Your contact form is so bad that clients work around it (when you're lucky)

A few days ago, a request for information came in from the website of a client who runs courses. Nothing unusual, except for one detail: it came from the wrong form.

The message was short: a user asking about in-person courses. For a request like that the site has a dedicated page with its own form, and every button on the pages of the upcoming courses points to it: five in all. He saw that page. Then he went looking for another way to write to us.

I went to reconstruct how.

Nine pages, one visitor

The analytics show a single nine-page session. On the content pages the visitor lingers:

• homepage, viewed twice: 1 minute 8 seconds, scrolled to 94%
• the introduction page: just over a minute, scrolled to 81%
• the page of upcoming courses: 1 minute 17 seconds, scrolled to 98%

Someone who reads a page almost to the bottom for over a minute is seriously considering signing up. This was not a distracted visit.

Then there is the page with the dedicated form, built precisely for him: 8 seconds, scrolled to 19%. It is the lowest value of the whole session.

After that page he keeps wandering: the seminars category, the online courses section, the page of one specific online course. Finally the contact page, where he stays 54 seconds, and the thank-you page.

One caveat: the report shows time and scroll per page, not the order of the visits. The sequence I am telling is the most plausible one, not a certain fact.

How he got to the contact form

On the new site the contact form appears neither in the menu nor in the footer. The only links to the contact page are the “info” buttons on the online course pages, and the visitor opened one of them.

That button pre-fills the subject with the name of the online course. The email we received did not have the pre-filled subject: he deleted it and wrote his own. Among the pages he visited there is no other path to that form, so the reconstruction holds.

In practice, to ask about in-person courses he used the button of an online course, that is, of a different category, and corrected its subject by hand to make it work. It is hard to find a clearer way of saying that the official form did not work for him.

The two forms compared

The dedicated form page is one of the old WordPress pages that the new site keeps serving through a proxy. Inside there is a Google Form embedded in a fixed-size iframe, 800 by 750 pixels.

Before the form there is a notice: the secretariat reserves the right, for reasons of force majeure, to cancel the course or change part of how it is run. Then comes an invitation to fill in the form in all its parts. Below the iframe, which only shows “Loading…” while it loads, there are the button to print as PDF, the line “Comments are closed.” and a sidebar with tags and recent posts.

The Google Form has six required fields:

• surname
• first name
• phone
• email
• a “Date”, with no explanation of which one
• a privacy checkbox

The privacy checkbox holds about eighty words of GDPR text and, to submit the request, also forces you to accept the newsletter and the sending of informational material. Further down there is an optional question about the newsletter, with “Yes” and “No” as checkboxes: you can tick both. There is no field to write a question.

The contact page, instead, belongs to the new site and uses a native form: name, email and message required, subject optional. No phone, no date.

The visitor wanted to ask a question. The official form was the only place on the site that did not let him.

Who works around the form and who leaves

This visitor was motivated enough to find an alternative route. Most people are not. Faced with a form that asks for a phone number and a mysterious date, and imposes the newsletter for a simple question, they close the tab. In the analytics what remains is a visit with an exit and nothing else, because nobody writes to tell you the form was ugly.

The lucky side of this story is exactly that: a request that came in from the wrong place made visible a problem that usually stays silent.

The comparison of times shows where the friction was. More than a minute on every content page, eight seconds on the form. The content worked, the conversion page did not.

Migration leaves behind the pages that convert

The part that concerns me most is this. The site is being migrated progressively: the new pages are online and the old ones are served from the previous WordPress until their turn comes. It is an approach I have written about before and that I still prefer to a full rebuild.

The request form stayed on the old site by the client’s explicit choice. It is tied to their whole internal organization, and touching it meant risking breaking something downstream. It was a reasonable request and I respected it.

That choice, however, had a cost, and from the inside nobody could see it. The new pages walked the visitor to the door, and the door was still the old one. Now there is a concrete case to put on the table, in place of an opinion.

What I take away: in a migration, conversion pages are the ones everybody is most afraid to touch, precisely because they are tied to internal processes. They are also the ones that decide whether the work done on the rest of the site turns into an enquiry. When they stay behind, it is worth looking at them through the eyes of the person who has to fill them in (how many fields, which ones are required, what is written before the button) and bringing to the client what you see.

If you have a site that brings visits but few enquiries, or you are thinking of rebuilding it, tell us about your project.