Four Years of the Same Enquiry Form

The least examined thing on the site

The pages get rewritten, the photographs get replaced, and the prices get updated.

The form was configured during the build and has been carrying every enquiry since without anybody reading it.

That is remarkable given that it is the point where a visitor becomes a customer, which is the only thing the site is for.

An annual review of it is twenty minutes and almost nobody does one.

The two tests

• Read every field: what do you do with it.
• Submit it yourself: where does it go.

Between them those cover almost everything that goes wrong with a form. The first finds fields nobody uses and the second finds submissions nobody receives, and both are common on forms that have run untouched for years.

Ask what each field is for

Which is the first pass and produces immediate deletions.

For every field, ask what you actually do with the answer.

A company name field on a form that receives homeowner enquiries, a how-did-you-hear-about-us nobody reads, a postal address you never use, or a dropdown of services that no longer matches what you offer.

Each field is a small cost paid by every person completing the form, and a field nobody uses is a cost with no return.

Delete anything you cannot justify in a sentence.

Most four-year-old forms lose two or three fields in this pass.

A worked example

A business reviewed a form untouched since 2019.

It had nine fields, five of which were required.

Two of the required fields, a postal address and a preferred contact time, had never once been used in any way.

The service dropdown listed two services they had stopped offering and omitted one they had added.

And the submission was still copying a former employee's address, who had left in 2021, alongside the correct one.

Removing three fields and fixing the dropdown raised completions noticeably within a month.

Follow the submission

Which is the second test and the one that finds the serious failures.

Submit the form yourself, from a phone, on mobile data rather than your own wifi.

Then check where it arrived: which inbox, which folder, and whether anybody other than you receives it.

Forms fail silently after a host change, a plugin update, or a mail setting change, and there is no error to notice because the visitor sees a thank-you message either way.

That is the failure that costs the most and is invisible from every direction.

Do it monthly rather than annually, since a form broken in March and found in December has cost nine months of enquiries.

Check who receives it now

Which drifts the same way everything else does.

Four years is enough for somebody to have left, an address to have changed, or a shared inbox to have been reorganised.

Confirm that at least two people receive it, so a holiday or an illness does not mean nobody sees an enquiry for a week.

Check the spam folder of whichever account receives them, since form notifications are exactly the shape of message that gets filtered.

And make sure the reply-to address is the customer's, so replying works without copying an address across.

Read what the form says it does

Which affects whether people complete it.

The button, the text above the fields, and the message afterwards were all written in a hurry during the build.

Say what happens next: we reply within one working day, or we will call you back within the hour during working hours.

Change the button from Submit to something describing the action, which is a small and measurable improvement.

And check the thank-you message actually says something rather than confirming that a form was submitted, which the visitor already knows.

Count what happens after

Which is the part beyond the form itself.

Look at ten enquiries from this year and check how long each took to answer.

A form that works perfectly and produces enquiries answered two days later is not converting anything.

Response time is the single largest factor in whether an enquiry becomes a customer, and it is entirely within your control.

That measurement is more useful than any change to the form.

Try completing it as a customer would

Which finds the problems that reading the fields cannot.

Fill it in on a phone, with one thumb, outdoors, the way somebody standing in a driveway would, and notice everything that is awkward.

A field that opens the wrong keyboard, a dropdown that is difficult to hit, a message box too small to see what you typed, and a required field whose error only appears after you press the button.

None of those show up when the form is inspected from a desk, and all of them cost completions from the majority of your visitors.

Ten minutes of that produces a more useful list than any amount of thinking about which fields to keep.

Watch somebody else use it

Which is the version that removes your own familiarity entirely.

Ask somebody who has never seen the site to send you an enquiry about a job, and say nothing while they do it.

Where they hesitate is a field that is unclear, and what they ask you is a question the form should have answered.

Five minutes of that is worth more than an hour of your own review, because you cannot see your own form as a stranger does.

Do it once a year with somebody different.

The counter-case

Some forms should ask more.

A business receiving many unsuitable enquiries may want additional fields deliberately, as a filter, accepting fewer submissions in exchange for better ones.

A four-year-old form that produces a steady stream of good enquiries also does not need changing simply because it is old.

And the telephone remains the route most people prefer for anything urgent, whatever the form does.

Read every field and delete what you cannot justify, submit it from a phone and follow where it lands, and check the response times.

What to do

1. Read every field.
2. Delete what you cannot justify.
3. Fix the service list.
4. Submit it from a phone.
5. Check where it landed.
6. Confirm two people receive it.
7. Measure your response time.

Step four is the one to repeat monthly rather than annually, since a form that stopped sending in March and is discovered in December has quietly cost nine months of enquiries.

The field-count question is covered in how many fields before people give up.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.