You’ve covered the basics: your website is setup, complete with a contact form, registration field, and payment integration. Your company’s marketing strategy is up and running, and the traffic is flowing in. So why is your conversion rate so low? Why aren’t people taking the actions that you would expect? Make sure that you not only have the basics covered, but that the small nuances of form optimizing are in place as well.

1. Mobile Responsive

By now, this should be obvious. But it can be an overlooked detail. Make sure that your form is mobile responsive, and delivers a great user experience across mobile devices. The last thing you want to have happen is for an item to be in a shopper’s cart — yet the button is frustratingly too small to click on to facilitate the check-out process. Be prepared for users from all mobile devices and ensure that your user experience will not suffer.

2. Verify All Email Addresses Entered

When you are trying to gain subscribers for your SaaS company, the sign-up form is extremely important. Many companies make it easy by only requiring a name and email address to sign-up. Your registration form should ensure that the email address that a potential new user has typed in is an actual working email address. Perhaps they made a spelling mistake by accident. Alert your users right then and there and don’t miss a failed opportunity for a customer.

3. Provide Inventory Information

On your product selection or payment form, provide inventory information. This is especially important if you manage a small online store or have an especially limited inventory. This may provide transparency when a customer needs it most, like if they’re interested in purchasing bulk orders. Also, when a customer is on the fence about purchasing your product, the psychological effect of urgency that sets in when it’s seen that there are only 2 items left can be the tipping point of your website making a sale.

4. Checklists

Instead of asking users multiple questions, see if they can all answer the same questions. Asking the question in a way that form visitors can quickly check off boxes increases efficiency and can increase conversion rates. Although your form visitors are giving you more information, it feels like less since they’re only answering one question.

5. Easy Photo Upload

If your form requires submitting a photo, then including both the option of uploading an image and taking a photo right then and there can increase conversion rates. You want to minimize the amount of steps a form visitor needs to take to complete the interaction. If a user doesn’t already have a photo saved on their device ready for upload, then offering the quick option to take a new photo works better than forcing a user to take an image, save it, then upload it. That may be one step too many for some users. You can also add the option of retaking the photo if the user is unhappy with it.

6. A Clickable Terms and Conditions Checkbox

Many forms require the checking off terms and conditions legalese before submitting the form. Instead of showing the entirety of the text, which can appear intimidating and can stretch the limits of a user’s trust, offer it to them in digestible form with a clickable terms and conditions checkbox. The checkbox links to the terms and conditions page with ease, and users are seamlessly prompted to accept those terms before submitting.

7. Add Tabs To a Multi-Page Form

One of the best navigation structures is multi-page tabs, because they’re organized and visually simple. Tabs can break up a long, tedious looking form into doable chunks. However, if possible, avoiding creating a form with more than 3 tabs. A plethora of tabs can look just as formidable than a long stretch of a form.

8. Date Picker

If your form needs to collect information like a stretch of time or specific dates, allowing your form visitor to quickly select dates on a visual calendar is better than having them manually type in dates into multiple fields. Not to mention the terrible UX of having to select the month, day, and year individually!

A date picker calendar is a clean and accurate way to have your users select their dates. It collapses into a calendar, and it can be set to match regional settings.

9. Organize Sections of Your Form

The strategic use of white space or a visual marker like a line can dramatically affect the way that the form looks, feels, and the image that it projects. It will feel cleaner and convey a greater ease of filling out. This aesthetic detail is particularly effective for forms that cover topically different questions.

10. Drag & Drop File Uploading For Forms

The Drag and Drop Upload widget, the form visitor can drag a file from any location on his or her computer, and then drop it on the form. It can list all selected files on the upload canvas, which your form users can delete, change or upload permanently. If the form user is uploading images, they can preview them from the list of uploads before submitting.

11. Infinite List

Let users enter as many entries as they wish with an infinite list. A text-box can be automatically created for each of the defined inputs whenever the form user adds another row to the list. The form user can save, delete or edit each row entry as they please before the form is submitted. This is an appreciated feature for form users whether they have few or very many things to add, it remains open ended and organized.

In the realm of optimization, sometimes it is the little things that end up being the big things. The most important part of your website or app can be the sign-up form and the checkout process. Making sure to get the nuances right on these forms can make an enormous difference that is clear to see. What would make it easier for the user to sign-up? To make a purchase? These are the questions that form nuances can get right for conversion optimization. No detail is too small to be questioned, tested, and analyzed.

All companies are in the conversion race together — and many of us aren’t getting it exactly right yet. We’ve all experienced an unwieldy, confusing, or frustrating component of a website. Let’s run a fine-toothed comb over our website’s points of interaction, and use our own experience coupled with the knowledge of user experience to make every conversion as effective as possible.

Originally published on Crazy Egg.