11 Top Complaints Visitors Have About Contact Forms (+Solutions)

Looking to make your forms better by finding out why people aren’t filling them out?

Knowing the most common issues with contact forms gives you the insight to improve your own forms and boost your conversion rate. In this post, we’ve listed the top complaints website visitors have about contact forms (plus solutions).

Top Visitor Complaints About Contact Forms

Unfortunately, lots of contact forms don’t meet website visitors’ standards.

Let’s make sure your forms aren’t guilty of any of these complaints. Here’s what they don’t like:

1. “Ugh, why would they need that info?”

If you’re not asking the right questions (or too many), you’ll lose leads fast. No one likes giving a contact form unnecessary personal info.

Make sure you’re asking for information related to your business. For example, unless you’re running a blog about astrology, it’s probably a bad idea to ask for someone’s zodiac sign on a contact form.

On the other hand, if you’re in a field like insurance or medical, you’ll need to ask for things like which state the contact lives in to qualify them for your services upfront. You may want to consider using a contact form template that matches your niche and industry.

Solution: WPForms Form Templates

WPForms has a library of 300+ form templates for any purpose. You can generate a contact form template that fits your site and only asks the right info for your customers. Plus, every template is 100% customizable, so you can add, delete, and rearrange the fields to make it exactly how you want it.

2. “I lose interest fast…”

Even if you’re asking all the right questions, people still get bored when filling out contact forms. In fact, most people who start filling out your form never end up completing it.

Forms aren’t naturally very ‘human’ feeling and it’s easy to forget you’re filling out a form. This huge issue for website owners has a bright side, though. It’s led to the creation of a new tactic called conversational marketing.

Solution: Conversational Forms

Conversational marketing with a conversational contact form helps you keep users interested when filling out forms that act like a one-on-one conversation. They’re also an easy and fun way to make your site look modern.

3. “It won’t let me pay with X.”

Website visitors aren’t big fans of being given only one payment option.

And if they’re ready to give you their money, the last thing you want is to annoy them with limited options. Think of how you feel when you’re paying for something online. You expect the checkout process to go smoothly.

Solution: Accept Stripe, Square, Authorize.Net, and PayPal.

All of the above payment gateways are supported by WPForms. In fact, you can offer customers tons of payment methods including credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more, with just the Stripe integration available in all WPForms plans (including Lite).

You can also offer multiple payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal in the sake form and your visitors choose how they want to pay.

4. “I already answered a similar question!”

If you’re sensing a bit of a theme in these complaints about contact forms, you’re on to something. People don’t like to have their time wasted.

Making sure your forms are as streamlined as possible and not repeating or asking for unrelated info should be a top priority for your forms. But it’s not always easy if you need certain info from certain types of users, but not others. Don’t worry, you can still use one form and ask different questions.

Solution: Conditional Logic

This easy-to-setup feature in WPForms lets you show or hide form fields based on user selections. That way, you can show only the questions you need to ask based on each unique visitor, and limit the number of fields to as few as possible.

5. “This could take forever to get a response…”

Have you ever hit submit on a form and nothing happened? This is incredibly frustrating.

And if this happens on your website after someone fills out your contact form, it’s a good way to lose credibility with that visitor.

People don’t like to be left wondering when someone may be following up with them (or that their form didn’t even go through). This is a sure way for a lead to lose steam and forget about you altogether.

Solution: Form Confirmation + Form Notifications

Your Form Confirmation will let people know that their submission came through, while also giving you a spot to display a message that clarifies when they can expect a follow-up. And Form Notifications will help you or your team get an email as soon as a form has been submitted, so you can follow-up quickly.

6. “Which field is wrong?”

Typos happen. Sometimes, people will put the wrong information into your contact forms (and they won’t even realize it).

For instance, they could miss a digit in their phone number. Or, they could mistype their email address.

Website visitors often complain that a form won’t let them submit because a field is wrong, but they can’t tell which one. If you don’t let them know, it’s highly likely they’ll give up and never finish filling out your contact form (costing you lost revenue!).

Solution: Smart Fields

Smart phone and email fields automatically detect when a typo has been entered. For emails, it even suggests a correction based on popular email service providers. This is a great way to increase the quality of your email list.

Smart fields could make WPForms worth it for you because they help to prevent form abandonment.

7. “I couldn’t find the form!”

Surprisingly, a top visitor complaint about contact forms is simply that they couldn’t find one at all.

You may think your form is easy to find, but it never hurts to include it in more than one location on your website.

Solution: Improve your form’s location.

Try creating a contact form pop-up and check out our post with the best places to put a contact form on your website for more ideas.

8. “There are too many distractions.”

There’s a reason so many people use Google Forms to gather info quickly. It’s because it has literally no other choices on the page but to fill out the form. But for serious business owners, Google Forms has significant limitations.

However, you can still make a distraction-free landing page that actually does connect to your email marketing, is secure, and lets you organize and save your entries in your WordPress database.

Solution: Form Pages

Create unlimited form landing pages to help you get more leads, track a specific campaign, conduct surveys, and more. All while reducing distractions for your visitors and boosting your conversion rate.

The Form Pages addon makes WPForms a much better alternative to Typeform or Ninja Forms.

9. “This is way too long!”

A massive complaint about contact forms from visitors is that they are simply just too long. The fact is, the more fields you have on a form, the less likely people are to fill it out.

Still, long forms are sometimes necessary. But the last thing you want to do is overwhelm your visitor with tons of questions.

Solution: Save and Resume

With WPForms Pro, you can add a Save and Resume option to any form on your site. All you have to do is install the Save and Resume addon, then enable it on each form to add a Save and Resume link.

Save and Resume is awesome if you have complex forms that can take a while to complete. Using this option, your visitors can save partial submissions and continue them when they’re ready to restart.

10. “I’m not sure I trust this form.”

Would you fill out a form you didn’t trust? If even you wouldn’t do something, it’s not wise or fair to expect your website visitors to do it.

To them, you’re a stranger asking for their personal info. If your form looks broken, dated, or otherwise untrustworthy, you’ll suffer from serious form abandonment.

Solution: Use Social Proof.

Psychologically speaking, people tend to do what others before them have done. You can use social proof to your advantage with things like testimonials, TrustPulse, security badges, and more.

11. “The site the form was on took forever to load.”

If your site is slow, it could be costing you sales.

Page load time definitely impacts conversion rates. According to eCommerce statistics, a 3-second page load time could increase bounce rates 32%. Which means this: People want things fast.

Don’t let a slow site reduce your form conversions.

Solution: Speed up your site.

Check out the best CDN providers to speed up your website. Also, check out this post on our sister website with great tips to speed up WordPress performance.

12. “I don’t understand X…”

A huge complaint about contact forms is that something isn’t clear on the form. Visitors sometimes have questions while filling out forms. The good news is, they’re much more likely to finish filling out the form if they can get a little help.

Solution: Provide instant help.

Consider adding LiveChat software to your website to provide better customer service through either a real person or a chatbot. Also, add a Tooltip next to a field on your form that might need deeper explanation. If you get a lot of questions about a specific field through your live chat, it’s a good indication that that field could use a Tooltip.

Don’t have live chat? You could try making a request a call back form so that your visitor can explain their needs over the phone.

In Conclusion

There you have it! You now know what the top user complaints about contact forms are. Hopefully, you’ve now got a good idea of ways to make your own forms even better and skyrocket your conversion rate. Our article on common complaints about payment forms will give you more ideas.

And now that there are no complaints about them, start making your forms convert even better by checking out these awesome lead generation form examples.

So, what are you waiting for? Get started with the most powerful WordPress forms plugin today.

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