What’s so important about form widths?
Imagine filling out a form that’s too wide for your mobile device. It’d be frustrating, right? Think about your forms and your audience. Do you provide a positive user experience? Do you know which devices your visitors commonly use?
Not knowing these things could affect your conversion rates. However, with some simple research and tweaks, you’ll be able to give your visitors a better experience with your forms and increase your conversion rates.
Note
Jotform forms are already mobile responsive by default. You don’t need to optimize your form width if your website or the page where you will embed the form is also mobile responsive.
Know Your Audience
Gather data about your audience with an analytics tool to better understand which devices your visitors are using. It is imperative to have this data, so you can outline your next steps towards making your page or form flexible across devices.
Know the Device Widths
Design your forms based on your audience data. If most of your visitors are mobile users and use portrait view when viewing your website, use 320px for your forms.
Here’s a list of common widths:
- Mobile: 320px for portrait view, 480px for landscape view.
- iPads: 768px for portrait view, 1024px for landscape view.
- Desktop and Laptops: 960px horizontal.
Change the Form Width
You can change the width of your form in three simple clicks. Please see the steps below.
- In the Form Builder, click the Form Designer icon.

- Go to the Styles tab.
- Change the value of Form Width.

And that’s it. That’s all it takes to change your form width. The changes are automatically saved for you.
Protip
You can also update the form width through the Form Layout tab of the Advanced Designer.
How effective was the change for you? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below.
Send Comment:
40 Comments:
I cannot get my form to show properly on a desktop. It is showing as a very narrow column with a scroll bar. I watched the video about how to change widths and it did nothing. Please help.
I'm still unable to change the form width. No matter what I put in the 'width' field, the form is still narrow with scroll bars on our website page. Has anyone else also had this problem? Keen to solve it.
Your video on YouTube shows that I can change the width of information being input into the forms by specifying how many characters can be entered into the space, etc. Yet, I cannot for the life of me find how and where to do this. I have awkward headings where they stack because I need to use more characters for my form heading/questions. I also have places where I am worried that the form input will not allow enough characters or if it will allow too many. I used Jotform a long time ago for my clients, and came back to you today to create a form for a medical client needing a LONG employment form. It is going to look atrocious at this rate. I am VERY disappointed. The old Jotform was easier to find my way around and figure out how to do what I needed. (I basically taught myself at that time.) Your help feature is of very little use, as I have asked my question MULTIPLE ways and have yet to find answers I need. HELP! I am VERY FRUSTRATED. {:(
Under your new system I am trying to set the width of a field in my form regardless of how many characters I set it to, the length (width) remains unchanged. Am I missing something? I have used your system for years and never had this problem before.
Re jotform - https://www.jotform.com/build/63126951034855
I am trying to place 3 fields on a line - U13(1), U13(2) and U13(3) to mirror the U12(1), U12(2) and U12(3) fields below them. I have turned on the "Shrink" and "Move to a New Line" options but I still can't move them. Can you please help me
Hello, I can´t center the form in the mobile view. How can I centre align the form?
How can I get a form to display in "Desktop View" by default on all devices?
And how do I centre align the form itself using CSS?
I cannot locate the design tab or the Form designer button. I have one form I have not had a problem, but the next form which is going to be basically the same it won't let me get the third short text field in. April challenge worked fine, but Pomeranian rescue does not
I'm trying to get my form to fit on a mobile screen. The form width setting seems to have no effect...
Hi - struggling with my form found at
One of our customers pointed out that the right side of the form (after you expand "year 1" and "year 2") gets cut off...there should be a total of six units. I expanded the width of our form from 690 to 960, but the right-most columns still get cut off...and there is not way to scroll farther to the right. How do I make the columns narrower to fit this form? Thanks!
Hello,
I cannot find the "STYLES" or "CSS" tabs on my form, only "THEMES" and "CUSTOM" appear. Is there a reason these would be missing?
