The nucleon form factors give direct empirical access to quantum chromodynamics in the non-perturbative regime, and serve as stringent benchmarks for lattice QCD, which provides a quantitatively reliable description of the strong interaction and the emergence of hadronic structure from the underlying quark-gluon dynamics.  Moreover, the form factors of the nucleon play a crucial role in the interpretation of a wide variety of processes, in particular those relevant to beyond standard model (BSM) physics searches. In this talk I will give a short overview of the applied computational methods on the lattice, with an emphasis on the strategies for the estimation of a full error budget most recently applied by the Mainz group. I will present a selected set of results for the form factors of the nucleon from  lattice QCD, highlighting the presently attainable precision, remaining systematic uncertainties and the implications for both hadron physics and BSM searches.