18 Website Survey Questions Examples, Plus How to Start Asking Them

Additionally, we'll share tips on when and where to display your website feedback survey, along with tools to implement these survey question ideas effectively.

Let's dive in…

16 general website survey questions to start asking your visitors

Let’s start with questions that can provide valuable information no matter what your website is about. Note that each survey form example below is an interactive template you can tweak and add to your website.

1. How did you hear about us?

Analytics tools can give you a lot of quantitative information about where your website visitors come from, but they'll never be able to give you the qualitative data that asking this question provides.

Figuring out how visitors discovered your website/business lets you double-down on the marketing strategies with the best ROI, which helps your website grow.

When to display this survey

The most common practice is to display this survey on a Thank You page, after a visitor has converted into a customer or a subscriber. This way, you’ll be able to tell which marketing channels your ideal customers come from.

2. How likely are you to recommend our website to a friend?

You've probably seen this before — it's a very popular survey question called Net Promoter Score (NPS). You can ask it as a standalone question or make it a part of a bigger website survey.

The Net Promoter Score is designed to be a single customer satisfaction benchmark. Ideally, you measure it over time so that you can see how your efforts affect customer satisfaction.

If your Net Promoter Score goes up, your customers are happier. If it goes down… well, that's not good.

Net Promoter Score works by giving visitors a scale from 0-10 and asking them something like “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend X to a friend?”. If someone answers between 0-6, they're a detractor. Scores of 7-8 are passive, and scores of 9-10 are promoters.

To calculate your Net Promoter Score, you simply subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. As a result, your score can range all the way from -100 up to 100.

If you only plan to ask one question, this is one of the best general user experience survey questions to ask.

When to display this survey

Ideally, you want to display the NPS survey soon after a customer interacts with your business. That is, on a Thank You page or an Order confirmation page. However, you can also create an NPS survey using a form builder like Getform, and send it to your customers in a post-purchase email.

3. What are you hoping to accomplish by visiting our website?

To improve your website's usability, you need to know exactly what it is that your visitors are hoping to accomplish.

Now, as the website's creator, you probably already have a pretty good idea. But asking visitors this question directly can help you flesh out your understanding with real customer data, which might give you some helpful insights into how you can refine your website's design and messaging.

When to display this survey

Soon after a visitor arrives at your website. If you want to survey engaged visitors only, you can display this question after they spend a few seconds on your website or view more than one page.

4. Why are you leaving?

Obviously, this question requires that you use a tool that lets you trigger survey questions by exit intent (we'll explain how to do this at the end of the post). If you do have such a tool, this is a great way to figure out what's causing your website's visitors to leave without converting.

Then, if possible, you can fix those leaks and boost your visitor engagement.

When to display this survey

Obviously, you should only display this survey as your visitors start heading to exit. However, you can strategically display it on different pages, too. For example, those abandoning a product page because they didn’t find a sizing chart will be different from those who abandon a shopping cart because they didn’t like shipping costs.

5. Are you having trouble finding anything?

This is one of the best website survey questions about usability to help you figure out how easily your visitors can locate information and perform important actions.

If you find that visitors consistently struggle to find certain information, you might want to rethink how you structure your website.

When to display this survey

For the best results, you should wait to trigger this question until you see that a visitor has spent a non-trivial amount of time on your site.

6. Is there anything missing on this page?

This question ties with the question above but gets a little more specific by focusing on a single page.

The goal with this question is to find any mismatches between a visitor's expectations and what's actually on your page.

For example, maybe the way that you organized your content is logical to you, but if you find that many of your visitors think it's more logical to organize your content in a different way, that would be a good indicator that you need to rethink your content hierarchy.

When to display this survey

Similarly to the previous question, this one will bring meaningful insights if you display it to visitors who’ve spent a lot of time on a page or scrolled all the way to the bottom.

7. How did your experience compare to your expectations?

This is another useful question for ferreting out any weak points in your website.

You can gain two insights from it.

First, you get to understand more about the goals and expectations that visitors have for your site in the first place. This helps you figure out what you should be optimizing for.

Second, it lets you figure out some of the weak spots that need to be corrected for your website to better meet visitors' expectations.

When to display this survey

The best timing for this question depends on your customer journey and what you consider to be an experience for your visitors. You can display it at the exit, after a visitor has completed a certain action, or send this survey via email after a customer has experienced your product or service.

8. Is our pricing clear?

Beyond acting as a good website survey question about usability, this question also provides valuable information to your sales team and contributes to the feedback on your pricing strategy.

When to display this survey

This is a great question to trigger if you notice that a visitor has been browsing your pricing page for some time.

9. What should we write about next?

If you have an active blog, this is a great question to help you shape your content strategy. It lets you know which topics visitors would like to see more of, and that helps you create content to resonate with your visitors' needs.

When to display this survey

You want to ask this question those who actually consume your content, so the best moment to display it would be at the end of your articles. Note that you can use both pop-up and inline forms for this survey.

10. Which of our competitors did you consider before choosing us?

This one is a useful competitor research question to help you figure out who you're actually competing against.

Sure, you've probably done your own competitor research. But who you think you're competing against might not always match up with who your visitors think you're competing against.

