What is Website Onboarding and How to Do It Right

Galleries of onboarding screens are easy to find. What they don't tell you is what it takes to put onboarding on your own website. As of October 2026 there are two routes: code it with an open-source library, or pay for a no-code tool, whose published entry plans ran from about $240 to $350 a month for 1,000 to 2,000 monthly active users. This guide covers the seven steps first, then that choice.

What is website onboarding?

Website onboarding is the process of guiding a first-time user through your website or web app's features until they become a loyal customer. It's often thought of as a simple product tour, but it starts well before the tour and, ideally, doesn't end until users decide to leave.

 

The product tour is only one part of onboarding. A complete onboarding starts as soon as a potential user learns about your service, and it works best when it's continuous: as your product changes, you have to onboard users to those changes too. Figma's modal above, introducing a better copy and paste with a link to try it in a playground, is onboarding for people who signed up long ago.

Why should you onboard users to a website?

Website onboarding matters because users decide quickly whether your product is worth their time. Think of how long you spend choosing a two-hour film; people give a new website far less before they judge it. If you don't give them enough information and direction about what your product is, how to use it and where its value lies, many will leave before they've finished trying it.

Good onboarding pays off in three ways:

• It works like a map. It helps users set expectations and a pace, and feel satisfied with your service.
• It shapes the user experience. A better first experience means better retention and a higher return on what you spent to win the sign-up.
• It saves money. Users who can help themselves need less support, sales and outbound marketing time, and they churn less.

How do you onboard users to a website in 7 steps?

The seven steps below follow the user's path, from before they reach your site to the feedback they give after using it.

1. Onboarding begins before the landing page

Website onboarding starts before users reach your sign-up page. Every email they receive, every ad they see and every conversation colleagues have about your service is part of it.

In other words, users have usually done some research before they decide to sign up. Design an onboarding journey that doesn't waste their time repeating who you are and what to expect. Instead:

2. Keep the sign-up process short

If signing up is a chore, nobody will find out how valuable your website is. These sign-up form rules hold up well:

• Don't ask for more than four pieces of information on one screen.
• If you need more than four, move the rest to another step.
• If your form has several steps, show a progress bar.
• Don't hide rules. If passwords have requirements, show them before the user types.
• Don't ask users to type their password twice, and don't make them confirm their email address before they can look around.

 

Take Netflix as an example. At the time of the screenshot, it set a friendly tone by telling users "We hate paperwork, too", showed "Step 1 of 3", and asked for only two things on the first screen: an email address and a password.

3. Be welcoming

Once users have signed up, make them feel at home. That's one of the trickiest parts of digital onboarding: giving a sense of warmth and human connection on a screen. A friendly illustration and a dialogue box keep people interested better than a cold modal.

Write the copy as if you're talking to the user. Instead of "Click here to go to the menu", try "The menu is right here; you'll probably be using it a lot." Moving elements such as GIFs, short videos and animations also hold attention better than static messages.

Typeform's product tour is a good example. When we featured it, its welcome modal had a small doodle, friendly copy, a "show me the highlights" button instead of "start tour", and a visible "no thanks" next to it. That one modal told users the tour wouldn't waste their time.

4. Keep the product tour short and clear

Onboarding as a whole takes a while, but users shouldn't feel that. Keep the product tour short, in both its copy and its number of steps, for three reasons:

• Long tours bore users, and engagement drops.
• A tour that dumps information interrupts the product experience it's meant to introduce.
• A short tour is easier to keep consistent with your website or web app design.

 

This one Plandisc tooltip shows three good practices:

1. The copy is short and well placed.
2. A progress bar shows how long the tour will take, and there are only eight steps.
3. Small details make it friendly. How much cuter could an hourglass be?

Check the tour at phone width as well. Plenty of visitors open a website on a phone, and not every tool handles narrow screens: our UserGuiding review notes that for screens narrower than 800px you need to contact UserGuiding, which says it's still testing them (as of October 2026).

5. Allow users to interact with the process

Unless you describe your product in a single article or a single video (both bad ideas), let users interact with the onboarding elements. Users should control how much information they get and when, and follow the tour at their own pace. So:

• If you use video, make separate videos for different functions.
• If you use text, split it across pages, or build a resource centre users can open any time.
• If you use an interactive walkthrough, let users do more than click "Next": have them fill in a field or select something on the page themselves.
• Use a checklist to show the onboarding tasks that are left.

 

Checklists do several jobs at once. Calendly's Getting Started Guide, at the time of the screenshot, listed five steps from connecting a calendar to scheduling a meeting, let users open them in any order, and showed how far they'd got.

6. Don't disappear after one explanation

If you know, you know: the feeling when you accidentally close a product tour and can't open it again. Make sure your onboarding resources and patterns aren't one-show only.

 

Take this tour step from Ideta. Everything on the screen was dimmed except the element being explained and the help button. Small touches like this keep the way back to help visible without making the tour longer.

7. Collect feedback and listen to your users

Finally, ask users what they think. Wouldn't you love it if your favourite bar took your advice about portion sizes? Asking users what they'd like to see on your website, or what could be better, turns your actual users into free testers. But keep feedback collection short.

 

ClickUp simply asked to be rated from 0 to 10, with an optional comment box, which is no burden on the user. Use short surveys like NPS, not endless forms. And don't expect users to volunteer feedback if you don't ask: an average user will churn after a bad first experience without saying why.

Should you build website onboarding or use a no-code tool?

Build it if you have developer time and a stable product; use a no-code tool if marketers or product managers need to change tours without a release. Open-source libraries cost nothing to license but need a developer for every change, as our guide to open-source onboarding libraries explains.

No-code tools charge by users. These are the entry plans published by tools we review, read on their pricing pages in October 2026:

MAUs are monthly active users and MTUs monthly tracked users; check which one a tool counts before you compare. Pendo, WalkMe and Whatfix quote on request instead. The comparison hub has the full price table and head-to-head pages.

Is website onboarding hard to get right?

Not especially, and it doesn't have to be expensive. It takes some of your time, and it pays back once you see more users reach their first success and the feedback turns positive. Start with the sign-up and one short tour, measure how many new users finish them, and add the rest of the seven steps from there.