Web Design
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January 22, 2019
You can have great SEO, a well-designed homepage, and compelling service pages — and still lose leads because your contact form is broken, confusing, or asking for too much. For
Von Holland
You can have great SEO, a well-designed homepage, and compelling service pages — and still lose leads because your contact form is broken, confusing, or asking for too much. For small businesses, where every inquiry is valuable, form errors are silent revenue losses.
A few quick form fixes can increase your leads.
Technology moves fast. A thing that every business works on continuously is an effective website that will captures leads and is responsive on any device it’s being viewed on. You can optimize your website and have A-1 copy but your website form errors could be a disaster and cost your business thousands.
A simple form error like an extra field can be tragic. A good example of this is how Expedia’s extra data field in a billing form cost them 12 million dollars. The simple error caused transactions to fail and cost the company 12 million dollars in a single year! Wild!
What We’ve Learned from Building Hundreds of Small Business Contact Forms
At Consort Creative, we build contact forms on every client website we deliver — using Forminator, our preferred form plugin for WordPress, because of its flexibility, Stripe payment integration, and reliable email delivery. Over dozens of client sites, we’ve seen the same form mistakes appear repeatedly — mistakes that are invisible to the business owner because the form ‘looks’ like it’s working, but that are silently filtering out leads before they ever arrive.
Here are the most common form errors we find and fix in client audits — including the three original issues covered in this post, plus several we’ve added from our direct experience.
Here are a few of the most frequent website form errors:
Complex CAPTCHAs
Face it. A lot of us fine those “Are you a human” questions annoying. Deciphering that jumbled text or finding all the images with busses in them slows us down. In a world with so many distractions, time is precious. Fix those website form errors!
Studies have shown that CAPTCHAs reduce form conversions up to 40%. 40%!
An alternative to using CAPTCHAs and ensuring that robots aren’t filling out your forms is to use honeypot traps. Honeypot implementation allows your users to fill out your form without jumping through hoops.
Stopping spam is important but not at the cost of losing valuable leads with website form errors.
Unnecessary Questions
Marketo found that the longer the form is, the lower the conversion rate.
Try reducing the number of clicks needed to fill out a form. It makes it fast and more enjoyable to fill out a website form. Replacing drop-down with image select questions is an example of a way to reduce the time it takes to fill out a form. A simple fix for a website form error.
Little or No User Testing
Remember when we talked about that form label error that cost Expedia millions? Simple user testing could have prevented that loss.
Other things that should be tested are how forms work on mobile devices, validation glitches, having form submissions sent to an incorrect email address and more. Test and Test again to increase leads.
Confirmation Messages That Don’t Confirm Anything
Most default WordPress form plugins show a generic ‘Thank you for your message’ after submission. This tells the visitor nothing about what happens next — will you reply today? Tomorrow? In a week? Should they call if they don’t hear from you? Uncertainty after submission increases the likelihood that the prospect will simply move on to a competitor while waiting.
Fix: Write a specific confirmation message: ‘Thanks for reaching out. We typically reply within one business day. If you need a faster response, call us at [phone].’ This confirmation should also include a redirect to a thank-you page — both for tracking conversions in Google Analytics and for delivering any promised content (like a free resource or next-step guide).
Forms That Don’t Work on Mobile
Over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Forms that look and work correctly on desktop can be broken on mobile — dropdown menus that are hard to tap, fields that zoom the page unexpectedly, submit buttons that extend beyond the screen edge, or multi-step forms that don’t scroll correctly.
Fix: Test your form on an actual mobile device — not just by resizing your desktop browser — before and after any changes. Specifically test: all field types, the submit button, any conditional logic that shows/hides fields, and the confirmation message or redirect. Forminator handles mobile responsiveness well, but always verify in a real mobile environment.
No Spam Protection — or Spam Protection That Blocks Real Leads
As the post notes, aggressive CAPTCHAs reduce form conversions by forcing legitimate users through friction. But the opposite problem — no spam protection at all — means your inbox fills with bot submissions that obscure real leads.
The right balance: honeypot fields (invisible fields that only bots fill in) handle the vast majority of spam without adding any friction for real visitors. Forminator includes built-in honeypot protection. If additional protection is needed, a simple math question (‘What is 3 + 4?’) stops most bots without the conversion penalty of image-based CAPTCHAs. Reserve Google reCAPTCHA for forms that are experiencing high bot volume despite honeypot protection.
General Rule
FAQ: Website Forms for Small Businesses
What’s the most common website form mistake small businesses make?
Asking for too much information upfront. The ideal contact form for a small business service inquiry collects three things: name, email or phone, and a brief message or project description. Every additional field reduces completion rates. The business rationale for extra fields — ‘we need to qualify leads before we call’ — ignores the reality that an unqualified call takes five minutes to close and that a lost lead from form abandonment is permanent. Qualify in the first conversation, not in the form.
How do I know if my contact form is working?
Test it yourself, thoroughly. Submit the form and confirm: (1) you receive the notification email, (2) the visitor sees an appropriate confirmation message or is redirected to a thank-you page, (3) the submission appears in your form plugin’s submission log, and (4) the email doesn’t land in spam. Then test on mobile — phone and tablet — and confirm the same results. Test every time you make changes to the form, to your email settings, or to your hosting environment. Form breakage frequently occurs silently after plugin updates or email configuration changes.
What should a small business contact form include?
For a standard service inquiry form: name (required), email address (required), phone number (optional — some clients prefer email first), project description or how can we help (a brief free-text field). For a discovery call booking form: name, email, and a single qualifying question (‘What best describes your project?’ with 3–4 options). Keep required fields to the minimum needed to have a productive first conversation. Add a clear privacy note below the submit button: ‘We never share your information’ or ‘We typically reply within one business day.’
Which WordPress form plugin is best for small businesses?
Consort Creative uses Forminator on all client sites. It handles contact forms, multi-step forms, payment integrations (Stripe and PayPal), quiz and survey forms, and conditional logic — all within a free plugin with no per-submission fees. It includes built-in spam protection (honeypot), reCAPTCHA integration, and reliable email delivery. WPForms is another strong option with excellent UX. We recommend against free versions of Gravity Forms for most small businesses — the free tier is too limited, and the full version is expensive relative to alternatives.
Can a broken contact form hurt my SEO or Google rankings?
Not directly — Google doesn’t evaluate form functionality as a ranking factor. Indirectly: a broken contact form means leads are lost rather than converted, which means less business revenue to reinvest in SEO and marketing. If a broken form is part of a broader site health issue (plugin conflicts causing JavaScript errors, or email delivery failures creating server errors), those technical issues can affect how Google crawls and indexes the site. The most direct impact is on business performance, not on rankings — but that consequence is significant enough on its own to make form testing a priority.
In conclusion, perhaps instead of asking why your forms aren’t doing well, ask how you can make the experience a user has when filling out your form as easy and quick as possible. Website form errors will cost you.
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