Your contact form is probably broken and nobody will tell you
A broken contact form produces no error, no bounce and no complaint. Enquiries simply stop arriving, and the business assumes it is a quiet month.
How does a contact form break without anybody noticing?
Most commonly the email it sends to starts being filtered as spam, a plugin or integration expires, a DNS or mail provider change breaks delivery, or the address it forwards to no longer exists. In every case the form still appears to submit successfully.
The visitor sees a thank you message. You see nothing at all. Because the failure is silent on both sides, it can run for months, and the only signal is a vague sense that things have gone quiet.
How do I check whether my contact form works?
Submit it yourself from a phone on mobile data rather than office wifi, using an email address unconnected to your business, and confirm the message actually arrives in the inbox somebody reads. Repeat monthly.
Testing from your own network and your own account is how broken forms pass tests. Allowlists and cached sessions hide exactly the failures you are looking for.
What else silently stops working on a small business website?
Booking widgets after a platform update, phone number links on mobile, embedded maps when an API key expires, and SSL certificates that lapse and turn the site into a browser warning.
The pattern is the same throughout: things that fail closed and quietly, on a site nobody looks at from the outside because everybody who works there arrives through a bookmark.
If this is your trade
Restaurants and hospitality →