How To Build High-Converting Landing Page Forms

The "back button" section feels a little out of place to me. I was expecting some form of pro-active advice much like all of the following sections give, but didn't find any there (did a double take on my first read-through because I thought maybe I had missed it). It might be nice to tie it up with something the reader can actually chew on (along the lines of "make it clear that the user has ended up where they want to be by including signs such as product images, logos, or whatever makes most sense above the fold where the user can see it, and heed the following advice to reduce the chance of users reaching for that button").

A surprisingly good and thorough article. I'm saving it as a checklist.

Great read, very educational. Definitely took a lot from it and now going to revamp the form on our landing page. Thanks for the share!

Where are the examples?

Hey Muddy - One thing that I'd love to add is "site speed"<p>Just about the easiest thing in the world to do, that works virtually every time is to increase site speed by.<p>On average we see load speed for client LPs in the 2.5 - 4 second range.<p>Rule of thumb for us is that 1 second reduction = 10% bump in conversion.<p>Here's a primer of the top 3 things that we do to improve:<p>a) Minimizing HTTP requests in your header that could potentially slow down loading.<p>b) Batching style sheets so that they load in appropriate order - eg client visually sees important elements immediately like headline, text, button.<p>c) Get your heavy weight elements (scripts / images), if not the entire site, onto a Content Delivery Network.<p>More resources on site speed:<p>Google's Site Speed Tax:<p><a href="http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/official-google-news-low-website-speed-will-lower-you-page-rank-and-your-landing-page-conversions/" rel="nofollow">http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/04/official-google...</a><p>Walmart's Real Data on Transactions w/Site Speed:<p><a href="http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/28/4-awesome-slides-showing-how-page-speed-correlates-to-business-metrics-at-walmart-com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2012/02/28/4-awesome-slid...</a><p>List of free &#38; commercial CDNS:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network</a>