How to Troubleshoot WordPress Contact Forms Issues

Some customers have issues with their WordPress contact forms not functioning correctly. This guide will cover what to look for when troubleshooting contact forms. 

How to troubleshoot WordPress contact form submissions not being received:

1. You will need to test the form yourself if your Contact Form is not sending or receiving messages. Use a completely different email address to send a submission with the contact form; this helps us check whether the issue lies with the contact form itself or the email associated with it. 
2. Test both email addresses directly if the form submission fails.  
   • The email associated with the contact form 
   • The email address you have used when entering form data 
3. If you receive the email, check the contact form configuration to confirm the email address is correctly spelled and entered. 
   • Check the spelling and punctuation for the email address. 
   • Make sure an email is set up correctly to receive form submissions. 
4. If you do not receive the direct email from the test email address, proceed with standard email troubleshooting steps if the email is hosted with us. 
5. If the email address is working, you may need to replace that Contact Form Plugin or reach out to the Plugin developers for assistance with further troubleshooting. 

Sender Email Configuration

Sometimes the "sender email" configuration may cause a form submission not to be received. Based on the form configuration, the form will show that it came from the person's email address who filled it out.  

The issue is that many 3rd party email providers will not allow emails to be delivered that did not originate from their specific email server. Hence, the form submission will fail. 

A recommendation is to have the "sender email" configured to use an email from the owner's domain. For instance, it may be contactform@'theirdomain.com' or no-reply@'theirdomain.com.' Using an email from their domain will eliminate the concern of a 3rd party email restricting the delivery of the form. Pending the form options, there may be a possibility of providing a "reply-to" field and having that configured to be the person's email filling out the form. This will allow the owner to "reply-to" the contact form email, and it will go to the person's email address that filled out the form instead of the contactform@'theirdomain.com' or whatever email address they configured for the "sender email."