Does your contact form work?

Fill in your own contact form today. A form can show a tidy thank-you page while the message reaches nobody, and a visitor who gets no reply will not always ring you to say so.

My services page says the forms on my websites reach you. Here is what has to be right for that. You can check most of it yourself, with no technical knowledge.

Send a real test

Take your phone, turn off the wifi and open your site the way a customer would. Fill in the form with an address other than your company one, such as a personal address. Write something recognisable in the message, such as TEST with the date, and tell the people who will read it. Then look at the following:

• Do you see a clear confirmation after sending?
• Did the message arrive, and who got it?
• Is everything you filled in there, including the option fields?
• If you press “Reply”, does your answer go to the visitor’s address?
• Is a confirmation email supposed to go to the visitor, and did it arrive?

If you have more than one form, such as a quote request, a sign-up and a job application, test each one separately. The same goes for each language. On a multi-language site the French version can go to a different address from the Dutch one.

Check the spam folder

If the message is not in your inbox, look in your spam folder and any other folders. If you find it there, the form works and your email program does not trust the message.

A common cause is the sender. Some forms send the email as if it came from the visitor, using the address they typed in. Mail servers then see a message that claims to come from a Gmail address but was not sent through Gmail, and they find that suspicious. The right setup is this: the sender is an address on your own domain, and the visitor’s address goes in the reply-to field. That field decides where your answer goes.

Your domain name also has settings that say which services may send email on your behalf. They are called SPF, DKIM and DMARC. You do not need to understand them yourself. Ask whoever manages your site or your email whether they are in order, including for the service that sends the form messages.

Marking a message as “not spam” helps your own inbox. The cause stays, though, and the next message can land in a colleague’s spam folder again.

Who receives the message

The address a form sends to sits in a setting somewhere, and nobody looks at it again once it works. Say a hair salon once set the form to the address of an employee who has since left. It can also be the address of the developer who built the site, or an info@ address nobody opens any more.

So check which address the message arrives at, who reads that mailbox and who takes over during a holiday. A shared mailbox that two people look at covers that. If you get different kinds of questions, an option field such as “What is your question about?” can send each message to the right person.

What happens when it goes wrong

Any form can fail now and then, because the sending service is briefly unreachable or the visitor’s connection drops. You can test yourself what the visitor sees when that happens:

• Send the form empty, and with a wrong email address. Does the message say what to do, and does it appear next to the right field?
• Type a long message, put your phone in flight mode and press send. Do you see a message, or does it look as if everything worked? Is your text still there?

A useful error message says the message was not sent and what you can do now, such as try again or email an address shown next to it. That is why your email address or phone number belongs on the page alongside the form. Some people would rather send their own email anyway.

Then there is what happens behind the scenes. Ask your developer whether each message is also stored somewhere, in a database or a form tool, so that a failed email does not immediately mean a lost message. Ask too whether someone gets warned when sending fails. If you store messages, you store personal data: mention that in your privacy notice, do not keep them longer than necessary and ask a lawyer if you are unsure what the GDPR, the European privacy law, asks of you.

Stopping spam without stopping customers

Any public form will sooner or later get messages from bots, programs that fill in forms automatically. There are a few ways to stop them.

A honeypot is a hidden field that people do not see and bots do fill in. If that field is filled in, the message does not go through. The visitor notices nothing. A step further, there are checks that estimate in the background whether a person is on the page, such as Cloudflare Turnstile or Google reCAPTCHA. Check which visitor data goes to that service, and mention it in your privacy notice. Puzzles where you click on traffic lights work too, but they annoy your visitors and are hard for people with poor sight. Keep those for when the rest is not enough.

Protection can also be too strict and stop a real customer. So test again after adding it, on your phone as well. If your form has a spam filter, look now and then at what it has held back.

When to test again

Forms often break because of a change somewhere else: a new email provider, a move of your site to other hosting (the place your site runs), an update to a plug-in (an add-on for your site), an expired password or key for the sending service. Send a test after each of those changes.

Set a recurring reminder in your calendar too, because sometimes something changes without you knowing. At the same time, check when the last real message came in. If you normally get enquiries every week and it has been quiet for a month, send a test that same day.