Quivermark
Contact form not sending emails? How to find out why
A broken contact form makes no noise. The page looks fine, visitors press send, and all you notice is a quiet few weeks. Here is how to find out where the message is getting lost.
Last updated: 4 November 2026
Start by testing it like a customer
Use your phone, with Wi-Fi off, so you are not relying on anything saved on your own computer. Open your contact page, fill in the form with an email address you can read, and press send. Then answer two questions:
- Did the page say the message was sent?
- Did the email reach you within a few minutes, and was it in the inbox or in spam?
The answers point to the cause.
An error, or nothing happens when you press send
The form itself is failing. The usual causes:
- A recent update. A plugin, theme or site update can break a form. If it stopped working around an update, start there.
- The spam protection. reCAPTCHA and similar tools rely on keys. A key that was removed, or that belongs to the old address of the site, can block every message.
- The form service. If an outside service handles your form, its account may have lapsed or reached its monthly limit.
It says “thank you”, but no email arrives
The form works and the message is being lost afterwards. Check in this order:
- Your spam folder, including that of anyone else who should get these.
- Where the form sends to. Open the form’s settings and read the address. It is often someone who has left, or the person who built the site.
- Whether the form keeps a copy. Many form tools store entries. If yours does and the messages are there, the form is fine and only the email is failing.
- Whether your domain can receive email. If it has no mail server records (MX), mail to an address at your domain is never delivered.
It keeps landing in spam
Mail providers are suspicious of messages that cannot prove where they came from. Two things usually fix it:
- Set up your domain’s email records: SPF, DKIM and DMARC. They prove the mail is really from you. Your email provider publishes the exact values.
- Send from an address at your own domain. A form that sends “from” the visitor’s address looks forged. Keep the visitor’s address in the reply-to field.
On WordPress, forms often send through the web server’s own mail, which many providers distrust. An SMTP plugin connected to a real mailbox or email service is the usual fix.
How to stop it happening again
The trouble is that nothing tells you. You can put a monthly reminder in your calendar and repeat the test above, or have it watched for you. Tell Quivermark which page your form is on and it opens that page in a real browser on every full check, and tells you if the form has gone. On the Business plan it can also send a weekly test enquiry through the form, clearly marked as a test, once you have confirmed the site is yours. Add one hidden copy address to the form’s notification email and it confirms the email really arrived.
Check your site now, free
The free check looks for your form and reads your domain’s email records, along with the rest of your site, in about fifteen seconds. It does not send a message, so it cannot tell you the email arrived: the test above does that.