While designing a website, web designers pay much attention on the website design, usability and navigational simplicity but generally pay less attention on the contact or sign up form. That is really a foolish thing to do because unless your HTML form is good enough and people subscribe to your service, the whole purpose of the website is failed.

Here are a few tips on how you can improve the website’s form and increase the conversion rates.

Test and track the form- Before ypu change any element in the form take split tests to evaluate your improvement. Some design can work for other company’s website and be a complete failure in your website. You have to try different styles to determine which one your visitors like the most. For tracking the success or failure of a form you can use clicktale.com

Use “Mad Libs”- The name is strange, right? Mad Libs is nothing but filling a form in a “fill in the blanks” style where obvious blanks are kept for the user to fill. The content of the form is generally written in a paragraph format with several blanks. For example, I would like to use XYZ. I want my username to be____________ and I want my password to be____________ My email address is____________________
By the way, my name is_____________________ and my website is____________________

Avoid captchas- Captchas generally annoy users and affect the conversion rate. Try to remove captchas from the form as they have negative factors and start using “honeypot fields”. It’s more efficient, increases conversion rate, and keeps the spam very low.

Remove optional fields- Optional fields make the form lengthy and they are completely unnecessary. Unless you want the information, why will the user care to fill the optional fields? What most designers don’t understand is that people want a simple form that they can fill up very fast. Always put the mandatory fields in the form and later ask for additional information from the user once he completes the form submission. It will save users’ time and they won’t get confused.

Avoid one page checkout- Interesting about form design is if you give the users one long form, they don’t like to fill it, but if you break the same form in 2-3 parts, then they will happily fill it. Especially if the online store’s checkout & shipment form is broken in 2-3 parts, the users can simply fill it.
Reset button is unnecessary- Don’t put any reset button in the forms. If the user mistakenly click it after filling a long form, all his data will be gone. This can have an extremely negative effect on the users and they might not try to sign up ever again.

Mask passwords only if it’s a must- There is a controversy among the web designers regarding the password masking. Even if you mask the password give the users the option to “unmask” the password field.

Field validation- For the usability factor field validation is a good thing to incorporate in the forms. It will prevent any client-side error. If the user types anything wrong, a dialogue will appear beside the field mentioning the mistake done by the user.

Put the label above the field- When the users fill a form they generally look for the labels mentioning the particular information needed for every field. If you place the label above the field it’s easier for the users to understand. The only problem with such labeling is it makes the form lengthier.

Use auto complete- Use an auto completion or suggestion script to make the sign up process easier for the subscriber. It will simplify the process and make it enjoyable.

Use custom elements- Custom elements like calendars, multiple selects, sliders are generally not available in HTML forms. Try to use jQuery plug-ins to make the forms more user-friendly.
These tips will improve the HTML form’s performance and boost the conversion rate. If you have any other good ideas to improve the HTML form conversion rate, feel free to share it with us.