The fastest way to improve a form is not to add anything — it is to take things away. Fields accumulate quietly, one well-meaning request at a time, until the form is twice as long as the job requires and completion has quietly halved.
Run this audit on any form you own. For each field, ask what breaks if it is gone. Most of the time, the honest answer is nothing.
The phone number nobody calls
Phone number is the most over-requested field on the internet. It is demanded by habit and used by almost no one. Unless you genuinely pick up the phone as part of your process, this field is costing you submissions for a number that sits unused.
If you must have it for a small subset of cases, make it optional rather than a gate for everyone.
Fields you can figure out yourself
Some information you are asking for is information you already have or can derive. Do not make the customer do your work.
- How did you hear about us — useful to you, friction to them; keep it optional at most.
- Separate first and last name boxes when one name field would do.
- Confirm your email — a fossil from a decade ago; drop it.
- Company or job title on a form where it changes nothing.
The everything-else text box
A giant anything else you want to tell us box feels generous but reads as effort, and it lands you a heap of freeform text to sort. If you need specifics, ask a specific question. If you do not, cut the box.
One targeted question beats an open invitation to write an essay every time.
Keep only what changes your next move
The rule underneath all of this is simple: a field earns its place only if the answer changes what you do next. If it does not route, price, fulfil or follow up differently, it is decoration — and decoration on a form is just friction.
You can rebuild a leaner version of any form, with only the fields that pull their weight, free at onesol.io/forms.
Run Every Field Through One Question
Before you cut anything, put each field on trial with a single question: what will I actually do with this answer? If the honest reply is "nothing", or "I don't know yet", the field is decoration and it goes. A booking form that asks for a company name you never segment by, or a phone number you never ring, is charging every visitor a small tax for data that sits untouched in a spreadsheet.
The test is stricter than it sounds, because "it might be useful one day" almost always fails it. A field earns its place only when an answer changes what happens next — it routes the enquiry, personalises the reply, or is genuinely required to fulfil the order. Everything else is you collecting information because a form template did, not because your business needs it.
Work down your live form field by field and say the action out loud. "Email — so I can send the confirmation." Good, keep it. "How did you hear about us — so I can... feel curious?" That is a survey question wearing a form's clothes, and it belongs somewhere people have already converted, not in the path to converting.
Replace Questions With Defaults and Inference
The best field is often no field, because you already have the answer or can assume a sensible one. Instead of a first-name and surname pair, use a single "Full name" box — you rarely need the split, and two boxes is two chances to hesitate. Instead of asking people which of your services they want on a general form, make a separate link per service so the choice is already made before they arrive.
"How did you hear about us" is the classic example of a question you can answer for them. Rather than making every visitor guess, put a different link in each place — one in your Instagram bio, one in your email footer, one on the flyer — and read the source from which link they used. You get cleaner data than self-reported guesses, and the visitor gets a shorter form.
The same logic retires date-of-birth when you only need "are you over 18" (a single tickbox), and retires "preferred contact method" when you are only ever going to email anyway. Every time you can infer or default, you remove a decision, and removed decisions are exactly what lift completion rates.
The Fields Worth Keeping — and the Ones to Delete First
Pruning has a floor. You still need one reliable way to reach the person, enough detail to actually deliver what they asked for, and — where the law or your mailing list requires it — a clear consent tick. Cutting those to hit a lower field count is a false economy; you will simply spend the saved time chasing missing information by email, which annoys the customer far more than one extra box ever would.
So aim the scissors at the predictable offenders rather than the essentials. Most forms carry three or four fields that exist purely out of habit, and removing them is the fastest completion-rate win you can make today without redesigning anything. Cut these first, then test the shorter form for a week before you decide whether anything you removed is genuinely missed.
- Phone number on anything you'll only ever email about
- Company or job title on a form that doesn't route by them
- Separate first/last name boxes — merge into one "Full name"
- "How did you hear about us" — infer it from a per-channel link instead