One of the key things I've found works for us is differentiating what we WANT to have from users vs. what we NEED to have.
We used to have a webform that (in summary) asked the user what they wanted to download, how they got there, and how we can contact them later (as sales leads). Conversion ratio was fairly poor, so I refactored the priorities of what we were asking for into 2 forms.
The first form consisted of questions we HAD to know the answer to to service the user's request, and the second form consisted of info we wanted from them (name, email, contact info, etc.)
So between the first form and the second form, we'd kick off the download for the user (and show a progress meter at the top) -- which got them what they needed immediately, making the site seem faster overall.
Plus, since they were waiting for the download to complete anyway, the conversion goals for the information we wanted went way, way up as well.
Again, I didn't actually MAKE things faster, in fact, having to fill out 2 forms was significantly slower, but we kept users engaged and let them waste their idle cycles making us happy since we were already accomodating their request.
We used to have a webform that (in summary) asked the user what they wanted to download, how they got there, and how we can contact them later (as sales leads). Conversion ratio was fairly poor, so I refactored the priorities of what we were asking for into 2 forms.
The first form consisted of questions we HAD to know the answer to to service the user's request, and the second form consisted of info we wanted from them (name, email, contact info, etc.)
So between the first form and the second form, we'd kick off the download for the user (and show a progress meter at the top) -- which got them what they needed immediately, making the site seem faster overall.
Plus, since they were waiting for the download to complete anyway, the conversion goals for the information we wanted went way, way up as well.
Again, I didn't actually MAKE things faster, in fact, having to fill out 2 forms was significantly slower, but we kept users engaged and let them waste their idle cycles making us happy since we were already accomodating their request.