Why Isn’t My Contact Form Working?

One of the more frequent support requests we get from business owners is in relation to their contact form.

For many businesses, a website’s job is to generate leads. When those leads show up, you need to know about it! Unfortunately, there are several potential points of failure from the time the lead pushes send til you read the email.

Form Spam Filtering

To prevent as many spam and bot submissions as possible, your contact form should have a spam check in place. Checks like Google reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare’s Turnstile perform a check to make sure an actual human is filling out your form. If there is a problem with the way this was setup, or if something has broken along the way, you won’t be able to submit the form at all.

Form Notification Settings

Your website needs to be told where to send these notification emails. It’s not uncommon to find very simple errors in the “to” setting. Here’s some we’ve seen over the years:

• Sending to a previous website developer
• Sending to a previous employees address that doesn’t have proper forwarding setup
• Simple typos
• Sending to an address no one monitors

Email Sending Issues

By default, WordPress sites use an outdated method to send email notifications. This method is unreliable in general and prone to getting emails flagged as spam. Sometimes this will not be a problem for months or even years. Then one day, it breakdown and you have no idea why all your leads dried up! Simple Mail Tranfer Protocol (SMTP) should be used to make sure your notification emails are going out with the proper authentication in place.

Email Authentication

Once the email notification finally leaves your site, it faces a series of filters and checks before it can safely get to your inbox. First, it has to pass a check at the domain level to prove that it’s a legitimate email. Again, a good SMTP service helps here by requiring these authentication records.

Inbox Spam Filtering

Assuming you had everything in place up till this point, your email now faces the spam filtering in your inbox itself. Different providers like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have different algorithms and filters in place to keep your inbox free of spam. This can cause your email to get flagged and sent to your spam folder. The first thing we always ask clients who aren’t getting their leads is to check their spam folder.

Accidental Spam Labeling

Believe it or not, we’ve had more than one client accidentally label their own lead emails as spam! It’s a simple mistake, but it happens. This can be fixed by finding the email notification in your spam folder and marking it as Not Spam.

We Can Help!

Are you having one of these problems with your contact form? Our Hosting & Maintenance service includes SMTP setup to improve deliverability of your form notifications. Even better, an actual R5 team member will check your form each month and make sure it’s getting past all these fail points and to your inbox!