How To Use Success Pages… Successfully

This week we’re looking at the importance of using a success page, and why if you are not using them, you should be using them, simples.

“I’ve Pressed Send But Nothing’s Happened!”

It’s dark outside, raining and you’ve spent the last 25 minutes completing a long application form before you press the send button and turn in for the night. Knowing that this long painful form will give you a little sense of achievement that will leave you smiling as you brush your teeth… and then it happens.

You press send.

The page refreshes.

You stare at the screen puzzled.

The form you spent all that time completing, sacrificing watching an episode of Ex On The Beach is blank.

What’s happened?!

Have I lost what I wrote? Did the form timeout? Have I got to do it again?

Then you see it. After submitting your form the page did refresh, and after scrolling down slightly you spot a confirmation message that says “Thanks, your message was sent”.

This Is Not A Horror Story, But It Certainly Feels Like One

The success message is a very common feature of many web forms. On completion, display a thank you message. This makes sense, but if it appears on the same page, or worse hidden on the same page, any success message might be difficult to spot. This can scare the hell out of people if they think they’ve wasted their time, and have got to complete the form all over again.

Fortunately, there is another way, and for WordPress users it can be super easy to do.

Direct To A Thank You Or Success Page

If you’re using any number of contact form plugins for the forms on your website, the default setting is generally to show a thank you message.

As with the story highlighted above, the user experience of this approach can leave your visitors worrying, searching, and potentially completing the form again. All because there was no obvious confirmation or result of them completing the form.

Shown below, is a sample request form that I completed on a WooCommerce website. Whilst this wasn’t an intensive form to complete, I had typed out a wordy message, and seeing a blank page left me confused.

I was on my desktop, so the page refreshed back to the top. So after scrolling down again I eventually saw the message. Mobile users would need to scroll down considerably further, and that’s the core thing here.

The more scrolling required, the easier it is to overlook the confirmation message.

A Different Page And Larger Message Provides Immediate Clarity

Not long after the example above, I was completing another sample request form from a different company in the same industry. Whilst the form was similar, the outcome was very different.

After pressing the send button on this form, I immediately knew that something had happened, because I was greeted with a bold message. There is no being left wondering or needing to scroll to find a hard to see message.

Traditionally, thank you pages or success pages were ideal for conversion tracking purposes. But nowadays, tracking is not reliant on having a new page load to fire. But in refreshing the page and serving a success message, although tracking might work, it doesn’t benefit the user experience.

Creating A Thank You Or Success Page And Assigning It In Gravity Forms

At Impact Media we are not lovers of plugins in most cases, that is no secret. However, some plugins are so good, we actually endorse them because they benefit what we do. Gravity Forms is one of those plugins.

We install Gravity Forms on nearly every website we build, and even for those sites we take over the support and development for, where the client allows it. Replacing the likes of Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms and so on.

Gravity Forms makes creating success or thank you pages in WordPress super easy for most users.

1. Go to pages, add new page.
2. Write a headline ‘ Thank you for contacting us’
3. Write some words of gratitude or provide a summary on what to expect as the next steps.
4. Place a button or buttons giving the user some paths to continue browsing.
5. Name it success or thank you (ensure it’s not included in the main page menus, and make it non-indexable) and publish!

Above is an example of a thank you/success page we created for Leaf Water. We include them as standard as part of all our website builds. They may not be ground breaking in layout or style, but they serve a critical purpose. Which is to assure the user that their form has been submitted successfully, and to inform them of the next steps they can expect after having taken this action.

Once the page has been created, and a form has been created in Gravity Forms, you simply select the CONFIRMATIONS tab for the form, and change the Text Confirmation (the default offering, we talked about at the start of this story) to Page. Then you just need to select the page you created from the list.

The save your confirmation choice, and don’t forget to test it out, to ensure everything is working as expected.

It should display your page after you have completed the form.

That is how easy it is to create success page in WordPress and to set it up as the confirmation in Gravity Forms.

So What’s To Swipe & Deploy?

First of all, do you know if your forms are showing success pages or success messages, which get easily camouflaged on the page?

If you are unsure then fill out some of your contact forms and see what happens? Where do the breadcrumbs lead?

If it’s not to a success page, then follow the steps above and start creating one. It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking.

The key takeaway today is the importance of having an alternate page to deliver the user to, so they can visibly see that something has changed. That small change can improve the user experience, as you are not leaving them wondering or scrolling for confirmation of success.

That’s a wrap for Swipe & Deploy 064 this week. Join me next time where I will share another insight or inspiration piece from around the web.