You should, but a website form can show your customer a friendly thank-you on the screen and still send you nothing at all, and you'd never know it happened. The only way to be sure is to fill out your own form tonight, from a different email address, and watch for it to arrive.
I love this question, because most people never think to ask it. You put a contact form on your website a while ago, it said "Thanks, I'll be in touch," and you've trusted it ever since. Meanwhile a quiet inbox could mean business is slow this month, or it could mean the form stopped talking to you a long time ago.
Two minutes tonight tells you whether it works
- Open your website on your phone, the way a customer would.
- Fill out your form using a personal email address, a different one from the address the form sends to.
- Write something you'll recognize, like "test from the kitchen table, Tuesday night."
- Over the next few minutes, check your inbox, then your spam folder, then any promotions or other tabs your email has.
- If you also have a booking form or a quote form, test each one separately, because each one can break on its own.
If it lands in your inbox, wonderful, you can stop worrying about this one. If it lands in spam, it's worth fixing, because you're probably not reading your spam folder every day and your customers are ending up in there. If it never arrives at all, every person who has filled it out since it stopped has been waiting on an answer that was never coming.
The form usually works, and the email gets lost on the way to you
When a form goes quiet, the trouble is usually in getting the message from your website into your inbox. These are the reasons I see most:
- It's sending to an old address. You changed your email, or whoever built the site set the form to send to their own address while they were testing, and nobody ever changed it back.
- It's pretending to be your Gmail. A lot of forms send the message "from" your own email address so it looks familiar when it arrives. Gmail sees a message claiming to be from a Gmail address it didn't come from, and its rules for anyone sending email to Gmail say messages like that can land in spam or never arrive at all.
- An update broke it. The tools your website is built on and your email settings all change over time, and a form that worked perfectly the year you launched can quietly stop after an update nobody told you about.
- Your spam filter learned the wrong lesson. If your form has been collecting junk submissions and you've been marking them as spam, your email may start treating the real ones the same way.
Whoever answers first usually gets the job
Think about how you shop for someone local yourself. You find two or three people who look right, you message all of them, and you go with the one who gets back to you first. Your customers do the same thing.
So a form that stopped working a few months ago has been costing you the people who were ready to book, and they didn't wait around to tell you. They went with whoever answered.
A form you can trust lands where you'll see it, every time
When I build a form for someone, I send a real message through it myself before I call it done, from an outside email address, and I check that it lands in the inbox and stays out of spam. I have it send from your website's own address, set up so Gmail trusts it, and when you hit reply it goes straight to your customer.
After launch, keeping spam out of your forms is part of Website Care, so the junk gets handled and the real messages keep coming through to you. The settings stay my job, and you just get the email.
This is exactly the kind of thing that sits on the list
The website you keep meaning to check is one more thing living in your head on top of everything else you run. You're great at what you do, and you shouldn't have to be your own tech department to know whether your customers can reach you.
If you're in Murfreesboro, Smyrna or anywhere in Rutherford County and you'd like a second set of eyes, start with my free Website Check. It's seven yes or no questions, about two minutes on your phone, and your results land in your inbox.
Take the free Website Check before bed tonight
Do it tonight, so the next person who fills out your form actually hears back. And if you'd rather just talk it through, pick a time with me, or call or text me at (615) 437-5552.