Lead Conversion
Your quote button can be dead for six seconds and nobody will tell you
A form that records every submission can still be losing you customers. What we found on a 34-form site, and the two habits that would have caught it.
Here is a failure that does not show up anywhere you are looking.
The form works. Every submission lands in the CRM. The analytics show visitors on the quote page. And yet the number of enquiries is lower than the traffic says it should be, and you have no idea why, because nothing is broken in any way a dashboard can see.
We found two versions of this on one site in the same week. Both had been there for a while. Both were invisible from the inside.
The button that was waiting for someone else
The visible “Get A Free Quote” button on this site was not the form’s submit control. It was a styled link that a script turned into one after the page loaded. Reasonable enough, and common: the real submit input was hidden so the button could be designed freely.
The script that did the turning lived in a deferred loader, behind an interaction gate, and that loader waited on three third-party stylesheets and three third-party scripts from three different CDNs before it ran. We measured the gap: about six and a half seconds from page load to the button doing anything, with no interaction. Click it before then and nothing happens. Not an error, not a message. Nothing.
Six and a half seconds is a long time for someone on a phone who has already decided to ask for a quote. And if any one of those CDNs was slow that day, the wait was longer. If one of them was down, the button never worked at all, on every page, for as long as the outage lasted.
The fix was small: a second handler that binds the moment the page has parsed, does the job itself if the main script has not arrived yet, and steps aside if it has. The lesson is not small. Anything the visitor has to click should work without waiting for anything you do not control.
The confirmation page that quietly went away
The second one was simpler and did more damage.
Every quote form on the site redirected to a confirmation page after submitting. That page had been switched to draft by accident, so it returned a 404. The submissions still recorded. From the inside, everything looked normal.
From the outside, a customer filled in a form, pressed the button, and got “Page Not Found.” So they did what anyone would do: they went back and submitted again. Sometimes twice.
We could see exactly when it happened, because the repeat-submission rate told us. Before the page went down, 1.3% of submissions were duplicates. After it, 23.8%. Nearly a quarter of the people asking for a quote were being told, in effect, that it had not worked. Some of them will have believed it and gone elsewhere. That number we cannot see.
Two habits that would have caught both
Neither of these needed a monitoring product. They needed two habits.
Watch the ratios, not the totals. Total submissions looked fine through the whole outage. The duplicate rate did not. Any metric that is a ratio of two things you already collect (repeats to submissions, submissions to quote-page visits, form loads to form completions) will tell you about a failure that totals hide.
Test from outside, on a phone, without being logged in. Every check that had been done on this form was done by someone who knew how it was supposed to work, on a fast connection, already interacting with the page. The customer is none of those things. Once a week, open your own site on your own phone over mobile data, and try to become a customer. It takes two minutes and it finds the things that dashboards do not.
What it looks like fixed
The confirmation page is back. The button binds immediately, and falls back gracefully if the main script is late. Every form on the site now carries the same attribution fields, so a lead from an ad arrives looking like a lead from an ad rather than a referral, which is a separate problem we found on the same pass and will write up separately.
None of it is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a form that records submissions and a form that gets you customers.
Common questions
How do I find out if my own quote button has this problem?
Open your site on a phone with the connection throttled in the browser's developer tools, and press the button the moment the page appears. If nothing happens until the page has fully settled, the button is waiting on a script. Then block one of your third-party scripts and try again.
Every submission reaches our inbox. Isn't that enough?
It tells you the form works for the people who reached it and waited. It says nothing about the people who pressed the button before it was live, or who saw a broken confirmation page and left. Watch the repeat-submission rate and test the page the form sends people to, not just the inbox.
What would have caught the dead confirmation page sooner?
A check that loads the page every form redirects to and raises a flag when it stops returning one, and a monthly look at the repeat-submission rate. Both are small to set up, and either would have shown the problem on the first day rather than after a week.
More in this category
The form works. So why is the lead not in your CRM?
A form can accept a submission and still fail to deliver the lead. Here are the four places it goes missing, and how to find out which one is yours.
How many fields should a quote form have?
Every field you add costs you submissions, and some of them earn it back. How to decide which questions belong on the form and which belong on the call.
Why your leads arrive with no idea where they came from
If most of your leads show up as direct traffic, the forms are the reason, not the analytics. Here is what to check and what it costs you.
Want this looked at on your site?
If your quote form has never been tested from a phone on a slow connection, that is the first thing we do on the audit call.