Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Signup Pages

Nearly every product starts with a sign up page and they have a huge impact on revenue, a 10% drop in people signing up successfully is a 10% drop in revenue.

We have collected some data backed falsehoods that we have come across for sign up pages.

User Identifiers and Input

Asking for more information is always better:

• Hubspot has a great study showing the impact of each additional input.

One account maps to one person:

• Accounts can represent a whole company, a family or another group of people
• Up to 45% of accounts are shared
• B2B is not immune with 34% of people admitting to sharing accounts with colleagues

Emails are always prefilled

• 34% of signups have their email prefilled

Phone numbers are always prefilled.

• 17% of signups have their phone number prefilled

Users always save the password.

• Logins are only prefilled 45% of the time

Users won't forget/lose their passwords.

Users always enter their email correctly.

• 0.5-1.0% of email addresses are typed incorrectly.
• Fun Fact: Yahoo emails are typed incorrectly twice as often as Gmail.

Emails will always be valid.

Emails will always be owned by the user.

All signups are from a person.

• We have observed hundreds of accounts created in a single day by just one automated system.

Free email addresses aren't used for B2B.

You need to ask for password confirmation.

Third Party Logins

Everyone has a third party account (eg. Google, Facebook or Apple).

People who have a third party account will always login via the button rather than email.

Third party logins have lower conversion rates.

• Auth0 saw increased a 20% increase in conversation rates from using third party logins.

Verification & Abuse

Emails will be verified on the same device the user signed up from.

Blocking emails with "+" in them will solve trial or signup abuse.

• 0.04% of all signups using email include a "+"
• 2.9% of multi-accounting attempts are done using a "+" email

Blocking disposable emails will solve trial or signup abuse.

• The vast majority of multi-accounting is done using multiple regular free email accounts

Blocking free email accounts will solve trial or signup abuse.

• Not only does this send away a lot of legitimate customers, most people conducting trial or signup abuse have access to at least one non-free account

.edu addresses guarantee the person is a student or teacher.

.student.edu or similar addresses guarantee the person is currently a student.

We would love to hear any suggestions to add to the list in the comments on Hacker News or feel free to send us suggestions via contact us.