Here's a problem you'll almost never hear about. Someone wants to sign up, book or buy. They fill in your form, press the button, and get an error. They try again, it fails again, and they leave.

They don't email you. They just go somewhere else. From your side, it looks like a slightly quiet week.

Why forms turn real people away

Every form has rules about what it accepts. A person writes those rules, or, more and more often, an AI tool does. Either way, they tend to be written with an ordinary-looking name and address in mind. Real customers are far more varied than that.

Here are some real details that forms often reject:

  • Names: O'Brien (an apostrophe), Anne-Marie (a hyphen), José or Zoë (accents), van der Berg (spaces), Ng or Li (only two letters), or someone who has only one name.
  • Email addresses: ones with a plus sign (like sam+shop@example.com), capital letters, or a newer ending like .studio or .london.
  • Phone numbers: typed with spaces, with +44 at the start, or with brackets.
  • Postcodes: typed with or without the space, in lower case, or from outside the UK.
  • Addresses: a flat number, a house name instead of a number, or a long street name that doesn't fit the box.

Each of these is a real person. Each one gets "Something went wrong", and no idea what to change.

Test your own form in ten minutes

You don't need any technical knowledge for this, only your form, an email address you can check, and the details below.

  1. Use an email address you control. Then you can find and delete your test sign-ups afterwards. If the form takes payment, stop before you pay.
  2. Try these details, one change at a time:
    • the name Siobhán O'Brien
    • the name Anne-Marie van der Berg
    • the name Li Ng
    • your own email address with +test added before the @ (for example, yourname+test@gmail.com). Gmail delivers these to your normal inbox, and many other email providers do too.
    • the phone number +44 7700 900123, typed with the spaces
    • the postcode sw1a1aa, in lower case with no space
    • the address line Flat 2, The Old Mill
  3. Write down what happens each time. Did it go through? If not, what did the message say, and did it tell you what to change?
  4. Try it on your phone too. Many customers fill in forms on a phone, where autofill and small screens bring problems of their own.
  5. Tidy up. Delete your test sign-ups, so they don't end up in your numbers or your mailing list.

What good looks like

A good form accepts every one of those details. And when it does have to say no, it says why, in words a person can act on: "Please add the number from your street address", not "Invalid input".

"Something went wrong" isn't an answer. It's a dead end, and the customer pays for it, then you do.

If your form turned someone away in your test, you've found real customers you've been losing. Take your notes to whoever built the form: the list of what didn't go through, and what the message said, is exactly what they need to fix it.

If the form looks fine and sign-ups are still low

Sometimes every test goes through and sign-ups are still lower than they should be. Then the problem is often behind the form, in what happens after someone presses the button: the confirmation email that never sends, or the record that never reaches your list.

That part is hard to see from the outside, and it's what my starter review looks at, read-only. I read how it's built, including anything written by AI tools, so you don't have to. Here's an example of the findings note you'd get.