Contact form not sending emails

Which one is it?

Open your website's dashboard and find the form's saved messages. Builders call them form submissions, form responses or entries; on WordPress they're under the form plugin's menu, if it saves them at all.

The messages are saved, but no email came

The form works. The email to you went astray: spam, the wrong address, or your email service refused it.

Nothing saved either

The form isn't sending at all: step 4.

It worked, then stopped on a certain date

Something changed that day: a new email address or email company, a domain move, or a website update. Steps 2 and 3.

Some messages arrive, some don't

Usually a spam filter: step 1.

Test it properly: fill in the form on your phone using cellular data, with a different email address from the one that receives the messages. Wait 10 minutes before you decide it failed.

1. Look in spam

• Check the spam or junk folder, and search all mail for "form" or your website's name.
• Found it? Mark it Not spam, and add the sender address to your contacts or safe senders, so the next one goes to your inbox.
• Builders send these from their own address, often with "no-reply" or "form" in it. Their help pages list the exact address to allow.
• At a workplace, a town hall or a school, the email system may quarantine it before it reaches you. Ask whoever runs your email to check.

2. Check where the form sends

• Open the form's settings and look for Notifications, Send to, Recipients or Storage. That's where the address lives.
• Look for a typo, or the address of someone who has left.
• Changing your account's email doesn't always change the form's. On some builders, each form's notification keeps the old address until you edit it.
• More than one address? Most forms want them separated by commas.

3. Your email service may be refusing it

Many forms send the email "from" your own address, so you can reply to the visitor. But it leaves from your website's server, not from your email company. If your domain's sender list (SPF) doesn't name that server, your own email service can treat it as a fake and bin it.

• On WordPress: it sends email through your web server unless someone set it up otherwise. WordPress's own notes say a message counted as sent doesn't mean it was delivered. The usual fix is a plugin that sends through your real email account (called SMTP). Ask your web person.
• On a builder: the builder sends it from its own address. If that's being turned away, the fix is on your email side: allow the sender.
• Check your domain's settings with Email check. It reads SPF, DKIM and DMARC, the three settings mail services use to decide whether email in your name is real. Stop your emails going to spam explains each.
• Moved your email recently? If your email moved to a new company and the form still sends through the old one, the new one may not trust it.

4. If the form isn't sending at all

• An error when you press Send? Take a screenshot of it for your web person.
• The "I'm not a robot" check fails or never appears: a cookie banner or a privacy setting may be blocking it. Try another browser, and see Enable cookies.
• Nothing happens on Send: a broken script on the page. Open the browser console and send the errors.
• The form saves to a spreadsheet or mailing list and that link was disconnected. Reconnect it in the form's settings.
• You just updated a plugin or the theme: tell your web person which one and when.

What PageKiwi can check

Email check reads your domain's email settings, the usual reason form emails go missing. We can't see inside your form's settings or send a test message for you.