How to think when you have too many survey questions

There are negative effects of having too many questions in a survey. Learn what they are and how to prevent it.

Before we get to how to reduce the number of questions in a strategic way, let's start with how many questions you should have. Unfortunately, there isn't a magical number we can give you, but we recommend that you stay below 10 main questions for a general survey (as in not including follow-up questions such as "Please specify 'Other purpose'"), fewer for a targeted survey (depends a bit on how you use it) and no more than 3 questions in a feedback survey. 

Including more questions than we recommend doesn't mean you'll end up with a bad survey, but there are some common consequences from having too many questions. The main is that respondents will leave the survey halfway through, and therefore only answer some of the questions. If only half the respondents answered the rating questions, the results may be less representative of the full population (e.g. all the visitors on your website). 

If you find that you have too many survey questions, there are some things to consider which can help you to reduce the number of questions without negatively affecting the survey or the quality of the data. Instead, the quality may increase.

1. Have a clear purpose for the survey
   Think about why you want this survey and how you are going to use the data. What is it that you want to know? When you have a clear purpose, it will be much easier to not only come up with new questions, but also to see which questions are relevant to include in the survey. It may be tempting, but the survey cannot answer everything.
2. Kill your darlings
   Sometimes you may have come up with great questions, but you also need to be able to remove questions that are not relevant for this specific survey. Even if they are objectively good or super interesting. Not relevant means not included. You can always keep a note of the rejected questions. Maybe you will update the survey later on or add an additional survey, and those questions may be relevant then.

Still end up with too many questions?

Don't worry, you can also divide the survey into one main survey and one or two complementing targeted surveys. For example, you may want to ask several questions relating to specific parts of the website, such as the product pages/information, or information written for a certain visitor category. Instead of including those questions in the general survey, you can add a targeted survey on the relevant pages on your website and ask the more specific questions in that survey.