Form Not Sending

Your form says thanks, and the messages never reach you.

So customers think you’re ignoring them. One check tells you which of two problems you’ve got.

A broken form doesn’t look broken. It looks like nobody’s interested in you, which is why it can bleed leads for weeks before anyone notices.

Run the entry-log check

Text 562-726-2287

The check takes thirty seconds and costs nothing. Text us only if you’d rather we handle it.

1 check

Splits the problem in two

$200

If it’s the only thing wrong

~4 hrs

To a written diagnosis

The short answer

Check the form’s own entry log before anything else. Gravity Forms, WPForms, Contact Form 7 with an add-on, and most other form plugins record every submission in the database, separately from the email they try to send. In WordPress that’s usually Forms, then Entries.

That one check splits the problem in two, and the halves are completely different jobs.

If the entries are there, you aren’t losing enquiries. You’re losing emails, and the problem is deliverability: your site sends mail in a way your recipient’s server doesn’t trust. The submissions themselves are safe and you can read them right now.

If there are no entries at all, the submission is failing before it’s recorded. That’s usually a plugin conflict, a JavaScript error, or a spam filter quietly discarding it.

Then check the spam folder of the receiving address, and send one test yourself so you know the current behaviour rather than a report of it from three weeks ago.

If entries are recording and email isn’t arriving, that’s SMTP work and it needs doing properly. Text 562-726-2287 or describe it here. Written diagnosis and a fixed quote in about 4 business hours, free.

Is this you?

Check you’re on the right page.

That last one is why this is urgent rather than annoying. Every week it stays broken is a week of people deciding you didn’t bother replying.

The form shows a success message, and no email ever arrives
Customers think you’re ignoring them, and you had no idea the messages weren’t reaching you
It worked until recently, and nobody changed anything
Some submissions arrive and some don’t
It reaches one address but not another
Someone says they contacted you weeks ago, and you never saw it

What’s actually causing it

Five causes, in the order they usually turn out to be.

01 Most common

Mail is sent in a way nobody trusts

By default WordPress sends email from the web server rather than from a real mail provider. Nothing authorises that server to send as your domain, so receiving servers increasingly discard it silently. No bounce, no error, nothing in the logs. This is the most common cause and it gets more common every year as providers tighten up.

The receiving address changed hands

The address on the form belongs to someone who left, or it forwards somewhere nobody reads. The mail arrives perfectly, at a mailbox nobody opens.

A plugin conflict

Something updated and the form now throws a JavaScript error before submitting. This is the version where no entry gets recorded, because the submission never completed.

A spam filter

Yours or theirs. Worth ruling out in a minute rather than assuming, especially if it’s intermittent.

The form plugin updated and lost a setting

Notification routing occasionally resets on a major version change. Check the form’s notification settings still name the right address.

What you can try yourself

Start with the entry log, not the spam folder.

Most pages about this open with “check your spam folder,” which is the least useful advice available. Step 1 is better, and it’s the one that tells you how bad this actually is.

Look at the entry log

Forms, then Entries, in your form plugin. This is the most useful thing on this page, because it tells you whether you’ve lost enquiries or only lost emails.

Send one test from an outside address

Not your usual one. Watch what happens, then check the spam folder of the receiving mailbox.

Check the form’s notification settings

Confirm the address is current and belongs to somebody who still works there.

When to stop

Stop here

If entries are recording and email isn’t arriving, that’s deliverability, and it isn’t a settings problem.

The real fix is sending through a proper mail service with authentication: SPF and DKIM records on your domain, and an SMTP plugin configured against a provider. Half-doing it is worse than not doing it. A misconfigured SPF record can stop your ordinary business email arriving too, and that failure costs far more than a broken form.

Stop there and get help. This is a two-hour job done properly and a two-week mess done casually.

What we do about it

Nothing in the entry log gets lost.