Your contact form goes nowhere

Open your website. Fill in your own contact form. Use a real address you can check. Submit it.

Now go and see whether anything arrived.

I do this on every audit and it fails more often than any other single check. Not occasionally. Regularly. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the small business sites I look at have a contact form that is either silently broken or delivering somewhere nobody reads.

The causes are boring and that is what makes them survive.

The address it forward to belonged to somebody who left in 2022. The form plugin updated and the integration quietly detached. The site moved hosts and the sending was never reconfigured, so submissions go into a queue that does not exist. The mail is being delivered and landing in spam, every time, because the site sends as your domain from a server with no permission to.

And the reason nobody notices is that a broken form produces exactly the same signal as a form nobody used. Silence. There is no bounce, no error, no alert. The business concludes the website does not generate leads, which becomes received wisdom, and eventually somebody proposes a redesign to fix it.

Three things, and none take long.

Test it monthly. Put it on a recurring reminder next to checking the smoke alarms.

Make it copy you in. Every submission also goes to a second address. If you stop seeing them, something changed.

Send from a service, not from the web server. Anything with a real sending reputation. Web servers are terrible at email and always have been.

The best-designed site in the county is worth nothing if the thing at the end of it is a hole in the floor.