A Service Site With a Broken Contact Form

How it was discovered

A customer mentioned, in passing during a phone call, that she had used the website form a few weeks earlier and had not heard back.

The owner apologised, assumed it had been missed, and thought no more about it.

Two weeks later somebody said the same thing.

Testing it properly took five minutes and revealed that no submission had arrived since a hosting change eleven months earlier.

Why nobody noticed

The failure is silent and symmetrical, which is what makes it so expensive.

The form submits, shows a thank you message, and appears to work from the visitor's side.

From the business's side, a broken form and a quiet period look identical. Both are an inbox with no enquiries in it.

And the people affected do not complain, because they assume they were ignored and go elsewhere rather than phoning to check.

Which means the business has no signal at all, from either direction, that anything is wrong.

The usual causes

• A hosting or platform change, where mail settings did not carry over.
• A plugin update that reset or broke the configuration.
• The destination address changed and the form was never updated.
• Submissions going to spam, because the site sends mail unauthenticated.
• An employee left and their mailbox was closed.
• A filter or rule quietly moving them into a folder.

The fourth is the most common and the most misleading, because the form is working perfectly and the mail is being delivered somewhere nobody looks.

A worked example

The business above estimated the loss conservatively.

They had previously received roughly eight form enquiries a month, converting at about one in four, with an average job in the low thousands.

Eleven months of that is a figure the owner preferred not to state precisely.

The fix took twenty minutes: reconfiguring the form to send through an authenticated route and adding a second copy to a different address.

They also added a monthly reminder to submit the form themselves, which has since caught one further failure after a platform update.

The second failure lasted nine days rather than eleven months, which is the entire value of the habit.

Store submissions as well as sending them

The single change that makes this failure survivable.

Most form tools can save every submission in a database as well as emailing it.

With that enabled, a mail failure means the enquiries are delayed rather than lost, and they can be recovered the moment somebody notices.

It costs nothing, it is usually a setting rather than development, and almost nobody turns it on.

It also gives you a record for anything disputed later, which is occasionally useful for a different reason entirely.

Sending from the right address

The technical cause behind most silent failures, and it is worth understanding.

Many forms send mail claiming to be from the visitor's address, so that replying works naturally.

Receiving systems increasingly treat that as forgery, because a message claiming to come from one domain and sent by a server belonging to another is exactly what forged mail looks like.

The correct arrangement is sending from an address at your own domain, with the visitor's address in the reply-to field.

That preserves the convenience and removes the reason for filtering, and it is a setting in every form tool.

The counter-case

Where a form is not the right route at all.

A business whose enquiries are overwhelmingly by phone, where the form exists because sites have forms and receives two submissions a year.

There the honest answer may be removing it, or replacing it with a prominent number and an email address, which cannot break silently.

A plain email address published on the page has its own drawbacks and it does have one advantage: when it fails, you find out, because the sender gets a bounce.

Forms fail without telling anybody, which is the whole subject of this piece.

A second route to the same enquiry

The structural protection worth having regardless of testing.

A form is a single point of failure, and any single point of failure eventually fails.

Publishing a phone number and an email address alongside the form means a visitor has two other routes, neither of which can break silently.

Some businesses avoid publishing an email address for fear of spam, which is a real concern and a smaller one than losing eleven months of enquiries.

A dedicated address that filters well, checked daily, handles that concern without removing the alternative.

The point is not that forms are unreliable. It is that when they fail, nothing tells you, and a second route means somebody eventually does.

What else this site got wrong

Worth noting, because they compound.

No confirmation email to the person submitting, so they had no record and no reason to expect a reply.

No stated response time on the page, so nobody knew when to chase.

And the thank you message said the team would be in touch shortly, which was untrue for eleven months and read as ordinary reassurance throughout.

A confirmation email would have made the failure visible sooner, because a customer receiving nothing at all is more likely to phone than one who assumes they are in a queue.

Recovering afterwards

Once a failure is found, there is a question about what to do with the gap.

If submissions were stored, the answer is straightforward: work through them, contact everybody, and be honest about what happened.

Most people are reasonable about a technical failure explained plainly, and a proportion of older enquiries are still live.

If nothing was stored, the enquiries are gone and there is no way to identify who they were.

What is worth doing then: checking server logs, which sometimes record form submissions even when the mail failed, and asking your host whether anything is recoverable.

Frequently nothing is recoverable, which is the strongest possible argument for turning storage on before you need it rather than discovering its absence afterwards.

The monthly check

1. Submit your own form from a phone, on mobile data.
2. Use a real address you can check.
3. Confirm it arrives, including in spam.
4. Check the confirmation to the submitter arrives too.
5. Do it after any platform or hosting change, without waiting for the month.

The fifth catches most of them, since changes are what break forms and the connection is rarely made at the time.

What the form should ask for in the first place is covered in asking for a phone number you will not use.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.