How to Embed Forms in Your Website With Minimal Disruption

The best websites offer slick digital experiences that drive conversions — and web forms play a big part in that. 

By embedding web forms in your website, you can collect valuable information, increase engagement, and turn visitors into leads. In fact, almost 50% of marketers claim that web forms are their highest-converting lead-generation tool.

The key, however, is to embed forms without compromising your website’s design, performance, or user experience (UX). In this article, we’ll guide you through some strategies and techniques to help you do this, including: 

• Choosing the right embedding method
• Ensuring compatibility with different web platforms
• Ensuring smooth functionality and a great UX
• Updating and maintaining your forms

By following the best practices we cover in this guide, you’ll have the knowledge you need to embed forms that enhance your website and drive results. 

What Is an Embedded Form?

Embedded forms are digital forms that are seamlessly integrated into your website’s content. They enable users to submit information without navigating to another page or domain and are placed within the webpage, aligning with its design and flow.

These forms can be used for different purposes — from downloading gated content to booking a demo. Embedded forms play a pivotal role in web integration, enabling businesses to build websites that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional. From the user’s side, they offer a seamless, hassle-free digital experience. 

Why Do We Need Embedded Forms?

Embedded forms are an essential tool for organisations looking to build high-performing websites. They enable you to streamline user interactions and gather crucial data, all while preserving the design and functionality of your website. Here are two key benefits that embedded forms offer:

More Efficient Data Collection

Website visitors don’t want to jump through hoops when submitting information. They want a seamless process with as few steps as possible. Embedded forms provide this by reducing friction in the user journey. 

By enabling visitors to quickly submit data without leaving the page they’re on, embedded forms increase the likelihood of form completion. After all, users are more inclined to complete a form when the experience feels intuitive and non-disruptive. In turn, this improves your business’s bottom line.

Consistent Design and Functionality

Embedded forms become part of your website’s overall design. They enable you to balance brand aesthetics and functional consistency. When done effectively, there are no jarring transitions or mismatched styles. 

Again, this consistency and functionality leads to better results. Visitors feel they’re interacting with a cohesive, professional platform, making them more likely to complete the form.

How to Embed Forms With Minimal Disruption

So how do you go about embedding forms in your website without causing performance issues or disruptions? In this section, we’ll guide you through the process. By following these steps, you’ll be able to integrate forms smoothly while balancing aesthetics and functionality.

1. Choose the Right Form Embedding Method

There are several different ways you can embed forms in your website. The method you choose will have a direct impact on the resources needed to publish and maintain your forms as well as the user experience. 

Traditional embedding methods tend to be relatively complex, requiring some degree of technical expertise — often without the payoff of a slick user experience. Here are some examples:  

• Embedded code: By inserting code directly into a webpage, the form appears naturally within the site’s layout — but it requires some knowledge of HTML.
• iFrames: This is an HTML element that embeds another HTML page within your website code. It essentially adds another webpage within the parent page. Again, some HTML knowledge is required.
• Pop-ups: Opening forms as pop-ops attract the user’s attention, but some may instinctively find it intrusive and off-putting. 

For businesses looking to simplify their form embedding process, there are better alternatives that don’t require technical expertise or complicated integrations. 

Using Formulayt, for example, you can easily embed forms in your website using simple hyperlinks. This significantly reduces the technical resources required in the above-mentioned options, enabling businesses to publish forms faster.

2. Prepare Your Form for Embedding

When preparing your form for embedding, there are several factors to consider to ensure seamless integration into your website. To ensure a slick user experience and reduce the risk of technical issues, focus on the following areas: 

• Mobile responsiveness: People expect to be able to interact with your website on any device. To ensure the best form completion rates, make sure your form works well on mobile devices as well as desktop. 
• Design optimization: Adapt the design of your form to minimize visual disruption. Ensure that the form’s fonts, colours, branding, and layout align with that of your website.

3. Test for Compatibility

Before you publish a form, it’s important to test its compatibility with your website’s platform or content management system (CMS). Your CMS may have platform-specific plug-ins or integrations. By using these, you’ll ensure that your form aligns with the CMS’s technical requirements. 

Most CMS platforms have a preview mode that enables you to check how your website — and the forms you’ve embedded — look and work from the user’s perspective. Use this to verify that everything is functioning as intended. 

You’ll also need to ensure that your form works on various browsers. You can do this manually by testing the form on popular browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Check that:

• The form displays properly without any distorted elements
• All interactive elements (buttons, dropdowns, fields) function as expected
• Any animations, transitions, or embedded media load and perform smoothly

Alternatively, you can use dedicated tools that test compatibility across browsers and devices. 

