Surveys are a great way to find out what your visitors actually think. In this How To we assume you've already set up your Free Comments account and completed your site and survey style settings.

Plan your survey

Before you build anything, have a good think about what you want to accomplish. What do you want to find out from your users?

What will you ask? What do you need to know?
Is it long enough that you should break it into pages (paid plans only)?

Once you know that, you can start to build your survey…

Creating and editing surveys

Log in to Free Comments, open My Sites, click your website, then open the Surveys tab to find the survey settings for that site:

Site dashboard with the Surveys tab highlighted

From there you can either create a new survey, or edit an existing one if you already have some:

Surveys list with New survey button and existing drafts

Adding questions to your survey

Next you'll want to add questions to your survey — after all, it's pretty useless without them!

Click Add question here:

Survey editor with the Add question button highlighted

Then enter the text for your question and choose which type of question it is:

Question row showing the question text and Type selector

And finally whether your question must be answered by the user or not:

Question row with the Required checkbox ticked

Add all your questions, then click Save to save your survey:

Survey editor with the Save button highlighted

Paginated surveys (paid plans)

If you're on a paid plan you can add pages to your survey.

Add the question(s) you want on page one, then click the New page button to add a new page:

Question list with the New page button highlighted

You'll also see which page each question is on in the top left of the question box:

Question box showing its page number in the top left

Aim for a similar number of questions on each page so your survey feels balanced.

Should your survey be within the page or in a modal?

Free Comments surveys can be embedded in the body of a web page or can appear in a modal (a "popup" that overlays your content).

To choose whether to show your survey in-page or in a modal, change the Position setting here:

Survey settings with the Position setting highlighted

If you go to the Style tab, you can preview how inline and modal surveys look here:

Style tab live preview toggling between Inline and Modal

So, which will you choose, inline or modal?

It depends on what you want to do. A modal survey will drop in and ask questions. A modal can be a bit of a surprise, but will work on all pages you put the code on. It's useful for requesting quick feedback or asking if people found what they were looking for.

An inline survey will typically sit in a page between content that explains what it's about. These are more useful for longer surveys, with pagination, where you're asking a series of questions.

Set your survey's status

Surveys also have a status setting. To show on your site it needs to be Active, like this:

Finally, embed your survey

Now you've added all your questions and set the survey Status to Active, you're ready to embed your survey into your website:

Viewing results

You can see the results of your survey in the Results tab:

Results tab listing surveys with response counts and download buttons

If you're on a paid plan, you can also Download all the results as a CSV file, which you can then take into your spreadsheet app to analyse in detail.

Example survey

Here is an example, in page survey, with pagination:

Get started today

Get started for free, and upgrade when you're ready for pagination, CSV downloads and more.

Create an online survey