Your contact form might not be working, and you would not know

A broken contact form does not look broken. The visitor fills it in, presses send, and sees a friendly "thanks, we'll be in touch". The message just never arrives.

Nothing errors. Nobody is told. From the inside, it looks exactly like a quiet month.

That is what makes it one of the most expensive faults a small business website can have. You do not lose the enquiries you can see; you lose the ones you never knew existed.

Why forms fail without telling anyone

When someone submits a form, the website has to send an email to you. There are several places along the way where that can quietly fail.

• The server is not allowed to send mail. Many hosts restrict or block email sent directly from a website, and sometimes they change that setting without much notice.
• The email fails authentication. Gmail, Outlook and most business mail services now check whether an email really comes from the domain it claims to. If your domain's SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are missing or wrong, form emails go to spam or are rejected outright.
• The form pretends to be the visitor. A common mistake is setting the "From" address to whatever the visitor typed in. To a mail server, your website is then sending email as gmail.com, which looks exactly like spoofing, and it gets treated that way.
• The destination changed. The address the form sends to was an old employee's, or a mailbox that filled up, or one that was closed during a change of email provider.
• Something updated. A plugin, a theme or a spam-protection tool updated and the form broke on mobile, or the captcha stopped loading, so nobody can actually submit it.

How to test it properly

Testing your form from your own laptop, once, does not tell you much. Do this instead.

• Use your phone, on mobile data rather than your office Wi-Fi.
• Fill in the form using a personal Gmail or Outlook address, not your business one.
• Note the time you pressed send, and check how long the email takes to arrive.
• If it does not arrive within a few minutes, check your spam or junk folder.
• When it arrives, press reply. The reply should go to the person who filled in the form, not back to your own website.

If it passes all of that, good. Now put a reminder in your calendar to do it again next month, and any time anything on the website changes.

Signs it might already be broken

• Enquiries dropped off suddenly rather than gradually.
• A customer mentions they "sent a message through the website" that you never saw.
• Your website was recently updated, moved host, or changed email provider.
• You have not tested it in longer than you can remember.

What a reliable setup looks like

If you are having a website built, or yours needs fixing, these are the things to ask for.

• Send through a proper mail service, using authenticated SMTP or a transactional email service, rather than the server's built-in mail function.
• Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your domain, so receiving servers can verify the email is genuinely yours.
• Send from your own domain, reply to the visitor. The email should come from an address on your domain, with the visitor's address set as the reply-to.
• Keep a copy of every submission on the website itself, not only in email. If email ever fails, the enquiry still exists and can be recovered.
• Use spam protection that does not punish real people. Puzzles that are hard to complete on a phone cost you genuine enquiries.

None of this is exotic. It is just the difference between a form that usually works and one you can rely on.

If you want a second pair of eyes

We offer a free website review, written by a person, which covers exactly this sort of thing. But honestly, the phone test above will tell you most of what you need to know. Do it today.

Common questions