6 ways to improve your website forms
Wednesday, February 18th, 2015
Website forms are ubiquitous. Every site needs them to engage visitors, collect information, makes sales, etc. They are easy to add to your site but not necessarily easy to do right.
There are plenty of free or cheap tools for creating web forms, but these tools may cause serious issues:
- Incomplete Forms: Users submitting incomplete forms (e.g., not filling out all of the essential fields)
- Invalid Inputs: Users not entering the “right” information (e.g., not putting an email address in the email address field)
- Form Spam Bots: Automated programs may fill out and submit your forms, sending you junk in the form of gibberish or website URLs they hope you will visit and buy stuff from.
- Form Insecurity: If your form collects sensitive information, from passwords to medical data, it could easily be set up incorrectly and enable phishing attacks or data leakage.
- Stale Forms: You updated your form, but someone just somehow submitted the old version, which is not even on the internet anymore!
- Connectivity/Server Issues: You don’t want your users to give up because their network is down or your site is down for a few seconds.
All of these problems impact the success of your site — causing everything from annoyance to the inability to contact your sales leads to breaches of privacy. Fortunately, it is not hard to plug these gaps and have a solid, productive, and secure web form.
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Many contact us forms and comment forms are plagued by “web form spam.” Automated programs crawl the internet looking for web forms. When found, they start submitting spam advertisements through the forms hoping that some of the recipients of these form submissions will see the ads and act on them. Almost nobody does, but the spam still comes and gets worse and worse over time. 
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