The Contact Form That Quietly Threw Every Message Away
A contact form that fails doesn’t announce it. The visitor fills it in, hits send, gets a thank-you message, and goes away satisfied. You get nothing. Neither of you knows. We audited thirty-four contact forms across the sites we host. Thirty-three were fine. One had no recipient address configured at all — so every message sent through it had been accepted, processed, and discarded. Nobody had complained, because nobody knew. The people sending those messages assumed they’d been ignored. That’s the part that costs money. It isn’t the lost message, it’s the customer who thinks you couldn’t be bothered to reply. Forms break quietly for boring reasons. Somebody changes the email address the form sends to. A plugin updates and resets a setting. The mail server starts rejecting messages from the website because the sending address doesn’t match the domain. An email host starts filing your own website’s notifications as spam. Any of those can happen months after the site was built and working. Test yours properly, at least twice a year. Not by looking at the settings — by filling the form in yourself, from your phone, on mobile data rather than your office wifi, using an email address that isn’t your business one. Then check whether it arrived, and check the spam folder too. If it doesn’t arrive, that’s the answer. If it arrives in spam, that’s a different problem and a fixable one. We now test every form on every site we host as part of routine maintenance, because “it worked when we built it” is not the same as “it works”.