A new client got in touch because enquiries had “gone a bit quiet”.
Their website had been built around a year ago, and they were starting to worry that hardly anyone was getting in touch.
We had just come out of summer so they assumed it was just the time of year. It wasn’t.
Their WordPress contact form had stopped delivering emails.
The strange thing was, nobody knew.
Customers filled in the form, clicked Send, saw a nice confirmation message and assumed their enquiry had been received.
The business never got a single one.
The form was trying to send emails through an email server that wasn’t set up correctly and therefore wasn’t trusted, so the messages were being rejected before they ever reached the inbox.
No warning… No error message… No obvious sign anything was wrong… Just missed enquiries.
I fixed the email delivery properly by routing it through my own email systems, set up a backup so every enquiry is stored in WordPress, and added a monthly test to make sure everything keeps working.
Within a couple of weeks, they’d already received a number of great enquiries through the website.
The worrying part is that this happens more often than you’d think.
Most business owners only discover there’s a problem when they suddenly realise their inbox hasn’t had an email from their website for weeks.
Meanwhile, potential customers assume you’ve chosen not to reply.
If you’ve got a website with a contact form, take two minutes today and test it properly.
Don’t just check that the success message appears. Fill in the form yourself and make sure the email actually arrives.
If it doesn’t, get in touch. I’ll work out what’s going on and get things back on track.
I’m Craig Pickles, a web designer, developer, technical SEO and social media specialist.