Contact form design
- Entries a month
- 36
- Seconds to fill the form
- 54
- Required fields as % of the form
- 67
- Visitors who start the form a month
- 60
These sheets have no constants. Every number is worked from the figures you enter: the prices, the quantities, the option fee, your sales tax rate, your processor's rate and fixed fee, the fields, the seconds per field, the visitors, the start and finish rates, the services, the questions, the requests, the win rate and the job value, with the arithmetic printed beside each answer. The defaults are one site owner's worked example, not a tax rate this site publishes and not a processor's price list.
The figures start from a worked example (36) and every answer is worked from the figures you enter: put your own prices, rates, fields and traffic in and read yours.
Download the Contact form design worked example (CSV)
This is the contact form design sheet, and it answers the question nobody asks until the form has been up for a month: how many entries should this page be producing. Enter the fields on the form, how many are required, the seconds a visitor spends per field, the visitors the page gets a month, the share who start the form and the share of starts that finish, and what a sent enquiry is worth to you. It returns the seconds to fill, the required share, the starts, the entries a month, the starts abandoned and what they were worth, what the entries are worth, and the entries per thousand visitors. The figure to argue over is the field count: every field is seconds on a phone and a share of the starts that never press send.
The time to fill, off the fields
Six fields at 9 seconds each is 54 seconds, and four of them required is a 67% required share. Take the phone field off required and the share falls to 50% without the form getting any shorter; drop a field and both move.
The entries, off the traffic
1,200 visitors a month with 5% starting the form is 60 starts, and 60% of those finishing is 36 entries a month, or 30 entries per 1,000 visitors. Enter your own analytics and the sheet prints what your page should be producing.
What abandonment costs
The 24 starts that did not finish, at $80 an enquiry, are $1,920 a month of enquiries that got as far as the first field and no further, against $2,880 of entries that arrived. That is the figure a shorter form is measured against.
What site owners ask before they trust the Contact form design
Where do the start and finish rates come from?
From your own form analytics: the share of visitors who type into the first field, and the share of those who press send. Without analytics use the worked example's 5% and 60% as a starting point and replace them the first month you measure.
Should every field be required?
No. A required mark is a reason to abandon on a phone. On the sheet the required share is printed beside the seconds to fill so you can see both move as you change the form.
What is an enquiry worth?
Your own average: the share of enquiries that become jobs times what a job earns you. $80 is a worked example; a plumber and a photographer will enter very different figures.
Where the constants in this tool come from
W3C WAI: Forms tutorial, labeling controls.
MDN: the autocomplete attribute, how a browser fills name, email and phone for the visitor.