Nobody knows more about what your users want than the users themselves. So why not ask them?

Regardless of what type of website you’re working on—be it e-commerce, SaaS (software-as-a-service), blog, or magazine site—surveying users on the page will give you the feedback you need to improve the user experience for your audience and increase conversions for your business.

In this quick guide, you’ll learn where on your website to ask questions, which survey questions to ask and best survey question examples.

Table of contents

• Where on your website should you ask survey questions?
• 10 survey questions to ask on your website
• 5 tried-and-tested website usability survey questions
• PS: 8 tips for writing better website survey questions

Where on your website should you ask survey questions?

When you run a survey on your website, the questions you ask are important, but so is the place where you ask them. For example: a landing page is a great place for a survey asking people how they found your site, but not the best one if you’re looking for feedback on the website experience as a whole.

Before you start picking survey questions (more on that in just a few paragraphs), think critically about what you want to accomplish and where the best place to ask your questions may be:

• What pages are crucial to your business?
• Which over- or under-performing page(s) could most benefit from additional insight?
• Where in the conversion funnel have you spotted a leak that needs investigating (funnel analysis will help you with this)?

Thinking about ‘where to ask’ before you get started helps improve your chances of getting truly valuable insight that you can action quickly, instead of unhelpful answers that won’t lead to improvement.

Here are five likely candidates:

1. Homepage surveys

Homepage surveys can be great for getting users’ first impressions of your site—but use them carefully so they don’t distract people and/or disrupt their journey so early on.

Here’s a practical example of a homepage survey used at Hotjar. Hotjar recently worked on a brand project to update their messaging and visuals, and created and tested several variations of the homepage. Anyone who landed on the homepage, whether it was their existing version or one of the variations, was asked this question:

This question, asked 15 to 30 seconds after people landed on the page, helped them learn more about what worked and didn’t, so they could refine their designs at each new iteration:

 A few responses from Hotjar’s homepage survey

2. Landing page surveys

Landing pages are targeted entry points to your website that can be key pages for conversions, so getting their content and structure right is well worth your time.

This is where an on-page survey can help: while data points like conversion rate will give you a black-and-white view of how your landing pages are performing, asking questions will help you color in the data and find out what’s still missing, what’s not crystal clear, and what’s stopping people from continuing their journey across your site.

Example question: What’s stopping you from continuing?

🏆Pro tip: consider triggering a survey only when visitors have spent 30 seconds or more on the page or scrolled halfway down. This solution will help avoid distracting people when they are first reading the page, and also give them time to determine whether they’re able to find the information they need.

3. Thank you page and post-purchase surveys

Thank you pages are a great spot for a quick survey because they target users who have just performed a desired action (e.g., signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product). Asking questions at this stage helps you dig into the details and learn more about what you’re doing right, why people choose you over competitors, or whether there’s anything that almost put them off.

Surveys on success pages can be triggered as soon as a confirmation message appears, ensuring that the user’s journey is complete and fresh in their minds. This is especially valuable if you sell products or services: for example, a post-purchase survey run as soon as a customer has completed an order will help you determine what (if anything) almost stopped them from converting, so you can address the issue for everybody else.

4. Surveys on pages with high exit rates

High exit rates may indicate that users are not getting what they want from a page. By asking a few questions on problematic pages, you can learn more about why people are leaving your website.

If exit rate is not the best indicator of success for your site, you can also poll users on pages with poor conversion rates. The principle is the same: take a page that’s underperforming, and ask your users why.

As with landing page surveys, it’s a good idea to trigger surveys on any pages where you want users to complete an action (such as a pre-sales page) after a set time or scroll length. That way, you’ll avoid distracting users before they’ve read the content.

5. Surveys on cancelation, downgrade, or churn pages

If you run a SaaS website or subscription service, you’ll likely have customers who wish to unsubscribe or downgrade to a lower pricing tier.

Asking a quick question or two after users cancel or downgrade can give you important insight into what made them quit, and help you improve retention rates in the future.

🏆 Pro tip: word your cancelation questions carefully so users are able to freely give negative feedback. One way to do this is to explicitly encourage honest feedback.

Example question: What’s the main reason for your score? Please be 100% honest: we need your feedback to really improve [COMPANYNAME].

10 survey questions to ask on your website

Now that you’ve thought about where to place surveys so you can most benefit from user feedback, it’s time to start asking questions.

