Landing Page vs Homepage: Which One Should You Send Traffic To?
Sending campaign traffic to your homepage asks the visitor to find their own way. What changes when you send it to a landing page instead, and when it should not.
Your enquiry form asks for nine things. Name, company, email, phone, postcode, service required, budget, preferred contact method, and how did you hear about us. It looks thorough. It looks like a business that takes itself seriously.
It is also the reason the form sits there for weeks without being submitted, while the same visitors ring the number in the header instead, or ring someone else.
Why field count is the number to watch
A form is a negotiation, and every field is one more clause in it. The visitor is not filling in a document; they are deciding, field by field, whether this is still worth the trouble.
Two things make that decision harder as the form grows. The first is simple effort: more typing, on a phone, probably one-handed. The second matters more: every question you ask is a question about how this information will be used. Asking for a budget range before you have said hello reads as a filter you might fail. Asking for a company name when someone is enquiring about their own house reads as a form built for somebody else.
Field count is worth watching because it is the one thing on your page you can count exactly. Design opinions are arguable. Nine is a number.
Deciding your minimum viable form
One question decides your form, and it is not "what would be useful to know". It is: what do I need in order to write the first reply?
Almost always the answer is a name and one way to reach them. Sometimes a sentence about what they want. That is it. Everything else is information you would like eventually, and eventually is not now.
The habit to break is treating the form as an intake document. It is the start of a conversation, and conversations get a second turn. If you need the postcode, the access details and the boiler model, ask in your reply, where they cost nothing, because the person has already committed.
Write your ideal first reply before you design the form. Type out the email you would send to a good enquiry. Then underline every fact you had to know to write it. Those are your fields. Anything you did not underline was never needed at the door.
There is a genuine exception. If your reply is a priced quote and the price turns on one variable (square metres, number of windows, vehicle registration), that variable belongs on the form, because without it your first reply is just another question.
Field by field: what to keep and what to cut
Name. Keep it, as one field. Splitting first and last doubles the taps for no gain.
Email or phone. Keep one. Requiring both is the commonest way to lose someone who would happily give you one and not the other. Make the choice theirs, and say underneath which you will use.
Message. Keep it, and keep it optional. The keen ones write three lines worth more than six dropdowns; the hesitant skip it and still get in touch.
Postcode or town. Keep it only if you have a service area, and say why it is there. Used to check the job is inside the covered area turns a nosy field into a helpful one.
Company name. Cut it. If it matters, it will be in the email signature or the first phone call.
Budget range. Cut it. It feels like a qualification tool and behaves like a deterrent, because the reader does not yet know what a fair range looks like.
Preferred contact method. Cut it. You already have one way to reach them.
How did you hear about us. Cut it. Attribution is a real problem, but the answers people give are guesses anyway.
Long service dropdowns. Cut them past about four options; a long dropdown on a phone is a small ordeal.
Validation, error messages and the mobile keyboard
A short form still fails if the last step is a fight.
Bring up the right keyboard. A phone shows a different keyboard depending on how the field is marked up. Use type="email" for email so the at sign is on the front row, type="tel" for phone numbers so the reader gets a keypad rather than a full alphabet, and inputmode="numeric" for anything that is only digits. The right autocomplete attribute lets the browser fill it in one tap. None of this shows on the page and all of it is felt.
Write errors that say how to fix the problem. Invalid input tells the reader they are wrong and leaves them stuck. Enter a phone number including the area code, digits only tells them what to do next. Put the message beside the field it belongs to, not in a red block at the top.
Validate when they leave a field, not while they are typing. Flagging an email address as invalid at the third character is scolding someone mid-sentence.
Never clear the form. If something fails on submit, every other answer must still be there. Losing the lot is where a mildly annoyed visitor becomes a lost one.
Testing that it actually delivers
Forms break silently, and nobody complains, because the people affected have already gone.
Submit your own form from a phone, on mobile data, as a customer would. Then check the notification arrived, in an inbox somebody reads daily, and not in spam. Check the reply-to address works. Check the thank-you message says what happens next and roughly when.
Then do it again after any change to the site, and once a month regardless. A plugin update, a changed mailbox password or an expired forwarding rule can stop delivery without altering anything you can see on the page.
A three-field form against a nine-field one
A landscaping firm asks for nine fields including budget and access notes. A visitor standing in their garden with muddy hands starts, reaches the budget dropdown, does not know the answer, and closes the tab.
The three-field version asks for a name, a phone number and an optional line about the job. It gets submitted from the garden. The budget conversation still happens, on the phone the next morning, when there is someone to ask.
Trimming a form is a small job, and it is one of the changes we make most often on the sites we look after.
