How to Decide Which Google Forms Questions to Make Required

Every required question you add to a form is a tiny wall between you and the data you need.

Ask for too much, and respondents simply close the tab.

Leave too many fields optional, and you end up with a scattered mess of incomplete submissions that you cannot actually use.

Finding the right balance determines whether your form actually does its job.

Here is how to navigate the technical settings and the strategic choices behind making a question mandatory.

What happens when you make a question required in Google Forms?

Toggling a question to required changes how Google Forms handles both the visual display and the submission process. The platform uses a mix of visual cues and hard functional stops to ensure the respondent provides an answer before moving forward.

The most immediate change is visual. Google Forms automatically appends a small red asterisk (*) to the end of the question title. If you have the form description enabled, a note reading "* Indicates required question" will also appear at the very top of the form, just below the header.

Functionally, a required question acts as a gatekeeper. When a respondent clicks the Submit button (or the Next button in a multi-section form), Google Forms runs a quick validation check. If an optional field is blank, the platform ignores it and processes the submission. If a required field is empty, the submission is blocked entirely.

When a submission is blocked, the user experience changes drastically to force a correction.

This hard stop is effective, but it is also an interruption. If a respondent is rushing or confused by the question, hitting this error state causes frustration. This is why the required status should be reserved for data you truly cannot live without.

How to make a question required in Google Forms

Google Forms makes it simple to control the required status on a question-by-question basis. You can adjust this setting at any time, even after the form has been published and is actively collecting responses.

To make an individual question mandatory, follow these steps:

1. Open your Google Form in edit mode.
2. Click anywhere on the question you want to modify. This makes the question block active, revealing the editing tools.
3. Look at the bottom right corner of the active question block.
4. Find the toggle switch labeled Required.
5. Click the toggle so it slides to the right and turns purple (or matches your form's theme color).

Once that toggle is active, the red asterisk immediately appears next to your question title. If you change your mind later, simply click the toggle again to slide it to the left, returning the question to an optional state.

If you are building a long form where almost every question needs to be mandatory, manually clicking the toggle dozens of times is tedious. Google Forms offers a global setting to automate this.

To set all new questions to required by default:

1. Click the Settings tab at the top center of your form editor.
2. Scroll down to the Defaults section.
3. Click the downward arrow next to Question defaults to expand the menu.
4. Toggle on the switch labeled Make questions required by default.

From that point on, every time you click the + button to add a new question, it will start with the required toggle already flipped on. Note that this setting is forward-looking. It will not retroactively change the required status of questions you have already created.

Expert tip: If you are migrating existing paperwork into a digital format, you can save significant setup time by using a document to Google Form workflow. This allows you to import your questions in bulk, after which you can quickly scan the list and toggle the required switches only on the fields that truly matter.

How to decide between required vs optional fields

Deciding which fields to force a user to complete is an exercise in balancing your own data needs against the respondent's willingness to type. If you demand high-effort answers for low-value reasons, people will simply abandon the page.

To make this decision logically, you need to weigh two factors: user effort and business value. User effort includes how much typing is required, whether they have to look up external information, and how sensitive the topic is. Business value is strictly about what you intend to do with the data. If a field is blank, does it break your workflow?

Use this decision matrix to evaluate each question on your draft list.

In practice, the hardest category to manage is high-effort, low-value questions. Form creators often justify these by saying, "It would be nice to know." But every "nice to know" field you make mandatory actively reduces your completion rate.

When evaluating business value, ask yourself what happens to the spreadsheet row if that specific cell is empty. If you can still process the request, fulfill the order, or log the feedback without that piece of information, the question should be marked optional.

Which questions should you always make mandatory?

While every form serves a different purpose, certain categories of data are universally necessary. If a submission lacks these core elements, the entire entry becomes essentially worthless.

When designing your form, ensure the following four categories are always set to required.

• Primary contact information If your form initiates any kind of two-way communication - like a service request, an event registration, or an application - you must have a reliable way to reply. Always require an email address or a phone number. However, you rarely need to require both.

• ❌ Weak: Please provide your home phone, cell phone, and email address.

• ✅ Strong: What is the best email address to reach you?

• Unique identifiers If the form data needs to be matched to an existing record in your system, you must require the identifier. Without it, you will waste hours trying to cross-reference submissions based on context clues. This is usually a full name, an employee ID, or an account number.

• ❌ Weak: Name (if you have an account with us).

• ✅ Strong: Please enter your 6-digit Employee ID.

• Routing criteria For forms that trigger workflows, the data that decides where the submission goes next must be mandatory. If an IT ticket form does not require the user to specify whether the issue is hardware or software, the help desk has to manually triage it. Use a required dropdown or multiple-choice question to force categorization.

• ❌ Weak: Tell us what is wrong with your computer.

• ✅ Strong: Which category best describes your issue? (Hardware, Software, Network, Access).

• Legal consent and policy agreements If your form collects personal data, processes payments, or registers someone for an activity with inherent risks, legal consent cannot be skipped. Use a required checkbox question to ensure the respondent explicitly agrees to your terms of service or privacy policy before the form can be submitted.

• ❌ Weak: By submitting this form, you probably agree to our terms.

• ✅ Strong: I have read and agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

When you make these essential questions mandatory, pay close attention to how you phrase them. A required question inherently carries a slightly demanding tone, so softening the phrasing helps reduce the friction of the red asterisk.

When is it better to leave a question optional?

The most common mistake form creators make is setting every single question to required by default, assuming it will yield a richer dataset. In reality, forcing answers where they do not naturally fit leads to junk data.

