How to Edit a Published Form

Looks like you’re trying to edit a published form. Before you do this, check this short article – it’ll help you safely edit your form without affecting statistics and user experience.

Let’s clear things up first. When your form is published, people can access it on your website or through a direct link. Some users may be filling it out as you read this guide. Editing a published form means that users will see your changes in real time. Minor changes usually don’t confuse users while major ones may significantly affect the responses. Let’s talk about each type of edits in more detail to help you find the best solution.

Minor Editing

Minor edits are those that don’t affect the overall appearance and functionality of the form. Such changes may include renaming the form, correcting spelling or punctuation mistakes, etc. If you’re sure that your edits won’t confuse users, you can edit your published form on the spot.

Major Editing

Rewriting questions, removing or rearranging fields, changing the design – all of these are examples of major changes. We do not recommend implementing them in real time since they may disorient and irritate users. As a result, you’ll lose potential customers and their responses as well. However, there’s a safe way to make major modifications in your form.

Consider the following example:

We have a published form for collecting emails. In the My Forms section it’s called Email Form. The form is located at https://username.aidaform.com/email-form-example where username is a username at AidaForm and email-form-example is the unique name for the form itself.

We need to add two more fields to the form – Full Name and Phone. Plus, we want to make the form more visually attractive, so we’ll change the color theme as well. But how to safely implement the changes? In short, we’ll open the published form (call it Form A), make a copy of it (call it Form B), introduce changes in the Form B, and finally give the Form B the web address of the Form A. To correctly perform these actions, see the following step-by-step instruction.

1. Make a Copy of the Form A

In your member’s area, select the published email collection form (Form A) and click its name in the top left corner of the website. In the dropdown menu choose Clone This Form. Alternatively, you can copy the form in the My Forms section – just click the ellipsis icon on the right and select Copy. After you copy the form, you’ll see a pop-up window. Enter the name for the copy (for example, “Email Form Copy”) and click Save. After that, you’ll see the copy of the current form. This copy (Form B) won’t be visible to anyone except you and will have a different URL. In our case it will be https://username.aidaform.com/email-form-example-copy. Don’t worry, this URL is temporary. We’ll get back to it in step 3.

2. Make Changes in the Form B

Now you can safely change the Form B in any way you like. In our example, we want to insert a couple of fields and change the design theme. To add the Full Name and Phone fields, open the Form Elements tab on the left, then drag and drop those blocks to the working area. To change the color theme, select the Form Designer tab on the right and choose the desired set of colors.

3. Publish the Form B with the URL of the Form A

When the copied form (Form B) is updated and ready, we need to publish it with the web address of the Form A. Get back to the Form A, select the Publish tab, and copy the URL to a Microsoft Word document or anywhere else – you’re going to need that URL a bit later. After that, click Edit URL. Enter any other web address that is different from the current one (for example, “email-form-old”), and click Save. Now go to the Form B, open the Publish tab, and paste the URL of the Form A that you’ve copied earlier. Now you can publish your updated form by switching the Form Status from OFF to ON. We recommend you perform step 3 as quickly as possible – if someone tries to access your form while you’re changing its URL, the user will see the 404 error.

That’s all there’s to it. Now you know how to safely edit published forms with AidaForm.

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