4. Maintain Website Aesthetics

A well-embedded form should feel like a natural extension of your website, not an external element that’s been clumsily tacked on. To ensure consistent aesthetics, make sure your form’s fonts, colours, and other design elements align with your website’s branding. 

The form builder or form management platform you use will dictate the extent to which you can personalize and customize your digital forms, so choose wisely. For more advanced customization needs, you can also use CSS — the coding language used to style an HTML document.

5. Ensure Smooth Functionality

Your form shouldn’t just look great — it should also work smoothly. If a form suffers from technical glitches or formatting issues, users may be put off completing it altogether. 

To avoid this scenario, perform rigorous quality assurance testing to identify and resolve any performance issues before the form goes live. Make sure you test all elements and steps of your form. For example:

• Enter different types of data in each field — e.g. text, numbers, and special characters
• Check that all dropdown boxes and interactive elements work as expected
• Check for formatting and spacing issues if you have multilingual forms 
• Ensure that error messages appear when forms are submitted incomplete or with incorrect formatting
• Test the form submission and confirmation process — ensure that any “thank you” messages or confirmation emails are triggered
• Check page loading times to ensure a seamless UX

6. Enhance the User Experience

In today’s digital-first world, website UX is a crucial factor in business success. Almost nine out of ten people (88%) won’t return to a site after a bad experience. Because forms are an interactive element, the risk of UX issues is particularly high. 

Well-designed forms that are easy to complete not only improve conversion rates but also leave users with a positive impression of your brand and business. Here are some ways you can ensure a stellar UX across your embedded forms: 

• Create a clear and intuitive layout
• Arrange fields in a logical order
• Keep the number of fields or steps to a minimum
• Provide clear labels and instructions
• Limit visual clutter and distractions
• Establish clear feedback channels for reporting any UX issues

If you are engaging with a global audience, one of the best ways to improve UX is to provide multilingual forms. Providing forms in people’s own language vastly improves completion rates and shows that you care. 

Without the right tech, however, providing multilingual forms can be a major headache from an operational perspective. Make sure you use a form management platform with built-in translation modules and multi-language formatting capabilities. 

7. Updates and Maintenance

Once your form is live, you need to ensure that it remains relevant, effective, and compliant over time. To do this, perform regular maintenance checks and update the content or formatting as needed. For example, you may need to update forms for the following reasons:

• To meet changing business or service requirements
• To incorporate user feedback and make incremental improvements
• To update branding and design elements
• To meet regulatory changes — e.g. adding consent checkboxes or links to your privacy policy

When your internal policies or external requirements change, it can be easy to overlook your web forms in the long list of steps you need to take to ensure compliance. To avoid oversight, build form updates into your business and compliance workflows. 

How the Right Platform Can Help Embed Forms Seamlessly

As you can see, there’s a lot to consider when embedding forms into your website. Managing the steps we’ve outlined above without the right technology can be time-consuming and error-prone. The right platform simplifies the embedding process while ensuring that your forms are highly functional, aesthetically consistent, and compliant. 

So what exactly should you look out for when choosing software? First of all, we recommend going with a comprehensive form management platform. While simple form builders are great at creating forms, they don’t offer the robust capabilities you need to manage all aspects of the form embedding process. 

When it comes to form management platforms, look for those that offer the following key features: 

• Integration options that enable you to connect with your existing tech stack seamlessly
• Embed forms using simple code (not JavaScript or iFrames), enabling forms to be easily added via your CMS
• No-code form builders for rapid form deployment
• Native translation tools and support for multilingual forms
• Compliance checks to meet ever-changing regulatory and internal requirements 
• Built-in analytics for measuring campaign performance

Embed Forms Seamlessly with Formulayt

As the world’s leading form management platform, Formulayt offers a comprehensive suite of form management tools designed to simplify and enhance the way you create, embed, update, and monitor your forms. 

You can rapidly create and deploy web forms using smart templates with predefined standards that ensure compliance with internal policies and procedures. And with our built-in multilingual support, you can ensure accessible and compliant forms across multiple languages and regions. 

Once ready, you can embed your forms easily into your website using simple hyperlinks — no technical expertise required. Formulayt also enables seamless integration with marketing automation and CRM platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Marketo. 

But that’s not all. Formulayt provides robust form management capabilities. You can update entire form estates by making a single change. And with built-in form monitoring, you can get a global view of form performance across your websites and marketing campaigns. 

In short, Formulayt offers something that regular form builders don’t — a complete form management system that streamlines operations, improves marketing ROI, and ensures compliance at scale. To see for yourself, book a demo today.