How do I know if my contact form is broken?

Why the success message is meaningless

Almost every broken form we find still tells the visitor their message was sent. That is what makes this fault so expensive — nobody complains, because from the visitor's side everything worked. They wait for a reply that never comes, then hire somebody else.

Developers routinely build the confirmation behaviour before the sending behaviour, using a placeholder that shows the success state so the design can be reviewed. If that placeholder is not removed before launch, the form permanently pretends. We found exactly this on our own site, months after launch.

The five-minute test

Use a phone, on cellular data rather than your office wifi, because that is how your customers arrive. Use a personal email address, not one on your company domain, since same-domain mail can behave differently. Write something unmistakable in the message field so you can search for it.

Submit it. Then check three places: your inbox, your spam folder, and — if you have a form plugin — its entries list inside your website admin. If the entry appears in the admin but not your inbox, your email delivery is broken rather than your form. If it appears nowhere, the form itself is.

Do this once a month. Forms break silently after plugin updates, hosting migrations and DNS changes, and there is no alert when they do.

The three causes, and what each looks like

A placeholder handler shows success instantly or after a fixed delay, and usually clears the fields. In the page source you will often find a comment saying something like 'replace with real endpoint'.

An unconfigured endpoint means the form posts somewhere that does not exist. This one usually produces a visible error, so it is the least damaging of the three.

Silently discarded email is the most common and the hardest to spot. The form works, the server accepts the message, and the receiving mail provider drops it because the sending server is not authorised to send for your domain. Nothing bounces. Nothing errors.

The fix that makes it permanent

Send email through a proper delivery service rather than the web server — Postmark, Brevo, SES or similar. That solves the deliverability half.

Then, more importantly, store every submission in your website's database as well as emailing it. Email should be a notification, never the record. Once submissions are stored, a mail failure costs you a delay rather than a customer, and you can go back and find enquiries you never received.