Asking this question helps you find those mismatches and tailor your messaging to beat out your real competitors.

When to display this survey

You can display this survey to all first-time visitors after they’ve spent some time on the page or scrolled down. However, if you only want to hear from those who’ve bought from you, you can either display it on a conversion confirmation page or ask this question in your post-purchase sequence.

11. Compared to our competitors, is our product quality better, worse, or about the same?

This question provides another chance to get insight into your competitors. Only this time, it's a little bit more aggressive by asking your visitors to compare how you're doing against your competitors.

As with the other question, you can use these responses to figure out what you're doing well, and which weaknesses might cause people to go to your competitor(s) instead.

When to display this survey

Ideally, you want to pair it with the previous question.

12. How easy was it to use our website? Did you have any problems?

This one is one of the best usability survey questions to figure out how easily your website's visitors can accomplish their goals. It can help you understand what you're doing well… or what you need to do better to improve the experience for your visitors.

When to display this survey

As the wording of the question implies, you want to ask it when an experience – whether it’s a shopping journey or a registration – is complete for a visitor.

13. What is a feature you wish our website had?

You can treat this question as a suggestion box if you’re open to absolutely all ideas. Or, if you already have several feature options in mind, you can use a survey to see which ones are in higher demand.

Be careful with this question because sometimes visitors will suggest that you add everything and the kitchen sink to your website. But as long as you keep a discerning eye and avoid scope bloat, listening to feature requests is a great way to figure out ways to improve your website or service.

When to display this survey

It only makes sense to ask this question to those visitors or customers who are engaged with your website. Consider displaying it either with a time delay or embedding the form into your blog content.

14. If you could change one thing about our website, what would it be?

This question dovetails with the previous question, but it's a little more pointed. First, you're no longer asking for a “new” feature. Instead, you're asking visitors how to improve something that you already have.

Second, you're forcing people to narrow things down by only asking for one thing. If you notice a pattern in users' responses, you might want to consider making the change.

15. Are there any features that you don't find helpful?

This is similar to the previous question, but a little more general by asking about multiple features.

16. What is the most useful feature of our website?

The previous two questions help you find what you're doing wrong — this one does the opposite, helping you discover what visitors love about your website.

If you notice a pattern here, you can consider adding that feature more prominently in your site's copywriting and messaging. After all, if a lot of visitors love one specific feature, that feature is probably a good incentive to dangle for prospective visitors/customers.

Two ecommerce survey questions to help improve your store

These last two questions are more focused on getting valuable insights to improve your ecommerce store sales. They still might provide value for other types of websites, but ecommerce is the main focus.

17. What was the one thing that almost stopped you from buying today?

If you run an ecommerce store, this is a great question to ask a shopper immediately after they've finished their purchase. It lets you know about any weak points in your sales funnel that might stop you from getting the sale.

A noteworthy alternative to this question is “What convinced you to buy from us today?”

When to display this survey

Immediately after the transaction is complete, which is either on a Thank You page or an Order Confirmation page of your website.

18. How can we help you complete your purchase?

Tied with the question above, this is another great one to ask. You can use exit-intent trigger to display it. This way, if a user seems like they're going to leave the checkout process or close out their cart, the question will pop up.

This survey will help you find leaks in your checkout process that are negatively affecting your conversion rate.

When to display it

You can display this survey when a visitor is about to leave without purchasing. The indication of that would be the abandonment of either a shopping cart or a product page.

Create a website survey within 15 minutes with Getsitecontrol

Up until now, we've shared a lot of suggestions for website surveys, as well as some tips on when to trigger certain questions.

However, what we have not covered is how you can actually do that. For example, how do you trigger a survey right as a visitor is about to leave (exit intent), or how do you only display a website feedback survey after a visitor makes a purchase?

To help you create targeted website surveys, you can use Getsitecontrol. This is an easy-to-use tool that lets you display popups and forms, including survey forms, anywhere on your site.

You can pick one of the survey forms from their template gallery and modify it to your needs within 10 minutes:

All you’ll need to do is edit the text of the questions and responses, adjust the design to align it with your website, and choose where and when you want to display it.

For example, if you wanted to ask the “Is our pricing clear?” question from above, you could use Getsitecontrol's Targeting rules to only display your question on your pricing page.

Or, if you wanted to ask the “Why are you leaving?” question to visitors who are about to leave your site, you could select the following targeting condition: Start to display the widget when the user is leaving the website.

Website surveys work best when paired with email surveys

We’ve talked a lot about surveying people while they are on the website. But you may also want to survey those who have made a purchase or joined your email list.

This is when tools like Getform come in handy. It allows you to share a form via a direct link, so that you can paste it to your Instagram bio or send it to your email subscribers.

Once the recipient clicks the link, a fullscreen survey form pops up as a new window, and they will be able to fill it out right there.

With Getform, you’ll be able to fully customize the form, add any field types, place your logo and even adjust the style of the text to match it with your branding.

A direct link to a survey form allows for sharing it with a wider audience, meaning you’ll get more insight for your research.

And that’s about it. By combining these rules, you can make sure that you only display your questions to visitors who will provide meaningful insights.