How many fields are you allowed to ask for? We counted 173 contact forms

How many fields are you allowed to ask for in a contact form?

Almost every company has a contact form and almost no one knows if it is a good form. It has been there since launch, enquiries come in, and as long as that continues, no one looks at it again.

We were able to really answer that question for once, because we manage a few hundred websites. So we measured them: 173 forms across 58 sites, alongside the number of enquiries that came through them over twelve months. Together, they accounted for 2,667 completed forms.

What came out:

• The middle form asks five things. The average is eight, because a few outliers pull it up. The longest asks thirty-seven.
• Three fields are usually compulsory.
• Just over half of the active forms ask for a telephone number.
• Forms with eleven fields or more receive roughly a third of the applications of forms with four fields or fewer.
• Forms that ask for a telephone number get about forty percent fewer than forms that do not.

In this article:

• What we measured precisely
• What an average form looks like
• What happens with long forms
• The telephone number
• How we build a form
• Measuring instead of guessing

What we measured precisely

The layout, so you know what the figures are worth.

• 173 forms on 58 websites that we manage, ranging from sole traders to businesses with multiple branches.
• Per form, the number of fields, how many of those are mandatory, whether there is a telephone field, and the number of submissions over the past twelve months.
• 66 of those forms actually received applications that year, spread across 29 sites. The rest are sitting unused or belong to a page that is rarely visited.
• No personal data, no customer names: only numbers.

The caveat is important. These sites don't attract equal numbers of visitors. A form with few requests might be a long form, or simply placed on a quiet page. This is therefore not a laboratory experiment and nor are we pretending it is. What it actually is: 173 real-world forms, in which the same patterns recur that you also see in larger-scale research.

What an average form looks like

Broken down by the number of fields, it looks like this: by far the most forms ask for three to six things. That has become the standard, and rightly so, because that is just enough to be able to call someone back with a sensible answer.

More interesting is the tail end. Fifteen forms ask for sixteen things or more, and the longest comes to thirty-seven fields. These are almost always quote or application forms into which the entire intake has been crammed: everything you would normally ask in a conversation, but beforehand and without anyone watching along.

Of the forms that received submissions over the past year, just over half ask for a phone number. There are usually three mandatory fields. In the case of a contact form, this is typically name, email address and message, which is a fine lower limit.

What happens with long forms

If you group the forms by length and look at the number of applications per group, the following picture emerges.

Forms with eleven fields or more achieve about a third of what the shortest group achieves. That is a substantial difference, even when you factor in that the sites receive different amounts of traffic.

There is one exception worth mentioning, as it makes the story more useful. The group with eight to ten fields performs above average. These are booking, quote and registration forms, and there is a different type of visitor behind them: someone who has already decided and now wants to sort something out. They will fill in ten fields without a murmur.

That is where the real lesson lies. The length is not the problem; the place in the process is. Someone who has just arrived on your site and has a question wants four fields. Someone who wants a quote will gladly fill in ten if those questions are relevant. If you serve the questionnaire of the second group to the first, half of them will drop out.

The telephone number

The clearest distinct difference in the measurement is with the telephone number. Forms that ask for it get about forty percent fewer submissions than forms that do not.

That is not strange. An e-mail address is no-obligation, a phone number feels like an appointment. With an exploratory question, far from everyone wants to be called, certainly not if it nowhere states what you intend to do with it.

Even so, “get rid of that field” is too simple. For a contractor or a caterer, calling is the quickest route to a job, and an enquiry without a number costs an extra day of emailing back and forth. The choice, therefore, is not whether to ask for it, but how.

• Make the field optional and include why you are asking for it: “Enter your phone number if you prefer to be called.”
• Ask when it suits them. Someone who chooses a time slot themselves will fill in their number.
• Don't ask for it with a download or a newsletter subscription. There, it's purely a barrier.

How we build a form

That is how we build a form, and as far as we are concerned, that is not a matter of taste but of arithmetic.

• Every field must earn its place. The question we are asking is: do we use this answer within 24 hours, or is it “nice to know”? That second type of field is being removed.
• Four to six fields for a contact form. Name, e-mail address, message, and optionally company and telephone number.
• A longer form only further along in the process. On a quote page or a sign-up page it can be detailed, because there the visitor is already further along.
• Provide what you need to reply. No more. A mandatory field that someone cannot fill in is a visitor who leaves.
• Tell what happens next. One sentence beneath the button, and the same promise in the confirmation email. That saves phone calls asking whether the message has arrived.
• Stop spam without annoying the visitor. A puzzle with traffic lights and pedestrian crossings costs you real leads. There are methods that work in the background and that a visitor won't notice at all.

Measuring instead of guessing

The tricky thing about forms is that you only see what comes in. Someone who starts and stops halfway leaves nothing behind. This leaves you guessing whether your form is too long or your page is attracting too few visitors.

That is why on our own site we have recently also been measuring the moment when someone starts typing in a form. The difference between those two figures is the only one that really tells you something. If twenty people start your form and four submit it, the problem lies with the form. If four start and four submit it, the problem lies with the page before it.

That can be set up in an afternoon using a tag manager and it is more useful for any site than yet another dashboard tile. Without that metric, you're optimising based on gut feeling.

Two fewer fields is the cheapest improvement

Review your own form with the question per field: do I use this answer within a day? On most forms, two to three fields can be removed without anyone missing them, and that is immediately the cheapest improvement you can make to your website.

Would you like to know how many people start and drop out with you, or would you like us to take a look at it together? We would be happy to help with that.