Submit your own contact form from a phone, on mobile data, using an outside email address. Time how long the notification takes and check where it lands. Broken forms and misrouted notifications are the most expensive problem we find, and the cheapest to rule out.
Check this before you conclude anything about traffic
A firm convinced its search visibility had collapsed turned out to have a working site, stable rankings, and a contact form that had been silently failing since a plugin update four months earlier.
Every enquiry in that period was lost. No error message, no bounce, nothing in the analytics — the form appeared to submit and displayed a thank-you page.
This is the highest-cost, lowest-effort check in the series. Run it before you spend money on anything else.
The test
Not a glance at the form. An actual submission, done properly.
Use an outside address. A personal Gmail, not your firm address. Internal mail often behaves differently.
Use a phone, on mobile data. Not office wi-fi. This catches mobile-specific rendering problems and any network-level filtering on your office connection.
Fill it in like a stranger. Every field, realistic content.
Then check four things:
- Did a notification arrive at all?
- How long did it take? Enquiry response time matters commercially, and a notification delayed six hours is nearly as bad as one lost.
- Where did it land? Inbox, spam, promotions tab, or a shared mailbox nobody monitors on weekends.
- Did the submitter get a confirmation? If not, a prospect has no way to know it went through.
Repeat for every form. The contact page, the consultation request, the newsletter signup, the footer form, the pop-up. They're often built with different tools and fail independently.
Then check the phone
Same principle, same neglect.
Call your main number from an outside phone, during business hours and after. Where does it go? How many rings? Is the voicemail greeting current, and does it name the firm? Then call from a phone with a blocked number — some filtering systems treat those differently.
If you use a tracking number anywhere, call it and confirm it forwards correctly. Tracking numbers are a routine failure point, particularly after a vendor change.
The failure modes
Plugin updates. Form plugins update frequently, and notification settings are a common casualty.
Deliverability. Forms that send from your own domain via a server not authorised to send for it get filed as spam. This is the most common cause and the least obvious — nothing is broken, the mail is simply distrusted.
Personnel changes. Notifications routed to someone who left. The address may still accept mail and forward nowhere.
Spam filtering. Aggressive rules catching your own form notifications, particularly where the submitter's text triggers a filter.
Anti-spam that's too aggressive. Some protection silently discards submissions it judges automated. Legitimate enquiries can be caught, and by design nothing is logged.
What you can and can't conclude
Verified — Whether your own submission arrived, how fast, and where. Direct, and you have the timestamp.
Pending — Whether all enquiries arrive. One successful test proves the path works for one submission from one device. It doesn't prove nothing is being filtered intermittently, or that submissions from particular providers aren't being lost. Establishing that needs server-side logging of submissions independent of email delivery — which most sites don't have, and which is the single best investment you can make here.
Unconfirmed — How many you've lost historically. If there's no independent log, that number isn't recoverable. Worth stating plainly: firms want to know, and usually the honest answer is that it can't be reconstructed.
The one change worth making
Log form submissions to the database, not just to email. Most form plugins offer it and most installations have it switched off.
With it on, you can compare submissions recorded against notifications received, and you'll know within a day if delivery breaks. Without it, email is both the delivery mechanism and the only record — so when delivery fails, the evidence fails with it.
Ranking without calls is the second symptom in the full map at how do I tell if my website is losing me clients — but rule out delivery before accepting that diagnosis.