The UX Industry Has Been Wrong for a Decade: Multi-Step Forms Are Destroying Business Revenue

New data exposes how the most widely adopted form design practice is silently costing businesses billions. Here is what to do instead.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA - IvyForms, a leading web form platform, today released a landmark analysis challenging one of digital marketing's most sacred conventions: that breaking forms into multiple steps improves completion rates. The findings, backed by data from the Baymard Institute, Zuko Analytics, and ConversionXL, reveal that for the vast majority of use cases, multi-step forms do not boost conversions. They crush them.

At a time when the average business loses 7 out of 10 potential customers before a single form is submitted, IvyForms.com is calling out an industry-wide blind spot that has persisted for over a decade, and it starts with the "Next" button.

The Myth That Spread Unchallenged

The theory behind multi-step forms borrowed from cognitive load psychology: show users less at once, reduce overwhelm, and completions will rise. This logic spread through UX blogs, design conferences, and product teams, becoming the default approach for everything from checkout flows to newsletter signups.

There was one problem: nobody stress-tested the assumption across different contexts. And the data, when properly examined, tells a starkly different story.

BY THE NUMBERS

81% of users who start a multi-step form abandon it before finishing. Step 2 (contact info) is the single biggest drop-off point, causing up to 81% abandonment alone.

13.85% completion rate for multi-page forms versus 53% for well-optimized single-page forms; a nearly 4x performance gap that most businesses are unaware of.

$260B in lost e-commerce revenue is recoverable annually across US and EU markets through better form design, according to Baymard Institute research.

-63% relative drop in mobile conversion rate versus desktop (1.53% vs 4.14%), made worse by multi-step designs built for desktop users, despite mobile now exceeding 50% of global web traffic.

Every Click Is an Exit Door

"Designers assume that breaking a form into smaller steps feels less intimidating," the IvyForms report states. "What it actually does is multiply the number of moments a user can decide to leave; and on mobile, where every tap is a commitment, that cost compounds fast."

Baymard Institute data shows that 18% of users abandon checkout processes specifically due to perceived complexity. Each page transition (the load, the animation, the updated progress bar) introduces micro-friction. Zuko Analytics found that users abandon comparison forms after an average of just 50 seconds, often because the progress indicator makes the remaining effort feel too steep.

Counterintuitively, progress bars, long touted as a motivational tool, may actually accelerate abandonment. When users don't know how long something will take, they keep going. When they see "Step 2 of 5," they do the math and quit.

The Exceptions Are Real, But Narrow

The report is careful to distinguish when multi-step forms genuinely work. Insurance applications achieve 95% completion once started. Mortgage and loan applications see 75% completion. These forms share a critical trait: the user arrives with high intent and genuinely expects complexity.

"The distinction is user intent and contextual expectation," the report explains. "Nobody expects a quick insurance quote. But for a newsletter sign-up, a contact form, or a lead gen page? Asking users to click through three screens is asking them to leave", says Bogdan Sandu, a web designer with 20 years of experience and who's written numerous articles for online publications like Design Your Way, TMS Outsource, or WPDean.

The universal mistake is applying multi-step logic to short, low-commitment forms: precisely the context where it causes the most damage.

What the Data Demands Instead

The IvyForms analysis points to single-page form design as the evidence-backed alternative for most use cases, paired with aggressive field reduction:

* Cutting from 11 fields to 4 produces a 120% conversion increase (HubSpot/Formstack data)
* Making phone number optional alone recovers up to 275% of previously lost conversions
* Single-column layouts complete 15.4 seconds faster than multi-column equivalents
* Removing just one unnecessary field typically yields a 26-50% conversion boost across studies

The business impact is stark: a mid-size e-commerce retailer processing 10,000 monthly visitors at a 2% conversion rate stands to gain $60,000 in annual revenue from form changes that take a single week to implement.

"The industry adopted multi-step as gospel without testing the assumption across different contexts. The data has been there. We just weren't looking." - Bogdan Sandu from the IvyForms Research Team

About IvyForms

IvyForms is a WordPress Form Builder. Combining smart design defaults with conditional logic, mobile-first architecture, and real-time analytics, IvyForms helps businesses replace forms that leak revenue with forms that drive it. The full research report is available at ivyforms.com.

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