Sign up form best practices: the words on 118 real screens

By Screenrove editorial · 22 October 2026

Sign up form best practices from 118 real screens: 61 primary buttons start with Continue, plus pre-ticked email boxes, consent buttons and odd fine print.

On 61 of the 118 sign-up and log-in screens in our login pages wall, the main button starts with the word "Continue". Only 30 say "Sign up" in any form, which is the first thing to know if you are looking for sign up form best practices grounded in what shipping products actually write, not what a checklist says they should.

The labels are converging. The fine print under them is not: in the same set we found pre-ticked marketing boxes, consent folded into a button, a biometric clause with no checkbox, and a joke.

Continue is the default verb

Each screen in the feed records one primary call to action. Grouped by how the label starts, across 118 screens from 104 products:

The single most common label is the bare word "Continue" (31 screens), followed by "Continue with Google" (16), "Sign up" (12), "Continue with email" (9) and "Sign up with Google" (7). On combined screens, where one form either logs you in or creates an account, "Continue" family labels account for 18 of 24. "Continue" is true whether the visitor is new or returning, and it fits email-first forms where the next step depends on whether the address is known.

A provider is named in the primary label on 32 screens. Capitalisation is less settled than the verb: "Sign up" appears 12 times and "Sign Up" 4 times, "Continue with email" 9 times and "Continue with Email" 3 times, and three products set the whole label in capitals (Cloudinary "SIGN UP WITH EMAIL", Sentry "GET SET UP", Penpot "CREATE AN ACCOUNT").

"Sign in with" on a sign-up page

The mismatch we noticed most is a sign-up page whose buttons say "Sign in". Product Hunt heads its modal "Sign up on Product Hunt", then offers "Sign in with Linkedin", "Sign in with Github" and "Sign in with X", with Google, Facebook and Apple as icon tiles below.

Tana does the same on a page labelled "Create account" in its header: all four buttons read "Sign in with" (Google, Apple, GitHub, Microsoft), directly above "By creating an account you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy". Raindrop keeps the conflict lower down: a "Start collecting!" form with username, email, password and a blue "Sign up" button, then "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Apple" under a divider.

It may be the provider's stock button copy carried over, but it leaves a new visitor reading two verbs for one action. Others keep one verb throughout: Medium's four buttons and Padlet's three all say "Sign up with".

Labels that say what happens next

A handful of products swap the generic verb for one that describes the result or the terms.

• Grammarly: "Agree and Sign up". The consent is in the button itself, and the fine print underneath includes marketing email (more on that below).
• Bubble: "Start building", under the heading "Sign up and start building". The label is the first thing you will do, not the paperwork.
• Checkly: "Start for free", beside a panel that opens "Start with a 14-day trial of Checkly". Postman ("Create Free Account"), Toggl ("Sign up for free") and Wrike ("Try for free") also put price in the label.
• Splitwise: "Sign me up!", after a form that reads as a sentence, "Hi there! My name is".
• Glide: "Sign up for the new Glide", with "Sign up for Glide Classic instead" as a quiet link.

Lines that take friction away

The short line under a heading often exists to answer a worry before the visitor raises it.

• OpusClip: "Free plan available. No credit card required."
• UXPin: "Free trial. No credit card required."
• Maze: "Get started for free, no credit card required"
• Jira: "It's free for up to 10 users - no credit card needed."
• Wrike: "No credit card, no commitment, no downloads"
• Superhuman Docs: "We'll email you a link for a password-free sign up."

AFFiNE goes furthest. Below Google, Apple and email, under an "or" divider, it asks "Want to keep data local?" and offers "Start AFFiNE without an account". It is the most direct no-account path we saw.

Small print can also state a cost. Ideogram's footnote reads "*Email accounts don't include free credits — you'll need a paid plan to generate. Sign up with Google or Apple to get free credits." It sits at the foot of the page, well below the email button it applies to.

The fine print: four ways to ask for consent

Under the button, the patterns split into four. We describe what each screen showed; whether any of them is appropriate depends on your jurisdiction and your lawyers.

1. A marketing box that starts ticked. Rive's "Send me emails with the latest updates from Rive" is checked when the page loads, directly under "Sign up". Maze does the same with "I want to receive email updates from Maze".

2. Marketing bundled into the terms sentence. SurveyMonkey has no checkbox at all. Under a pale "Next" button: "By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Notice. You also agree to receive product news and special promotions via email. You can opt-out of these emails in your My Account page anytime." Grammarly's third paragraph works the same way, and Toggl's terms block ends "You also agree to receive marketing emails from us, which you may unsubscribe from at any time."

3. Separate, unticked boxes. Postman splits the two: "Receive product updates, news, and other marketing communications" starts unticked, while "Stay signed in" starts ticked. Hygraph and Mixpanel put an unticked terms box above the button (Mixpanel's reads, in the past tense, "Agreed to terms of use & privacy statements"). Hygraph enforces it even for social login: clicking Google with the box empty shows "You must accept the terms of service and privacy policy to continue."

4. A clause that does more than terms. Runway's last step, "Finalize your account" (in the Runway flow, after the email step), has one button, "Create account", and above it: "By clicking "Create account" you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge that you have read and understand our Privacy Policy and agree that we and our vendors may scan faces or capture voiceprints each time you use certain features such as Act-Two and Custom Voice." There is no separate checkbox; the biometric clause rides on the same click.

And then there is Padlet, under "You belong here" and an email placeholder of "harrypotter@hogwarts.edu": "By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You also admit that you are beautiful."

How we counted

We captured these screens in desktop browsers with research accounts in September and October 2026. A vision model recorded each screen's attributes, including the primary CTA text, and every attribute is checkable on the screen's own page. We grouped labels by their opening words; "primary" means the one button the model marked as the main action, so secondary provider buttons (like Raindrop's) are not in the table. We quote copy only from screenshots we re-checked. These are observations of what we saw on one visit, not A/B test results, and we make no claim about which wording converts better.

What to steal

• Use "Continue" when the form serves both new and returning users. Use "Sign up" or a result verb ("Start building") when the page is sign-up only, and do not let provider buttons say "Sign in" there.
• Pick one capitalisation and one verb and apply it to every button on the form, including the provider ones you can restyle.
• Answer the cost question under the heading. "No credit card required" appears on OpusClip, UXPin, Maze and Jira for a reason; Ideogram shows that the reverse belongs there too.
• Offer a way out if you have one. AFFiNE's "Start without an account" costs one line.
• Keep marketing consent separate from terms consent. Postman's two independent boxes are the cleanest version in the set. If a clause covers something unusual, like Runway's face and voice scanning, consider giving it its own visible step rather than a sentence before the button.
• Read your own fine print. Make sure it names the buttons you actually show.

Browse every label on the login pages wall, filter to sign-up screens only, or connect the Screenrove MCP server and ask your agent for sign-up forms with a separate marketing opt-in when you are writing your own.