For most business websites, the contact form is where the site earns its money. Yet it is often the last thing anyone tests. Form and email notification issues came up in 11 of our 110 WordPress projects and 5 of 45 landing pages. In our maintenance work, email, form and notification requests made up 9% of all tickets.
Here is what goes wrong and how we set forms up so they keep working.
The form problems we see most
Notifications that never arrive
The most serious problem: a visitor submits the form, sees "thank you", and nobody at the company ever receives the enquiry. Common causes:
- The website sends email through the server's basic mail function, and receiving mail servers treat it as spam
- The notification goes to an old address or to a web developer's test address
- The sender address uses the company domain without proper email authentication
Our fix is standard on every site: forms send through authenticated SMTP, the notification recipient is confirmed with the client in writing, and we send test submissions on launch day.
No confirmation for the visitor
Visitors like to know their message arrived. We set up a short confirmation email or, at minimum, a clear message on the page.
Missing thank-you page
A redirect to a dedicated thank-you page after submission is useful for two reasons: it reassures the visitor and it makes conversion tracking reliable. Clients regularly ask for this after launch, once they start advertising. We now include it by default.
Too many fields
Clients sometimes want to collect everything in the first form: company size, budget, timeline, how they heard about you. Every extra field costs submissions. We usually recommend name, email or phone, and a message – plus one or two qualifying questions if really needed.
Fields that do not match the audience
On one landing page, applicants and companies used the same form, which confused both. Adapting the fields to each audience, or offering two short forms, solved it.
Junk submissions
Spam bots find every form eventually. We use invisible spam protection and honeypot fields rather than frustrating puzzles for real visitors.
Integrations not receiving data
When form data goes to a CRM (for example Pipedrive), an email marketing tool or an event system, fields must be mapped exactly. We have seen custom fields not passing through to an event tool until they were mapped properly.
Our form setup checklist
- [ ] Fields agreed with the client, as few as possible
- [ ] Required fields marked, error messages in the site's language
- [ ] Privacy notice near the submit button, linked to the privacy policy
- [ ] Spam protection active
- [ ] Notification recipients confirmed in writing
- [ ] SMTP configured with an authenticated sender
- [ ] Confirmation message or email for the visitor
- [ ] Redirect to a thank-you page
- [ ] Conversion tracking on the thank-you page (with consent)
- [ ] CRM or email tool integration tested with a real submission
- [ ] Test submission from desktop and phone on launch day
Forms on multilingual sites
On bilingual sites, every form exists in each language: labels, placeholders, error messages, confirmation emails and thank-you pages. Confirmation pages are a classic place for mixed languages. We test each language separately.
Forms and tracking
If you run ads, the form is where the conversion happens. We track submissions through the thank-you page or a form event, with consent, and connect it to Google Ads or the Meta Pixel. Without this, ad platforms optimise blindly.
What to check yourself every few months
Even a well-configured form can stop sending when something changes: a new email provider, a changed password, a hosting move or an expired SMTP credential. We recommend a test submission every few months, and after any change to email or hosting.
Booking forms and multi-step forms
Longer processes – quotes, applications, bookings – sometimes benefit from a multi-step form: a few questions per screen instead of one long page. It feels shorter on mobile and lets you ask qualifying questions without scaring people off. The trade-off is more setup and testing, especially for conditional questions that only appear after certain answers. We use them when there are genuinely more than five or six things to ask.
Who should receive enquiries?
A small decision with a big effect. Sending enquiries to one personal mailbox creates a single point of failure during holidays. A shared inbox or two recipients is safer. For sales-led businesses, sending form data straight into a CRM with an automatic reply and a task for the team is even better.
FAQ
Why do my form emails go to spam?
Usually because the website sends mail without proper authentication. Setting up SMTP with a verified sender and SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for your domain fixes most cases.
Should I use a form or just show my email address?
Both. A form is easier on mobile and trackable; an email address and phone number give people a choice.
Can form submissions go directly into my CRM?
Yes. Most CRMs accept form data directly or through an integration. We map the fields and test with real submissions.
How long does a website update project take?
Our 10 update projects – new pages, sections or features on existing sites – had a median delivery of 8 days and 5.5 hours of work.
How often do outages or security issues happen?
Less often than people fear: outages and security issues were 5% of maintenance requests, with a median of 1.4 hours to resolve. Regular updates and backups keep it that way.
Where the numbers come from: our own project records in Odoo – 233 finished projects, 909 tasks and about 4941 logged hours, mostly from 2025–2026. Durations are calendar days from kickoff and we quote medians, so one unusually long project does not distort the picture.
Planning a WordPress project?
If you want a realistic plan for your own project, book a short call with our team and we will walk you through the phases, what we need from you and where projects like yours usually lose time. You can also browse finished work in our WordPress portfolio.
Comments