A contact form looks like the silliest part of a website: four boxes and a button. Then it turns out the button works, the customer sees the thank-you message and nothing shows up in any mailbox. Nobody finds out until somebody phones, annoyed, asking why they were never answered.
A contact form is not an email
It is worth knowing what happens inside, because it explains nearly every failure. When somebody hits send, the browser passes what they wrote to your server; a program there picks it up and builds an email; and that email has to land in a mailbox somebody actually looks at. Three stages, and it can get lost in all three.
If you want to see what the page side is made of, the MDN forms guide is the reference those of us who write the code actually use.
Want to know what it would cost you?
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
The four ways a form message gets lost
1. The made-up sender
This is the most common failure and the hardest to spot. The program sends the email using the address the customer typed as the sender, and the receiving server can see the message is not coming from where it claims. It bins it. The right way is to send from an account on your own domain and put the customer address in the reply-to field, which is what you need to answer with one click. INCIBE, the Spanish cybersecurity institute, has material on email that covers this without jargon. How the domain email is set up is in business email.
2. The mailbox nobody reads any more
The notification does arrive, but at the address of whoever built the site six years ago, or at one belonging to somebody who no longer works with you, or at a free account so full that it bounces anything new. We have seen all three.
3. The message that is never stored anywhere
If the email is the only copy and the email fails, there is no trace: you do not even know somebody wrote. That is why we always keep a copy somewhere else, even a spreadsheet, plus a notification on the phone of whoever answers.
4. The validation that fails silently
An expired captcha, a required field that does not show on a phone, a button that just sits there thinking. The customer assumes a message went out that never did. You will not catch these by watching the mailbox: they only show up if you test the form yourself.
How many fields: fewer than you think
Every extra box is people dropping out halfway. A name, one way to reach them and an open space to say what they need is plenty to reply. We ask for a phone number when the business answers faster that way than by email, and everything else gets asked later, in conversation.
Two details that matter more than the design: the phone keyboard should switch to numbers on the phone field, and the error message should say what is missing and where. The web.dev forms course covers all of it with examples.
The one extra field usually worth having
A short dropdown with «how did you find us?». It does nothing for the message itself, but a year later you have the answer to the question that moves the most money. How to use that without tying yourself in knots is in where your customers come from.
The data protection checkbox
You need it, and it is not decoration: a box that is not ticked by default and a link to your privacy policy, saying who collects the data and what for. The legal pages a site needs are covered in legal pages for your website.
Spam, without going mad about it
An open form gets junk, that is life. Three things remove nearly all of it: a discreet captcha, a trap field people cannot see and robots fill in, and a limit on submissions per minute from the same address.
What does not work is removing the form and leaving the email address written on the page. The robots copy it anyway, and on top of that you lose everyone who would rather write from a phone without opening their mail app.
What should happen after the send button
Three things, none of them complicated. A thank-you message you can actually see, not a change of colour. A copy to the customer with what they wrote, which works as a receipt for both sides. And a notification on the phone of whoever will answer, because email gets checked when it gets checked. What happens from there is in how fast you reply.
We'll tell you in a ten-minute conversation
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
The five-minute contact form test
Do it today, on your phone and with real details, as if you were a customer:
- Fill the form in with your name and an address of yours that is not the business one.
- Check the notification arrives, and look in the spam folder too.
- Hit reply on that notification and see whether it goes to the customer or back to you.
- Check whether the customer got their copy.
- Do it again from the phone on mobile data, off your own wifi.
If any of the five steps fails, the form is broken even though it looks like it works.
Why a contact form breaks on its own
It almost never breaks by itself: it breaks when something next to it gets touched. A change of hosting, a migration, a new email provider, a content manager update or a password that expires. We test it every month and after every change, and it sits inside the maintenance.
WhatsApp beside the form, not instead of it
In small businesses the WhatsApp button takes most of the first contacts, which is why we always put it in plain sight. Even so, the form is still needed: for people who will not hand over their number, for the person writing at eleven at night from a work computer, and for when a plan or a photo has to be attached and left on record.
What it costs to have the form working properly
If we build the site, this is inside and not charged separately. Our prices are published: Tu Landing is 100 € a month and Tu Web 200 €, VAT on top and with no lock-in, with domain, hosting, email and maintenance included, and the domain registered in your name. In the presence plans (400, 750 and 1,500 € a month) it is included too, along with the articles and the listing posts.
If you already have a site and suspect the form is not getting through, we will look at it and tell you what is going on. Fixing it is usually a short job; what really costs you is the month you spent not knowing.
We work from Palamós, with businesses across Girona and Barcelona
We build sites and look after them from here, and the form is one of the few things we check one by one every month, because it is where the work comes in. If you want us to take a look at yours, send us your web address and we will tell you what we find.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.