does-requirement-to-log-in-before-starting-decrease-conversion.md

Does the requirement to log in before starting the request process decrease conversions?

Alaveteli has a configuration option that forces users to create an account before they start the make a request process. We've long recommended that administrators don't enable this, but we've never had any data to illustrate the impact. AskTheEU.org recently removed this configuration setting, so we took a look at the conversion rate before and after.

• issue#42

Answer

TL;DR: Yes. We continue to recommend that FORCE_REGISTRATION_ON_NEW_REQUEST is set to false.

The conversion rate increased by about 1.2% after removing the requirement to create an account before starting the request.

Analysis

Analytics Data

Conversion rate before and after the change of configuration:

Before (2016-02-06 – 2016-03-08)	After (2016-03-10 – 2016-04-10)
1.56% of sessions	2.80% of sessions
1.50% of users	2.70% of users