DeveloperTutorials for Web Developers & DesignersForms

Two Stage Registration Forms

The idea of a two-stage registration form is to increase the likelihood a user will sign up, by breaking up a larger form into two separate stages.

A user will initially sign up with only an e-mail address or limited details, and then be asked for more details on a second page. If the user doesn't complete the second stage of registration, at least you have some limited information to add them to your contact database for follow-up.

Keep Your Database Clean & Valuable

Ideally to maintain a valuable, clean database you'll know at least these details about each of your contacts:

  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • E-mail

Requesting a minimum of these details will ensure that your database stays clean and personalized.

The Registration Form

The first registration form requests an e-mail address, first name and last name from the user, and the second stage form requests their address, phone number and date of birth details.

The first stage registration form:
This form would be added to the website design, or on the first page of the two page registration process.

The second stage registration form:

After adding the above code to your second page, you'll need to add some server code to properly re-direct the user back to the page they were originally referred from. If you don't want to redirect the user, simply leave the onsubmitredirect="" attribute blank (or redirect to a success page) and don't worry about the below server code:

*Note: To access the server code for a page, simply open the page with the page editor and select the "Server Code" tab towards the top of the page.