How often do web forms change?

Our guiding principle while designing ActiveForms was: forms change. You no longer create forms once and for all. If your form is supposed to sell something, it needs some work—correcting, optimising and testing. Just as websites or Facebook fanpages change, so do your forms.

There may be lots of reasons for changes:

• new product parameters
• new legal regulations
• modification of the form logic—adding, deleting or editing fields
• conversion optimisation
• usability improvements
• spelling corrections

Those reasons come one after the other or all at once. Consequently, your form changes all the time.

We have done some research and checked how often you modify your forms (or more specifically, how often new releases appear). The chart below shows the number of changes to your various forms over 3 months:

What can we see here?

• Fewer than half of the forms didn’t change at all.
• The record-breaking form had 106 releases over the 3-month period.
• The average form had 9 releases, i.e. it changed every 10 days.

With a medium-sized implementation with, say, 40 forms, you need to introduce 120 changes a month or 6 changes per working day!

Can you be so flexible coding forms the old-fashioned way? No chance!