Gravity Forms: How to return the user to the form / validation message if they make a form submission and there are errors with their submission.
If you are using Gravity Forms and care about your user experience – and therefore your conversion rate – you need to use this simple filter.
(A filter is just a piece of code you will add to your theme functions file to add functionality)
What it will do, is when a visitor on your site completes a form and there are validation issues: ie. a required field is not competed, email format is wrong etc. It will bring them back to the actual validation message on the form letting them know there an issue.
Why? – The standard Gravity Forms configuration works like this: A user completes the form. The submission happens and Gravity Forms validates the details submitted. If there are issues, the page refreshes and the form displays the validation error message (letting the visitor know there were issues) and the fields with issues are highlighted.
The problem is, when the page reloads, the visitor is back at the top of the page – not at the form. So they can’t see the message. They may think the form submitted and be on their way.
Adding this filter will return the visitor to the validation message on the form if there is an error. So they see the problem, correct it and re-submit.
This is particularly helpful if the visitor in on their phone or with a less engaged audience. EG: a visitor coming from a Facebook ad to a lead form is not likely to go scrolling down the page looking for validation errors.
And because it makes things easier for the visitor (and they actually know there’s an issue), you get a higher conversion rate.
It’s simple and takes 30 seconds. Just paste the code below into your theme’s functions.php file and it works.