The contact form that stopped working eight months ago
A broken contact form does not look broken. It submits, it says thank you, and the message goes nowhere. Here is how to test yours properly.
A contractor we spoke to had noticed things were quieter than usual. Not dramatically. Just enough that he had started wondering whether people were spending less, or whether the bigger outfits were taking work he used to get.
His contact form had not delivered an email since the previous autumn.
It still submitted. It still said thanks, we will be in touch shortly. Every enquiry went into a void, and every one of those people concluded he had not bothered to reply.
This is the most expensive thing that goes wrong with a small business website, and it is the hardest to notice, because nothing about it looks like a failure.
Why it happens
The form itself rarely breaks. What breaks is the delivery, and there are several ways for that to happen quietly.
The email address changed. The form sends to an address set up years ago, often a former employee, or an old provider that got replaced. Mail goes to an inbox nobody opens.
A hosting change. The site moved, and the mail settings did not move with it. Common when a site gets migrated by someone who was not the original builder.
A plugin or service update. On WordPress, form plugins update. Sometimes settings reset. Occasionally two form plugins end up fighting each other.
An expired key. Many forms send through a mail service that uses an API key. Keys expire, free plans hit limits, accounts get suspended for non payment on a card that expired.
Spam filtering. The most common one and the most frustrating. The email arrives perfectly and gets filed as spam, forever, because website forms often send in a way that looks suspicious to mail providers. Nobody ever checks the folder.
The site got busier. A form on a free plan that allows a hundred submissions a month silently stops at a hundred and one.
None of these produce an error message on the website. The visitor sees success. You see nothing at all, which looks exactly the same as nobody getting in touch.
Test it properly, right now
Five minutes. Do not skip the details, because they are what makes it a real test.
- Use your phone, on mobile data. Turn wifi off. You want to look like an actual visitor, not like your own office network.
- Open your website in a private or incognito window. Not logged into anything.
- Fill in the form completely, with a real email address you can check, and put something identifiable in the message like "test, ignore, Tuesday."
- Submit it and note the exact time.
- Check the inbox it should arrive in. Then check the spam folder. Then check any other address that might be the recipient.
- Wait ten minutes and check again, because some setups are slow.
If it arrives, note the date somewhere and repeat it monthly. If it does not arrive, you have just found something worth more than any redesign.
The second failure, which is quieter
The form works fine. The email arrives. Nobody reads it.
This happens more than you would expect. Enquiries go to an address like info@ that gets checked when someone remembers. Or they go to a personal inbox that receives two hundred other emails a day and the enquiries scroll past.
Two fixes, both fifteen minutes.
Send form submissions to a real, monitored address. Whoever actually answers the phone should get them.
Set up a rule that flags them. A filter that labels anything from the website, or moves it into its own folder, or triggers a notification on your phone. Anything that makes an enquiry look different from a supplier newsletter.
And test whether it lands in spam. If it does, the fix is usually technical, involving records that tell mail providers your website is allowed to send on your domain's behalf. Your web person will know what SPF, DKIM and DMARC mean. If they do not, that is informative.
Keep a record of enquiries somewhere other than email
The version of this problem that we see most often is a business that has no idea how many enquiries it gets, because the only record is a scattered email history.
You do not need software for this. A spreadsheet with five columns works: date, name, business or job, phone, and what happened. Fill it in when an enquiry comes in.
Within two months you know your actual enquiry rate, which means you would notice if it stopped. That is the whole point. The contractor above did not lack a form. He lacked a baseline, so a drop to zero looked like a slow season.
What to do this week
Test your form the way described above. Put a monthly reminder in your phone to do it again.
Then check the address it goes to, and check the spam folder in that account while you are there.
If the test fails and you cannot work out why, that is exactly the kind of thing our free review covers. No pressure and no sales call, just a straight answer about what is broken.
Call +1 506-801-9970 or email info@qhike.ca. We serve Fredericton, Moncton, Saint John and all of New Brunswick.