You’ll get the best insight from open-ended questions: questions that let users answer in their own words instead of just selecting from multiple-choice answers.

Here are ten open-ended survey questions you can use as a template on your website: feel free to copy, re-word, or expand on any or all of these.

Question	Where to add survey
❓ Where exactly did you first hear about us?	Homepage / Landing page
❓ Did you find the information you were looking for on this page?	Landing page / Product page
❓ What’s the ONE thing missing from this page?	Landing page / Product page / Pages with high exit rates
❓ If you could no longer use this website, what is the ONE thing you’d miss most?	Landing page / Success page
❓ How easy was it to complete your purchase?	Success page / Post-purchase page
❓ What was the main concern or fear you had before purchasing?	Success page / Post-purchase page
❓ What was the main thing that persuaded you to purchase?	Success page / Post-purchase page
❓ Where you looking for anything today that you could not find?	Pages with high exit rates
❓ What could we have done better?	Cancelation, downgrade, or churn pages
❓ Was there anything specifically that made you cancel?	Cancelation, downgrade, or churn pages

5 more examples of usability survey questions from Hotjar’s website

1. What nearly stopped you from becoming a customer?

Hotjar asks customers this question in a post-purchase survey immediately after they sign up for a paid Hotjar plan:

They lead up to the question in two steps:

• First they ask “How would you rate the payment experience?” on a scale from 1 to 5
• Then they ask an open-ended question to get more information

Only at this point, after the person has already been primed to remember what they liked or didn’t, they make sure to ask what nearly stopped them from becoming a customer. This helps learn more about how to improve the payment process and spot any potential issues that might be stopping other website visitors from converting.

2. What’s the main reason you are downgrading/canceling?

This question is ideal for a SaaS company or any business with a subscription revenue model, but you could pose a similar question to people who unsubscribe from an email newsletter.

You can use a simple multiple-choice format for the main question (“What’s the main reason you are downgrading?”), and then use an open-ended question (“Please explain why you are downgrading in your own words”) to get a better understanding of how users feel.

Hotjar got such valuable feedback from this survey that they made it mandatory for all downgrades/cancelations. Here are just a few of the responses they’ve received, which they later used to refine their product and pricing strategy:

3. How likely are you to recommend our product…?

Hotjar asks their customers the standard Net Promoter Score® (NPS) question when they are logged into their dashboard. Referrals and word-of-mouth marketing are really important for them, so they ask a couple of follow-up questions to get as much insight as possible.

4. What should we do to WOW you?

One of the best ways to get happy customers is to go above and beyond what they expect from you. Hotjar uses the “If we could do anything, what should we do to WOW you?” question as one of the follow-up NPS survey questions so they don’t have to guess what their users truly want from them.

5. How helpful is this article?

Many e-commerce and service companies use blog posts and articles to educate customers and bring in new users. But it’s not always easy to know from just quantitative analytics data if content is providing real value to the right people.

To get more insight, Hotjar asks blog visitors if their articles are helpful on a scale from 1 to 5, then follow up with an open-ended question to find out why the content is or isn’t helpful for them. The responses help shape the editorial calendar and write more articles their readers and customers want.

The 15 best website survey questions to ask customers in 2019

 

PS: 8 tips for writing better website survey questions

1. Use simple language

Avoid jargon and technical words whenever possible (unless you clearly explain them), to make it easier for new or less experienced users to understand what you’re trying to say.

2. Don’t ask multiple questions in one

Give your customers one question at a time, and never add an “and why?” option at the end—if you want to know more, ask a separate question instead.

3. Keep the number of questions to a minimum

Shorter surveys will have better completion rates and show your users that you respect their time.

4. Ask open-ended questions

Closed-ended (i.e., multiple-choice) questions will help you quantify the feedback, but open-ended questions give you insight in your users’ own words and will help you find errors or surface ideas you haven’t considered before.

5. Avoid loaded or leading questions

Phrase questions neutrally to get honest feedback and avoid getting only the answers you want to hear.

6. Start surveys with an easy multiple-choice question

Starting with a question that’s easier for users to answer will increase the chances of people actually completing the survey.

7. Experiment with different questions

Keep experimenting with different questions in your surveys and you’ll keep learning what delivers the most actionable insights.

8. Test your surveys on colleagues before sending them out to your customer base

Doing a trial run on your colleagues will help you spot errors or identify ways to improve questions before they go live.