Have you been thinking about adding a questionnaire to your website? It’s definitely a great idea!

Questionnaires are perfect for gathering valuable focused information about your readers as individuals.

Word of caution, though – don’t mistake survey for questionnaires. People often confuse the two, and while they are similar – they don’t have the same purpose.

The difference between surveys and questionnaires

A survey is a data collection medium intended for a wider audience and the goal is to look for behavior tendencies and data. Survey questions are usually more general in focus.

A questionnaire has a more localized focus and the goal is to get data from a person with a specific purpose in mind.

A questionnaire is typically a mix of open-ended and closed-ended questions. Open-ended are long-form questions that offer the answerer the ability to elaborate on their views. 

Surveys, for example, always consist of a questionnaire, while questionnaires may not always be delivered in the form of a survey.

In short, questionnaires are designed for individuals, while surveys are used to understand the broader audience.

A questionnaire is essentially any written set of questions while surveys are also the set of questions and include gathering and analyzing the data.

Here’s an example:

When you go to a doctor’s appointment for the first time, they usually ask you to fill out a  form with some basic questions. This is your specific health information that the doctor needs to know before proceeding with an examination or checkup.

When you finish an exam, some clinics may ask you to fill out a survey to get some feedback on your experience: 

• If you’re satisfied with the staff
• If you got to see the doctor on time 
• If you’re inclined to refer the clinic to your friends

As you can see, questionnaires and surveys are very different in nature with different goals in mind.

Here are some common questionnaire examples:

• Product Use Satisfaction Questionnaire
• Customer Service Satisfaction Questionnaire
• Communications Evaluation Questionnaire
• Suggestions and Improvement Questionnaire

How to create a good questionnaire

Technically any set of questions is a questionnaire, however, you should think long and hard about what information you want to gather about the individuals you’re questioning. Additionally, the success of your questionnaire depends on the quality of the questions you ask. 

Another essential aspect you need to think about is the length of the questionnaire. Nobody wants to spend 30 minutes responding to inquiries, and as the number of questions increases – the completion rate frequently decreases. 

Our recommendation is to keep it simple. In most cases, your questionnaire should have around 10 questions, and if you need to ask more – make sure it doesn’t take longer than 10 minutes in total to complete the questionnaire.

We believe this will significantly increase the completion rate and that you’ll receive the data you need.

Creating a questionnaire

Adding a questionnaire to your WordPress website is done in three straightforward steps:

1. Install and activate a questionnaire WordPress plugin
2. Build your questionnaire
3. Publish your questionnaire to your WordPress website

In this example, we’ll use a free plugin called Quiz And Survey Master:

It’s a perfect plugin for questionnaires, quizzes, surveys, and it’s packed with features. It’s also very intuitive to use, so we decided to showcase it in this article.

Install and activate the Quiz And Survey Master plugin

Log in to your WordPress dashboard, head to Plugins > Add New, fill in Quiz and Survey Master in the top-right search field, and click Install Now:

Next, click Activate to activate the plugin:

The plugin will then ask you if you allow gathering usage and statistics data (anonymous):

We’re okay with this, considering it’s a free plugin, but do whatever you think is best for your website. The plugin author explains why they do this here, feel free to take a look before agreeing.

Configure 

Next, head to QSM > Settings and configure the plugin to your liking:

Unless your website focuses on fun and educational quizzes – we recommend disabling searching through quiz posts and disabling the quiz archive.

Keep in mind that these are just the plugin wide settings and there are much more for each questionnaire individually.

Create your questionnaire

Now to the fun part, creating your questionnaire!

Head to QSM > Quizzes/Surveys and click Create New Quiz/Survey:

Next, enter the name and choose the Survey option:

Click Create Quiz to go to the next step.

The plugin will take you to the Questions page, where you can add your questions:

Fill in the question name, and choose the question type.

There are quite a few options to choose from:

Once you choose the question type, it will dynamically change the question body format.

For example, when we choose the Vertical Multiple Choice question, we receive the ability to add answers in the body of the question:

Make sure to select Required under the Publish meta box if you want to make sure users are required to answer certain questions before being able to move to the next one.

Each time you finish working on a question – click Save Question to save changes. Otherwise, they’ll be lost.

Additionally, you can save the question in a specific category and enable the comment field for each question:

Go ahead, and add all the questions you want in this questionnaire using the method we described above.

To create a new question, click Create New Question button at the bottom of the page:

At some point, you’ll want to reuse questions in your new surveys/questionnaires and the plugin has a handy Add Question From Question Bank option where it allows you to insert any question used previously:

Here’s how it looks:

Configure your questionnaire

Next, you need to configure options for your new questionnaire. If you look at the top of the page, you’ll see a menu with available options:

Each of these allows you to configure a different aspect of your questionnaire:

Questions – add/change/remove questions.

Contact – This will add a field to your questionnaire where your users can insert their contact details.

Text – Here, you can customize each message’s text during the questionnaire and all button labels.

Options – Here, you can find advanced options for your questionnaire, such as a progress bar, if user login is required, questions per page, time limit, and more.

Emails – Here, you can configure conditions when emails are sent from your website. For example, each time someone completes the questionnaire – the plugin will send you an email notification.

Results Pages – Here, you can define if you want to show the result page to the user or if you’re going to redirect them after the questionnaire is completed.

Style – This is where you can choose from the six predefined styles/colors and use your custom CSS.

At all times, you can preview how your questionnaire looks by clicking on the monitor icon at the top-right corner:

Once you’ve finished configuring everything, click the Publish Quiz button in the top-right corner of the page:

Publish your questionnaire

To publish your new questionnaire, head back to QSM > Quizzes/Surveys, and click on the monitor icon under the Shortcode column:

This will reveal the shortcode which you need to copy:

Once copied, paste the shortcode into the editor body in your page or post:

Click Publish to publish your new page, and voila!

Final words

As you can see, creating a questionnaire on your website can be a piece of cake and doesn’t require much time or any advanced coding knowledge.

It also allows you to learn more about your audience and collect valuable information on what they like and what they want to see improved regarding your website or service.