Why you should regularly check your website contact form is working

Broken website contact forms sit there losing you leads while you’re wondering why things aren’t as busy as you’d like them to be.

Things go wrong with websites and a non-working contact form is fairly common but not always spotted quickly enough.

1. Keep records of all incoming enquiries by source (contact form, email, phone etc.).  If you need help with this, see my page that shows you why this is so important and how to implement strong enquiries logging.
2. On a weekly basis review your enquiries to see if there is any marked difference in enquiries received via contact form.
3. After every non-basic website change, test your contact form still works.
4. Make it someone’s responsibility to check the contact form weekly, and to record that in your internal documentation.

Enquiries logging process

When an enquiry form is submitted, it usually connects with a CRM and/or sends you an email, making it clear that the enquiry has come via your website form.

By recording the date and time of every enquiry received, along with the method it came through (contact form, email, phone, etc.), you’ll build an ongoing log of all incoming enquiries.

Reviewing that log on a weekly basis should make it obvious whether you’ve recently received any enquiries via your contact form. While you may not get form submissions every single week, you’ll generally have a feel for how often they come in – which helps you spot when something might have failed.

Creating a failsafe alert

Even if a website form appears to submit successfully, the enquiry can sometimes fail to reach you.

I recommend using a separate URL (e.g. /thank-you) that’s triggered only after a form has been completed. This allows you to set up an automatic alert each time someone reaches that page.

Here’s how this creates a failsafe:

1. A website visitor fills in your contact form and is redirected to your /thank-you page, assuming their message has been sent.
2. You receive an instant email alert confirming the thank-you page has been visited – but you notice no corresponding enquiry in your inbox or CRM.
3. That’s a red flag, and you can then contact your technical support to investigate what went wrong.

I’ve seen many cases where no such failsafe was in place – only for businesses to later discover that dozens of enquiries had been lost, often too late to recover the opportunity, as potential customers had already gone elsewhere.

If you’d like help setting up this kind of failsafe, feel free to get in touch.

Human checking

Assign someone the responsibility to carry this out once a week:

1. Submit a test enquiry via your contact form.
2. Check that the enquiry is received via email or logged in your CRM.
3. Record that the check was completed, with date and initials.

You might think: “That’s overkill.” But it’s not – it’s two minutes each week for the peace of mind that your contact form is doing its job properly.

After website changes

For anything beyond simple content edits (like adding blogs or changing text), every website change should be logged internally – with a note of the date, what was changed, and who made the change. This applies to both internal teams and external suppliers (such as your web developer).

Each change should also trigger a follow-up action: test the contact form again and record who completed the check.

I’ve seen websites altered, hosting moved, and CRMs added or modified – all of which have resulted in forms silently failing. Without a clear post-change process, those issues can go unnoticed for weeks.

A well-documented change log and follow-up process helps reduce that risk significantly.