Separate forms for LPs and website?

[marcieatwork]

I have two sets of global forms right now - one for use on landing pages and one for use on our website. We initially set it up this way because the website forms had slightly different needs than the landing page ones, but that is no longer the case. Before I sunset one set of forms and start using just the other set, is there a good reason to keep them separate that I'm not considering? Once I combine them, it will be more work to separate them again if I need to. Do y'all use just one set of forms for both use cases, or do you split them?

[SanfordWhiteman]

Advantages of dedicating forms to each side:

• instant knowledge (from the Form Name alone) that a form fill originated on some webpage vs. some LP, without having to check the Referrer or Web Page constraints
• ability to adjust Custom CSS to match site styles without affecting LP styles, and vice versa

Disadvantages:

• any field changes need to be made in both places (though to some degree this can be done with shared JS)
• ditto for style changes (can be mitigated by using external styles instead of inline Custom CSS, which doesn’t share across any forms anyway)

In general I recommend the same forms for web + LPs and also externalizing as much as possible into JS + CSS to easily share updates across forms. Examples are Country picklists and Hidden fields.

[Michael_Florin]

Another reason to keep separate forms could be that forms on landing page can utilize program tokens in hidden fields, which can be very handy. Embedded forms can't do that.

So while I generally think that the less forms you have the better you're off, it might be acceptable to have a separate set for each case. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

The thing is that isn't really safe to do (because they're not JS-encoded but only HTML-encoded) and should be done outside the form anyway, i.e. by outputting into a <datalist>.