A contact form that fails quietly is one of the costliest problems on a small business site, because you never find out what you lost. Work through these checks in order. Each one rules out a different place where an enquiry can disappear.
Test it like a customer
- Fill in the form with an email address you can check, ideally a different one from the inbox that should receive it.
- Press send and note exactly what the page says.
- Wait a few minutes, then check your inbox, your spam or junk folder and any promotions tab.
- Try again from your phone and from a different browser.
Five places an enquiry can disappear
- The form goes nowhere. Some forms look right but aren't connected to anything, for example because their action is empty. Open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab and send the form. A request with a 4xx or 5xx status means the server refused it. No request at all means the form isn't sending anything.
- The notification goes to the wrong place. The address that receives submissions may be an old one left over from a template, or belong to someone who has left. Check the form's settings in your builder or plugin.
- The email lands in spam. Google says messages that aren't authenticated might be marked as spam or rejected. Its sender guidelines say all senders should set up SPF or DKIM for their sending domains, and senders of 5,000 or more messages a day need SPF, DKIM and DMARC. A message sent as your address by a service that isn't authorised to send for you is easy for a receiver to distrust.
- The service stopped or hit a limit. Some form services cap submissions on free plans, and accounts can lapse or keys can expire. Log in to the service and check for errors or a quota warning.
- A spam filter can block real people. Anti-spam checks such as hidden fields, timing checks or captchas can block genuine submissions if they are set too tightly. Test in a normal browser, at a normal human pace.
How to fix it properly
- Send from an address on your own domain, through a proper email service, with SPF and DKIM set up for that domain, and DMARC too.
- Keep a copy of every submission somewhere that isn't email, so nothing depends on one delivery.
- When sending fails, tell the visitor and give them another way to reach you, so the enquiry is never silently lost.
- Test the form after every change to the site, and once a month.
That is how our own form is built: the message is checked on the server, sent through an email service, and if sending fails the visitor sees an error with an email address to use instead.
Our Fix & Launch service starts at $450 and includes connecting your form to real email or your CRM, testing that a message arrives, and setting up the email authentication so it doesn't land in spam.
Ask us to test your form