First, the reassuring part
When a contact form goes quiet, the form itself is almost always still working; it is the email notification that fails somewhere between your website and your inbox. Most form plugins also store submissions in the site's dashboard, so the messages your visitors sent are usually not lost. The task is finding out why the notification stopped, and there are only a few usual suspects.
The most common cause: the form pretending to be the visitor
Some forms are set up to send their notification email as if it came directly from the visitor. So when a customer with a Gmail address fills out your form, the message claims to be from their Gmail account, even though it was actually sent by your website's server. Email providers now treat that as impersonation, because it is exactly what scammers do, and they block or junk those messages. The fix is to have the form send from an address at your own domain, such as website@yourdomain.com, and put the visitor's address in the reply-to field so you can still hit reply and answer them. Our hosted sites are set up to send this way, but a form plugin update or a settings change can quietly undo it.
Other usual suspects
- A changed email password. Your website logs in to an email account to send mail, just like your phone does. If that account's password changes, the website is still using the old one and every send fails.
- A plugin change. Installing, updating, or reconfiguring a form or email plugin can reset the sending settings.
- A full mailbox. If the inbox receiving the notifications is over its storage limit, new messages bounce.
- The spam folder. Sometimes the notifications are arriving; they are just being filed as junk.
What you can check in two minutes
- Search your spam or junk folder for the form's subject line.
- Check whether your mailbox is full or close to it.
- Submit a test through the form yourself and note the exact time.
- Think back: did anyone change an email password or update plugins recently?
When to open a ticket
If the test message does not arrive within a few minutes and the checks above do not explain it, stop there; the remaining causes live on the server side, where we can see the sending logs and fix the configuration directly.
Open a support ticket with the page address of the form and the time of your test submission, and we will trace it from our end.
