If your contact form is not delivering, your website will look exactly like a site that gets no leads, and you will never know the difference unless you test it. Fill in your own form now, from your phone, and see what arrives. If nothing reaches you within a few minutes, the cause is almost always one of four things: the messages go to an inbox nobody reads, they land in spam, the form is broken after an update, or it fails silently on a phone.
This is part of reason 4 in why your website isn't generating leads: there is no obvious way to contact you, or there is one and it does not work.
The five-minute test
- Open your site on your phone, not your computer.
- Fill in the form as a customer would, with a real email address you can check.
- Submit it. Note what the page shows: a confirmation, an error, or nothing.
- Check the inbox that is supposed to receive it, including the spam and promotions folders.
- Reply to the message and see whether the reply goes to the customer or to your own address.
Each step that fails points to one of the causes below.
Cause 1 — It goes to an inbox nobody reads
The most common cause by far. The form was set up years ago to send to an address that belonged to a previous employee, the person who built the site, or an inbox nobody opens any more. The form works perfectly; the messages pile up unread. Check the form's settings and send it to an inbox someone reads every day.
Cause 2 — It lands in spam
Form emails are often sent by the website's server "from" your own address. Mail services see an email claiming to be from your domain that did not come from your mail server and treat it as suspicious. The fix is to have the form send through a proper mail service or from a correctly configured address, and to set up your domain's email authentication records. Whoever looks after your site can do this in an afternoon.
Cause 3 — An update broke it
Plugins, themes and builder updates change things. A form that worked last year may now fail on submit, or show a success message and send nothing. If you cannot remember the last time a lead came through the form, this is likely.
Cause 4 — It fails on a phone
A form that works on a desktop can fail on a phone: a hidden required field, a captcha that will not load, a date picker that cannot be used with a thumb. Always test on a phone, because that is where most of your visitors are.
What a good form asks
Name, a phone number or email, and what they need. Optionally the town and the service from a short list. Nothing else. Every extra field loses people, and fields like "budget" and "how did you hear about us" belong in the conversation, not the form. Show a clear confirmation after submitting and say when they will hear back, then make sure they do.
Have someone else test it
The free website audit checks whether your homepage has a form, a tap-to-call number or an email link. The one test it cannot do is yours: send an enquiry through your own form and make sure it arrives. A plumber or an auto shop that books mostly through the form should run this test before anything else on this site.