How to Track and Reduce Form Abandonment in WordPress

It’s frustrating when people start submitting your WordPress forms but leave without completing them. The problem is that you may not know which field made them leave or why.

The good news is that you can track which fields cause visitors to abandon your forms. You can then fix those issues and get more people to complete your forms.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to track form abandonment in WordPress, step by step.

Here’s the short answer. Use WPForms Pro‘s Form Analytics to find the exact field where visitors abandon. Its Form Abandonment addon can save partial entries and help you reach out to them. Alternatively, you can use Google Analytics for basic form abandonment tracking.

Here’s an overview of everything we’ll cover in this guide:

Why Do Website Visitors Abandon Your WordPress Forms?

Your site visitors may abandon your forms because they get distracted, find the form too long, run into a confusing field, or simply change their mind before hitting the submit button.

When this happens, you miss the chance to convert an engaged visitor into a lead, customer, or subscriber.

Tracking form abandonment reveals exactly where users drop off, allowing you to remove friction and boost your form’s completion rates.

Track Form Abandonment with Form Analytics

The easiest way to track form abandonment is with WPForms. It is the WordPress form plugin that we use on WPBeginner and its built-in Form Analytics highlights field-level drop offs directly in your WordPress dashboard.

Keep in mind that you’ll need a WPForms Pro license or higher to access advanced form analytics. You can read our in-depth WPForms review for more details.

To start, install and activate WPForms. You can check out our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin, which walks you through the entire process, step-by-step.

Upon activation, go to WPForms » Settings and enter your license key. You can find this information in your WPForms account.

After that, click ‘Verify Key.’

You can now create all kinds of forms using WPForms, including a standard contact form, email newsletter signup form, payment forms, and more.

No matter what kind of form you create, you can see its analytics by going to WPForms » All Forms in your WordPress dashboard.

Here, find the form you want to inspect and click its ‘Analytics’ link.

At the top of the report, you’ll see five metrics:

• Views – the number of times the form was displayed to a visitor.
• Interactions – the number of times visitors engaged with the form’s fields.
• Conversion Rate – the percentage of views that ended in a completed submission.
• Abandonments – the total number of times visitors abandoned individual form fields.
• Errors – the number of times a submission failed validation, like a required field left empty or an email address in the wrong format.

Unlike Views, Interactions and Abandonments measure total actions across every field, not individual visitors. If someone leaves a form halfway through, every unfinished field counts as an abandonment. Plus, it only counts an abandonment after an hour of inactivity.

Right below those cards, you’ll find the Form Fields table. This lists every single field in your form along with its own Name, Type, Views, Interactions, Abandonments, Errors, and Avg. Time (m:s) column.

If you want a target to measure against, you can click ‘Set Goal’ on the Conversion Rate card and enter a percentage between 0.1 and 100. The report then shows your current rate against that goal.

Track Form Abandonment for Free with Google Analytics

If you don’t want to use a premium plugin, then use Google Analytics to track the form abandonment rate.

To ensure form tracking is enabled, open Admin in Google Analytics, then go to Data collection and modification » Data streams and select your site.

From there, open the ‘Enhanced measurement’ section and make sure ‘Form interactions’ is enabled.

Google Analytics fires two events when a user interacts with your form (‘form_start’ and ‘form_submit’ events). You can compare these two events in your reports to see how many people have seen your forms and how many of them have submitted them.

Keep in mind that many WordPress form plugins process submissions in a way that enhanced measurement’s basic detection doesn’t recognize. That means the events either fire when they shouldn’t, fire multiple times, or miss the submission entirely.

For accurate form tracking, you’ll have to use a Google Analytics plugin like MonsterInsights.

Recovering Abandoned Form Entries with WPForms

If you don’t recover abandoned form entries, you’ll end up with useless drop-off numbers and no way to contact those visitors who left.

WPForms solves this using its Form Abandonment addon, which automatically saves partial entries as users type. Even if a visitor fills out their name and email but leaves when they hit a phone field, you still capture that core contact information.

Like Form Analytics, this addon requires a WPForms Pro license or higher.

Install and Enable the Addon

To activate this extension, go to WPForms » Addons in your WordPress dashboard. Find ‘Form Abandonment’ and click its ‘Install Addon’ button and then activate it.

After that, open the form you want to capture partial entries for, switch to the ‘Settings’ tab in the form builder, and select ‘Form Abandonment’.

Then turn on ‘Enable Form Abandonment Lead Capture’ for that particular form.

Choose Your Lead Capture Settings

At this point, you’ll see two new options:

• ‘Save only if email address or phone number is provided’ is selected by default. It’s the right choice for most sites because it only saves entries you can actually contact.
• ‘Always save abandoned entries’ keeps every partial entry instead. Typically, this is only useful for anonymous surveys or polls.

