How to find out whether your enquiry form still works

This is the single most expensive defect an audit turns up, and it is the one owners find hardest to believe. The form looks fine. It accepts input. It shows a confirmation. The failure happens after that, out of sight, and it produces no error anyone sees.

The usual causes

• The destination mailbox was closed. An employee left in 2019, IT deleted the account, nobody connected it to the website.
• The sending domain stopped being trusted. Mail policy tightened, the form's mail is now rejected or filed as spam at the receiving end.
• The hosting moved and the mail function was never reconfigured on the new server.
• A plugin update broke the handler, and the confirmation screen is hard coded to appear regardless.

The ten minute check

Do this yourself today, from a phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi.

• Fill in the enquiry form as a stranger would, with a personal email address you control and a message you will recognise.
• Submit it and note the exact time.
• Check the destination inbox. Then check its spam folder. Then ask whoever is supposed to receive enquiries whether it arrived.
• Repeat with a second address on a different provider, because one provider accepting the mail does not mean all of them do.
• If your site offers a WhatsApp route as well, test that separately. It fails independently.

If anything does not arrive within fifteen minutes, treat it as broken. A form that is slow is a form that is going to spam.

What a working setup looks like

Submissions should reach a monitored inbox, with a copy to a second address so a single mailbox change cannot take the channel down. The site should store submissions independently of mail, so nothing is lost even when delivery fails. And someone should receive a monthly count, because the fastest way to notice a broken form is a number that suddenly reads zero.

Part of the standard Buildgin audit. The findings are yours whether or not you hire us for the rebuild.