There is one type of problem that is particularly troublesome. Not because it is so difficult to fix, but because it makes itself completely invisible.
A website that’s offline alerts you straight away. The customer calls, the monitoring system raises the alarm, and you know about it within minutes. A website whose contact form sends enquiries into thin air never alerts you. It looks just the same as always. The form loads, the ‘Submit’ button works, and the visitor sees the confirmation message ‘Thank you for your enquiry’. But nothing actually reaches you.
And here’s the real catch: an enquiry that never arrives looks exactly the same to you as one that was never written. It’s just quiet. And every business has its quiet weeks.
A real-life example
That’s exactly what happened at a local restaurant. The owner got in touch because he’d noticed that nothing had been coming in via the website for a while. No alerts, no errors, just a hunch.
It didn’t take long to diagnose the problem. An access token between the form and the email inbox had expired. From that day onwards, every single submission was stored correctly but never delivered. Eight enquiries lay unnoticed in the database, the oldest of which was several weeks old. These included booking enquiries and a request for a corporate event.
I was able to retrieve the enquiries from the database and prepare them. The owner contacted them all. For some, it was too late; for others, it wasn’t. But for a business of this size, eight enquiries are not a rounding error but real money.
This week I had a second case on my desk, with a different cause but the same effect.
If your own sender address is rejected
A website sends out more emails than most people realise. Form notifications, confirmations to the sender, system messages, password reset links, and order confirmations from the online shop.
To ensure these messages do not end up in the spam folder, recipients now carry out rigorous checks to verify whether the sender is genuine. This involves three mechanisms, which can be thought of in the same way as sending a letter.
- SPF is the list of post offices authorised to post letters on your behalf. If the sender is not on the list, they will be regarded with suspicion.
- DKIM is the seal on the envelope. It proves that the contents have not been tampered with in transit.
- DMARC is your instruction to all recipients on what should happen to a letter that is neither on the list nor bears a valid seal. The strictest setting is: reject.
That is exactly what happened with a client’s website, which I look after. The web server sent the system messages using the company’s domain, but was not authorised to do so anywhere. Its own DMARC rule was set to ‘reject’. The result: the recipients flatly rejected the messages. They weren’t sorted into the spam folder; they weren’t accepted at all.
With system messages, it’s annoying. With contact forms, it costs you business.
The two-minute test
You don’t need a technician to find out if your form is working. All you need is two minutes.
- Open your own website as if you were a visitor, ideally on your mobile and without being logged in.
- Please fill in the contact form in full, using a genuine email address that is not your work address. A personal email address is ideal.
- Send it off and check the time.
- Check three places within five minutes: your inbox, your spam folder and the inbox of your personal email address, in case your form sends a confirmation.
If the message reaches its destination everywhere, everything is fine. If it ends up in your spam folder, you have a delivery problem. If you don’t receive anything at all, you’ve been missing enquiries since an unknown point in time.
Do this test every three months. It’s best to make a note of it in your diary straight away, because that’s precisely where the crux of the problem lies. Nobody thinks to check something that never reports an error.
Why I’m raising this issue
For the websites I manage, this check forms part of routine maintenance. Not because it’s complicated, but because nobody else does it. Traditional website maintenance covers updates, backups and security. The journey from the form to your inbox often falls through the cracks, even though it’s the only way your website actually makes money.
If you’re not sure whether everything is coming through properly, why not have a look for yourself? The test above will only take you two minutes.
And if you’d prefer someone to check this for you and keep an eye on it in the long term, then get in touch. I’ll check the whole route, from the moment it’s sent to your inbox.