BIG PROBLEM - get one form that is satisfactory for BOTH mobile and laptop.
Hi, I made the change but the for doesn't "take" it. If I put 1000px, the frame remain 500px.
What happen?
This is the link:
thank you,
Martina
Thanks
I became able to change width of form
How to reduce the width of the space/field made for emails/names and other?
The outline of the form seems to reduce by changing "form width" but not these fields.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
is there a way to make them dynamic to be used on both mobile and desktop?
what about telephone number - there are two columns. I need more width in area field. Please describe
how can I get away the two white side bars and the background transparent?
Maybe the DDoS is not from phishers, but from phish victims. Your service is perfect for them, especially considering you don't make it easy to report abuse.
Here's one for you, form id #12882142124
Happily collecting user data and sending it off to who knows where.
Back to searching for a "report abuse" link...
You are an awesome service and your dedication to us users is a rare find here in cyberspace. thanks!
My forms aren't working. The code to embed them isn't right. I'm going to have to use another form builder.
We switched from "www.jotform." to "secure.jotform." solution this past week, but our orders were coming in text format, not html. Our only solution was to manually download each to .pdf and forward (ugh!) Also, we have one user in CA that cannot connect. We had her go to another work station where whe was able to submit. What's up with that? Finally, I switched back to the "www.jotform." prefix this a.m. Do you think our problems will be over come Monday a.m.??? Sure hope so - thanks guys - go Colts!
Thanks for the speedy reply. I'm so glad your system is alright. You guys do an amazing job. I'm so glad I found you!
Thanks for all the hard work. I am a premium member and rely heavily on Jotform for my start-up. I am not a techie and am not even really sure what a DDoS attack is. Which is testimony of how easy Jotform is to use... But sounds pretty bad and hope you'll fully recover from this soon. Most of all, I sincerely appreciate the transparency. Jotform totally rocks. Keep up the excellent work!!!
I'm still having trouble submitting forms. One second it works and the next it doesn't. Trying to use these forms for teacher observations and getting extremely frustrated that I continue to have these issues.
I am still having trouble with form submissions (connection time-out messages), and the site still seems to be down intermittently. It's not just me, right?
Due to the IP address change, do I need to update the code of my forms that are on my website so the forms submit properly?
Did this attack in any way compromise the information we have collected via Jotform?
Awesome work, guys! We're happy to have you back.
Is there a phone number to contact yall if something like this happens to get updates? Dr. Schlesinger, My Boss, was wanting a phone number just in case something happens like this that we can call to just get updates on when things will be up and running again.
I checked on Facebook for updates and nothing was said about the jotform.net option. From my perspective, the site was down pretty much all day Friday in the USA. Just a suggestion...try to synch up communications between twitter and facebook. Thanks for the info.
Aytekin, thank you for a thorough report. I knew you were going to learn many valuable lessons from all this and continue to provide an ever greater service than before. Good luck and big thanks to the whole Jotform team!
Thanks for all your hard work. I noticed my forms were down around 7am CST, and by 10 or 11am they looked like they were coming back up.
The attack couldn't have come at a worse time, as we are using Jotform for our wedding RSVP system, and our guests were starting to get their invitations on Thursday and Friday!
Thanks not only for your tireless work, but being upfront and honest about what was going on and constant status updates on Twitter. It makes those of us who rely on web services trust the providers we use so much more.
Please ask your questions to the forum.
How do you change the form height?i.e on my sub heading once I copy on my facebook page some texts are cut
How can you increase the spacing between the check box responses. I have it set up for 3 columns and the page width is definitely wide enough to accommodate the text but the check box responses are extremely close to each other.
ebsconsulting: Yes, you can change the spacing between fields from "Preferences".
Is there a way to decrease the top and bottom padding between fields? so that height of the form also decreases?
Get the html source code and put as many new line character codes (html - br ) as you want in the code. Height is automatically resized according to the space form elements occupy.
and to change the height?