My contact form is not sending

This is the most expensive quiet failure a small business website has. The form still appears, the customer still fills it in, the thank-you message still appears, and nothing arrives. Nobody complains, because from the customer’s side it worked.

The cost is invisible in exactly the way that matters: it looks like a slow month.

Test email sending properly, which is not how most people test it

Four conditions, all of them necessary.

From a phone, on mobile data. Different device, different network. Some failures only appear off the office network.

With an email address not on your own domain. A free Gmail address is a reasonable choice for this, because testing with your own address can succeed through internal delivery while every real enquiry fails.

With realistic content. Spam filters react to short, link-free, test-shaped messages differently from real ones. “test test test” is not a test.

Then check three places. The inbox, the junk folder, and whatever the form stores on the site itself.

If it arrives in junk, the form is not broken but the enquiry is still lost, which counts as broken for business purposes.

The four places it breaks

Stage	What fails	Symptom
The page	Validation, a script error, an anti-spam check	Cannot submit, or nothing happens on tap
The delivery	The mechanism sending the mail	Submits, thank-you shown, nothing sent
The inbox	Filtering, a full mailbox, a forwarding rule	Sent, never seen
The storage	Nothing keeps a copy	Nothing to recover afterwards

Stage two is the one that produces the classic silent failure, and stage four is what turns it from an incident into a loss. If submissions are stored on the site as well as emailed, a delivery failure is an inconvenience. If they are only emailed, the enquiries are gone.

The usual causes of a WordPress contact form not sending mail

Something was updated. A platform, plugin or theme update that changed how mail is sent. The form still renders, so nothing looks wrong. On WordPress specifically, a form plugin such as WPForms or Contact Form 7 hands the message to PHP’s built-in mail function by default, which most receiving mail systems now treat as untrustworthy regardless of how well the form itself is built — an SMTP plugin, configured against a real mail provider rather than the server’s own mailer, is the fix, and its absence is the single most common cause on this platform.

Hosting changed. Sending mail from a web server is treated with suspicion by receiving systems, and many hosts restrict or disable it outright, which is exactly the failure an SMTP-based sending method is designed to avoid. A migration frequently changes this without anyone mentioning it.

DNS changed. The records that let receiving systems verify mail from your domain are the same records that website work disturbs. That connection is set out on email failing on a business domain.

The recipient address is stale. A former staff member’s address, or an address on a domain the business no longer uses. The mail sends successfully and goes somewhere nobody reads.

Anti-spam is too aggressive. Whatever protects the form from bots is also rejecting real people. A form protected into silence is the same outcome as a broken one.

The mailbox is full or filtering. A rule created years ago filing anything with the word “enquiry” into a folder nobody opens.

The fix that removes the whole class of problem

Store submissions on the site, not only in email. Every enquiry written to a record that survives independently of mail delivery. Then a delivery failure means late enquiries rather than lost ones, and there is something to recover.

This is a build decision rather than a repair, and it is worth naming in the brief. It is one of the questions to put to a supplier alongside the others on the questions to take to a meeting.

Send to an address the business controls permanently. Not an individual’s address. A role address that continues to work when the individual does not.

Send an acknowledgement to the person who submitted it. It sets the expectation, and its absence is a signal to the sender that something went wrong.

The Australian consideration

A contact form collects personal information — usually a name, an email address, a phone number, and whatever the person types into the message field.

Two consequences worth stating. What you say you will do with it should match what you actually do with it, and a privacy policy copied from another business is a set of statements about your business that may not be true. That is on why terms and a privacy policy are different documents.

And if the form doubles as a newsletter signup, consent obligations attach separately under the Spam Act, which is on the Spam Act and your email signup form. A tick box that is already ticked is not the safe design.

Make it a scheduled check

This is the one thing on a small business site that should be tested on a schedule rather than when someone notices.

Once a month, on a phone, on mobile data, with an outside address, with realistic content. It takes two minutes. Put it on a recurring calendar entry with a named owner, and do it immediately after any website change.

Where an ongoing arrangement exists, this belongs in it and should be named explicitly — a maintenance agreement that covers updates but not a form test covers the cause and not the consequence. What one should contain is on the maintenance page.

What to do next

Test your form now, properly, using the four conditions above. If it works, put the monthly check in the calendar today. If it does not, the four-stage table tells you which part to describe when you call, and that description is the difference between a fix and an investigation billed by the hour. The technical scope sits under web development services.