When a respondent faces a mandatory question that does not apply to them, they do not simply stop and think. They type "N/A", hit the spacebar, or select a random multiple-choice option just to clear the error message and move on. This pollutes your spreadsheet and ruins your analytics.

To protect data integrity, always leave questions optional in the following scenarios.

• Open-ended elaborations If you ask a user to rate an experience from 1 to 5, making the rating itself required is fine. But if you follow up with a paragraph text field asking them to explain their rating, that must be optional. Forcing someone to type out an explanation when they have nothing to say guarantees you will receive hundreds of responses that just say "good" or "nothing to add."

• ❌ Weak: Please explain in detail why you chose that rating.

• ✅ Strong: Is there anything else you would like us to know about your experience?

• Sensitive demographic data Questions about age, income, race, or household status often make respondents uncomfortable. Unless you are running a formal demographic study or have a strict legal requirement to collect this data, making it mandatory will cause people to abandon the form entirely. If you must ask, keep it optional or include a clear "Prefer not to say" option.

• Conditional follow-ups without logic branching If you are not using Google Forms' built-in logic branching (the "Go to section based on answer" feature), you will inevitably have questions that only apply to some people. If question 4 asks "Do you have dietary restrictions?" and question 5 asks "Please list your allergies," question 5 must be optional. If you make it required, people without allergies will be forced to type "none" just to submit.

• Secondary marketing attribution Marketing teams love to ask, "How did you hear about us?" While this data is valuable, making it mandatory often results in respondents picking the very first option on the list (usually "Google search") simply because it is the fastest way to clear the requirement. An optional field yields fewer total answers, but the answers you do get will be accurate.

Expert tip: If you find yourself repeatedly adding "If applicable" to the end of your question titles, that is a clear signal the toggle switch should be set to off. A required question should apply to 100 percent of the people taking the form.

How do required fields affect your form completion rates?

The relationship between required fields and form completion rates is governed by basic behavioral economics. Every time a respondent loads a page and sees a wall of red asterisks, they perform an instant, subconscious cost-benefit analysis.

This reaction is tied to cognitive load. Working memory has strict limits. When a user looks at a form, they have to hold the context of the questions, their own answers, and the overall goal in their mind simultaneously. Each required field adds weight to that cognitive load. Optional fields, conversely, can be safely ignored, allowing the brain to bypass them without spending mental energy.

When you demand too much mental energy, you trigger form fatigue.

Form fatigue occurs when the perceived effort of completing the mandatory fields outweighs the perceived reward of submitting the form. If an employee is filling out a required HR compliance form, their tolerance for friction is relatively high because the reward (keeping their job) is significant. If a potential customer is filling out a lead generation form, their tolerance is near zero. The moment they feel overwhelmed by required fields, they will bounce.

This behavior is well documented by Hick's law, which dictates that the time it takes for a person to make a decision increases logarithmically as the number and complexity of choices increase.

In the context of Google Forms, Hick's law means that asking five required multiple-choice questions is significantly faster and less taxing for the user than asking five required short-answer questions. The cognitive effort required to recall information and type it out is much higher than the effort required to recognize the correct answer in a list and click it.

When you are digitizing complex paperwork - such as using an intake form PDF to Google Form process - you must resist the urge to directly translate every mandatory box from the paper version to the digital version. Paper forms often ask for redundant information (like asking for a name and date at the top of every single page) because pages can get physically separated. Digital forms do not have this problem.

To keep completion rates high, you must minimize the friction cost.

If your completion rates are dropping, look at your required fields and ask two questions. First, are you asking for recall (typing an answer from scratch) when you could be asking for recognition (picking from a list)? Second, have you artificially inflated the friction by making "nice to know" data mandatory?

By stripping away unnecessary requirements and lowering the cognitive load of the ones that remain, you create a smoother path to the Submit button. The fewer decisions a respondent has to make about whether a field is worth their time, the more likely they are to actually finish the form.

FAQ

Can you make an entire section required at once in Google Forms?

No, Google Forms does not have a single button to make an entire section mandatory simultaneously. You must toggle the required switch on each individual question within that section. However, you can use the global default settings to ensure any new questions you add to the section are automatically set to required.

How do you remove the red asterisk from required questions in Google Forms?

The red asterisk is hardcoded into the Google Forms interface as the universal indicator for a mandatory field. You cannot hide, recolor, or remove the asterisk while keeping the question required. The only way to make the asterisk disappear is to toggle the question back to an optional state.

Can Google Forms dynamically make a question required based on conditional branching?

The required status of a question in Google Forms is static; it cannot change dynamically based on previous answers. However, if you use logic branching to send a user to a specific section, any required questions inside that destination section will enforce the hard stop. If a user bypasses a section entirely due to logic branching, the required questions in the skipped section are safely ignored.

Does Google Forms save a respondent's progress if they get stuck on a required question?

Yes, Google Forms automatically saves a respondent's progress as a draft for up to 30 days, provided they are logged into a Google account. If they hit a mandatory question they cannot answer right away, they can close the tab safely. When they return to the form link later, their previous answers will repopulate, allowing them to pick up exactly where they left off.

Respecting your respondent's time is the most effective way to guarantee clean, useful data. When you are deliberate about which fields you force them to complete, you stop acting as a roadblock and start acting as a facilitator. If you want to streamline the initial build process so you can spend more time refining these strategic settings, Doc2Form can automatically generate your layout from existing documents, leaving you free to focus entirely on optimizing the final user experience.