Trust
Phone and email fields bring up the right keyboard
trust.form-field-wrong-type
Why this matters
A box expecting an email address should be marked as one. When it is not, a phone shows the ordinary letter keyboard rather than the one with the @ sign on it, and the browser does not check the address looks plausible before the form is sent. The same goes for a phone number, which should bring up the number pad. It is a single word in the markup and it is the most common reason a mobile enquiry form feels awkward to use.
Who fixes it
You can, usually
Roughly how long
15 minutes
Care needed
Low risk to change
How to fix it
Change `type="text"` to `type="email"` or `type="tel"` on the fields named here. Nothing else needs to change — every browser falls back to a plain text box if it does not understand the type, so there is no compatibility risk. Do not add pattern validation to a phone field at the same time: people write phone numbers in a great many valid ways.
On your platform
WordPress
Every form plugin has the right field type in its palette and it is usually a matter of having picked the wrong one. WPForms and Gravity Forms have dedicated Email and Phone fields — swap the field rather than editing the markup, because the plugin's own validation comes with it. In Contact Form 7 the tag itself is the type: `[email* your-email]` rather than `[text* your-email]`.
Shopify
In the theme's form section. Shopify's own themes use the right types on the contact form, so this generally means the section has been edited or the form comes from an app.
Drupal
Webform's element types include Email and Telephone; change the element type rather than the markup, and the validation follows.
Joomla
The forms extension's field type. Joomla's core contact form has fixed field types, so a wrongly typed field there means a template override is in play.
How we score it
Failing this check takes up to 12 points off your trust score. It is a fact about your site rather than a measurement, so it reads the same on every scan until you change something.
Does your site pass this one?
This check runs on every scan, along with the other 121. Free, no account, and you see the evidence for each result.
Check my siteOther trust checks
- Analytics can account for where your visitors came fromAnalytics sorts every visit into a channel — search, direct, social, email and so on — and puts the ones it cannot work out into 'Unassigned'. A large unassigned share usually means campaign links are being tagged inconsistently, or a redirect is stripping the tracking parameters off them. The effect is that the channels which *are* recognised look smaller than they are, and whatever is being spent on the unrecognised one cannot be judged at all.
- Analytics keeps enough history to answer a question about last yearGoogle Analytics throws away the detailed data behind your reports after a set period, and the shortest option is the one every property starts on. Two months is not enough to compare this Christmas against last one, or to look back at what a campaign actually did. The headline totals survive, but the ability to ask a new question about an old period does not — and it cannot be recovered later, because the data is gone rather than hidden.
- Analytics knows what counts as a success on this siteA key event is how you tell Analytics that something mattered — a form sent, a purchase, a call button pressed. Without any, the property can tell you how many people came and nothing at all about whether any of it worked. Every question worth asking of analytics data is some version of 'did this bring us business', and none of them can be answered by a property that has never been told what business looks like.
- Analytics knows which page your visitors arrived onThe landing page is the first page of a visit, and it is how you tell which of your pages actually bring people in. Sessions recorded as '(not set)' are ones where Analytics never saw a first page — usually because the visit was measured before the page view arrived, or a single page application changed the address without telling Analytics. Those sessions still count in your totals but cannot be credited to any page, so the pages doing the work look less important than they are.
- Analytics reports on the same day your business doesEvery date in Analytics is drawn against the property's timezone, so it decides when 'today' starts and ends. A property reporting on a timezone several hours from the business means daily figures cut the day in an odd place — yesterday's sales include this morning's, and a comparison between two days is comparing two overlapping windows. It is easy to set when a property is created and almost never revisited.
- Browsers are allowed to fill in your formsSetting autocomplete to off tells the browser not to offer a visitor their own saved details. On a phone that turns a form somebody could have completed with one tap into a dozen fields typed with a thumb, and every extra field measurably costs completions. It is almost always inherited from a template or added years ago to stop a browser suggesting the wrong thing, and on a password field it is worse than useless: password managers ignore it, so the only people it stops are the ones typing by hand, who then choose something they can remember.