap rather than type whenever possible. Traditional forms rarely optimize for this preference on mobile devices.
5. Hard to Improve
With traditional forms, it’s extremely difficult to understand user behavior. Since everything appears on a single screen, you can’t see how far users progress before abandoning.
Typically, anywhere from 50% upwards of your users will start filling in a form but leave before finishing. With traditional forms, you can’t identify:
- Which specific field causes them to abandon
- Where users pause or show uncertainty
- Patterns in partial completions
- Optimization opportunities based on user behavior
This means you can’t spot issues with your form, test solutions, or implement improvements based on actual user data.
The Solution: Multi-Step Forms
Our preferred solution is to abandon traditional forms entirely in favor of multi-step forms. These address many of the issues outlined above and typically convert around three times better than traditional forms. We’ve seen cases where conversions tripled simply by making this switch.
Why This Matters to Your Business
Your form is the bottleneck in your conversion journey. You’ve invested significant time, effort, and money into getting users into your marketing funnel and to your website. If the final action you want them to take is made even slightly more difficult than necessary, that’s a substantial problem for your business.
The good news? This is fixable. By addressing these five key issues with your forms, you can dramatically increase completion rates and generate more leads for your business.