We also recommend enabling ‘Prevent duplicate abandon entries’. Without it, one person attempting your form multiple times creates a new entry for every try.

Turning this on merges repeat attempts within the same hour into a single entry holding their most recent answers.

View Your Abandoned Leads

Once the addon has been running for a few days, head over to WPForms » Entries and select your form.

Select the ‘Abandoned’ filter link above the table, which shows all the partial entries you’ve captured.

Inside the table itself, partial entries show as ‘Abandoned’ in the ‘Entry Type’ column, while finished ones show as ‘Completed’.

Keep in mind that this column only appears after you get your first abandoned entry, so don’t worry if you can’t see it yet. Clicking on any entry lets you see exactly what that visitor typed in before walking away.

Follow Up on Abandoned Form Entries

A saved partial entry is only useful if you do something with it. WPForms can email you as soon as someone abandons a form, so you can follow up while your brand is still fresh in their mind.

To set up an alert, open your form in the builder and go to Settings » Notifications. Scroll to the bottom of the page and toggle on ‘Enable for abandoned forms entries’.

It’s a good idea to create a separate notification just for abandoned forms, complete with its own subject line, so your completed entries and lead alerts stay separate.

For the best results, in your notification email, explain what they were filling out and include a direct link back to the form to complete their form submission.

If you want to recover store checkouts instead of basic forms, check out our guide on how to recover WooCommerce abandoned cart sales.

See Why Users Abandon with Microsoft Clarity (Free)

Form Analytics tells you which field is failing, but it won’t tell you what visitors were actually doing on your page, which is where Microsoft Clarity is useful.

Clarity is a completely free behavior analytics tool from Microsoft, with no hidden limits or paid tiers to upgrade to later. Its two best features for forms are session recordings, which replay anonymized videos of real site visits, and heatmaps, which show where visitors clicked and scrolled.

Watching a few people fill out your form can give you insights into why people abandon your site. For example, you can catch someone retyping a phone number four times or scrolling right past a hidden submit button on mobile, making the fix obvious.

You can set this up in just a few minutes by creating a free Clarity project and adding its tracking code to your site. Our step-by-step guide on how to install Microsoft Clarity analytics in WordPress walks you through the exact setup.

The main drawback is that session recordings show you individual human behavior rather than giving you a spreadsheet of overall numbers.

Clarity reveals why an individual visitor struggled, but it won’t tell you how widespread the issue is. For the best results, use it side-by-side with your WPForms analytics.

Tips to Reduce Form Abandonment in WordPress

It’s tempting to collect as much information as you can while you have someone’s attention. However, every extra field gives visitors another reason to leave.

Here are the changes that reduce abandonment most reliably:

• Cut unnecessary fields – If no one acts on an answer, drop the field.
• Split long forms across multiple pages – Multi-page forms show a few questions at a time and feel much shorter compared to one long list.
• Use dedicated form landing pages – Removing menus and sidebars keeps visitors focused on finishing the form.
• Switch to a conversational layout – Conversational forms ask one question at a time, which works well for longer forms and mobile visitors.
• Optimize fields for mobile devices – Make buttons tap-friendly and ensure on-screen keyboards don’t cover the field being typed into.
• Enable inline field validation – Display errors next to fields straight away, rather than rejecting the entry when users hit submit. This is one of the most common reasons why people abandon a form at the final step.
• Hide irrelevant fields with conditional logic – Conditional logic only shows extra questions when a visitor’s previous answers make them relevant.
• Catch exiting visitors with popups – Use OptinMonster’s exit-intent technology to detect when somebody is about to leave the page and give them an extra incentive to stay and complete the form.

FAQs: Track and Reduce Form Abandonment in WordPress

What is the average form abandonment rate?

Published estimates range from roughly a third to over 80%, depending on what a study counted as starting a form and the specific type of form it measured.

The only number that truly matters is your own baseline, which you can read straight off the Abandonments and Conversion Rate cards in WPForms’ Form Analytics.

For checkout forms specifically, research puts the average shopping cart abandonment rate at around 70%.

How do you let users save their form progress in WordPress?

WPForms handles this with its Save and Resume addon which lets visitors save their progress and return later with a single click. It’s particularly useful for longer forms, as it turns an interruption into a simple pause rather than a lost submission.

Video Tutorial: Track and Reduce Form Abandonment in WordPress

Before you go, you might want to watch our video tutorial on how to track and reduce form abandonment in WordPress. Just hit play! ▶️

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Extra Resources for Improving Your WordPress Forms

We hope this guide helped you learn how to track and reduce form abandonment in WordPress. You may also want to see our other helpful guides:

• Best Lead Generation WordPress Plugins (Compared)
• WordPress Conversion Tracking Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Best WordPress Survey Plugins (Compared)

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