How often do you check that the online forms on your website are working? I don’t just mean, “Can people submit them?”, I’m asking, “Are you checking that you’re receiving the form submissions; as in, checking that they are being delivered to your email?”
It goes without saying that if you own a website, you need to know when people try to contact you, using the forms on your website.
But what if the form submissions are not being received to your email? This of course is a problem, and it needs to be fixed. Read on to learn how it can be fixed.
Please note: If you don’t have time to read this entire blog post, here is the most important part:
Please test the enquiry forms on your website regularly. To test them, literally fill them out, and submit them. Then check your email and see if your test(s) have been received. If it/they haven’t, do this:
- Contact whoever looks after your website. Tell them that you are not receiving the website form submissions; As in, tell them that the form submissions are not arriving to your email inbox. Tell them that you need this fixed.
- In the same email, ask them if a ‘SMTP Plugin’ needs to be set up and configured within your website.
- Also ask them if DMARC, DKIM and SPF is already set up in your email. If they say it hasn’t, or they say, “We don’t look after your email”, contact whoever looks after you email and ask them. If they say it has not been done, ask them if it should be set up or not. Then instruct them further, based on their response.
Your website person should reply to any of your questions with honest answers. If a SMTP Plugin needs to be set up and/or DMARC, DKIM and SPF needs to be set up, hopefully they will tell you. Hopefully they’ll then get this set up asap.
If they don’t reply, or they don’t help you, contact us and ask us to help you instead.
"This all sounds like boffin IT stuff"
Yes it is, and I don’t expect you to want to know what a “SMTP Plugin”, nor additional boffin things like “DMARC”, “DKIM”, “SPF”, “PHP Mail”, etc are. And nor do you really need to know. Just know they are important.
If by chance you do though want to know what these things are, you can use Google or YouTube to find out. The below information may also be of interest:
Most email services now require DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records when receiving emails. When you don’t have those set up, most email services will simply bounce these emails.
WordPress and other website platforms send email using something called ‘PHP Mail’. This is a php extension that mimics an email server. But under the hood the email does not contain any validation.
This is why an SMTP Plugin is needed. Additional information about why a SMTP Plugin is important is here.
The problem that some website owners are having, is that whoever is meant to be looking after their website (eg. a Webmaster) is not keeping up with technology correctly. In the past a SMTP Plugin was not always needed. But today, it usually is.
How often do you check that the online forms on your website are working?
We encourage our clients to check (test) that their website forms are submitting and being received to their email every few months. We also check (test) this for our clients each time we do security updates.
If your website forms break or stop submitting to your email, and you are not aware of it, you won’t receive form submissions and you’ll therefore be missing (not receiving) important potential new customer enquiries. As in, you’ll be missing out on new customers and new sales opportunities.
Note: Some people who create websites forget (or don’t bother) testing online forms correctly or fully when they launch websites. If your website has been recently launched, this is also a good time to test that the forms are working correctly and that you are receiving the form submissions to your email.
Testing your website online forms is easy. Simply fill them out, submit them, and then check your email to see if your tests have been received.
Additional info about how to Fix Forms that are not Sending Submissions to your Email
If you are not receiving online form enquiry submissions sent from your website, there are a few additional things you might want to know about, and do:
- Check your spam/junk folder to make sure the form submissions haven’t been flagged as spam by your Email Program.
- If they are not in the spam/junk folder, follow the steps that I have written about earlier in this blog post.
- Your website provider may then need to work with whoever looks after your email. Between the two of them they will need to set up and configure the ‘SMTP Plugin’ within your website. Once set up, it will need to be tested. If all is set up and configured correctly, any form submissions should then send correctly and be received to your email inbox.
- If you still find that website form submissions are not being received, or your ‘website person’ (Webmaster person) does not help you with this issue, contact us and we’ll help.
Tip: Ask your website person if a dashboard has been set up within your website that keeps a record of all form submissions. With this in place, you can regularly login to your website and view all submissions. This is a good backup, if you have not been receiving website form enquiries, people have been sending you.
Note: We set up this type of dashboard within all websites we create.