There’s only one problem: You’re not actually receiving any contact form submissions — but even worse, you don’t know it.

Now, what’s even worse than not getting customers is that you’re actually communicating to your new potential customers that they can’t count on you to respond to them. 

Yikes!

In our ever-changing world of technology, we’ve discovered that diligence and constant testing are the only way to ensure that contact forms on your site are continuously working. Without a game plan, your contact forms can stop working at a moment’s notice and there’s no one to tell you until a frustrated customer reaches out directly via email or calls your place of business.

All Giant Donut Marketing Monthly Site Maintenance plans include monthly testing of your forms to ensure they continue working for you!

So why don’t contact forms just — work? What’s going on behind the scenes?

Sending Via PHP Protocol

In the “old” days, any time a contact form was filled out on a website, WordPress would just utilize a fairly simple process via “PHP” to directly send that contact form submission to an email address your contact form plugin was pointed to and it would be sent “from” whatever email address you indicated. This was typically something like “info@yourdomainname.com” or something that used your domain name. There was really no configuration to consider. 

This is no longer the case.

Now, many web servers will no longer “spoof” the email address you’re purporting to send from on your behalf. So in our case, for example, we tell our contact form to show that we’re sending our contact form emails from the email address “wordpress@giantdonutmarketing.com” with a “Reply To” address of info@giantdonutmarketing.com. In reality though, our emails are hosted with Google, so Google is not actually sending this email. We’re kind of asking our web server to do us a favor and send the contact form via email on behalf of Google. But Google doesn’t like that either as too many people have historically abused this and any web service could pretend to be sending from your email address using this simple method.

Gravity Forms, SMTP, and Mailer Services

SMTP (or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the preferred method employed to verify you as the owner of your email address so that you can allow WordPress to send contact form submissions on your behalf.

Here at Donut, we use the Gravity Forms plugin for many of our customers’ contact forms. Our agency purchased the Elite License which all our customers benefit from. Customers would otherwise pay $60/yr just so their contact forms would work.

We then connect WordPress and Gravity Forms to a dedicated mailer service using an SMTP plugin such as WP Mail SMTP. Our choice for 3rd party mailer service is called SendGrid. SendGrid allows us to connect the dots with information we copy and paste into DNS settings with our clients’ hosting or domain registrar. A mailer service helps authenticate your website’s outgoing email so providers like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are more likely to trust that the message really came from your domain. For most people, we’re already speaking Greek, but just understand that it’s like pasting in a permission key where the domain’s info is registered to say, “yep, you can send email on our behalf”.

So now, after a little test, if all went well, contact forms should now send correctly.

SMTP Mailer Options for Small Business Websites

SendGrid is our choice for SMTP mailer service because our plan covers our clients. Today, there are several strong mailer services that can be a better fit for small businesses that only send a small number of emails each month. Options like SMTP2GO, Brevo, and Mailjet offer free or low-cost plans that are usually more than enough for basic contact form notifications, website admin emails, and other routine WordPress messages.

For many small business websites, the goal is not to send thousands of marketing emails. The goal is much simpler: make sure contact form submissions, quote requests, appointment requests, password resets, and other website notifications actually arrive in the right inbox.

For low-volume WordPress sites, these are a few of the best affordable mailer options to consider:

SMTP2GO is one of the best all-around options for small business websites. Its free plan allows up to 1,000 emails per month, which is often enough for a typical local business website. It is designed specifically for reliable email delivery and works well for basic contact form notifications and other WordPress transactional emails.

Brevo is another strong option, especially if your business may also want email marketing or CRM tools in the future. Its free plan allows up to 300 emails per day, which is far more than most small business websites need for contact form notifications.

Mailjet is also worth considering for small businesses that want a generous free sending limit. Its free plan includes up to 6,000 emails per month with a 200-email-per-day limit, making it a practical option for low-volume WordPress email delivery.

If your needs are different than those above, WP Mail SMTP has a page listing all the supported mailer services.

Fallback Methods for your Contact Forms

Even though everything is now set up correctly and working, there’s no guarantee that your contact forms will continue working without issue into eternity. Every month, plugin changes, hosting or email requirements, or any other number of technology changes can affect your contact form functionality. Add to that multiple people touching a website, hosting, or domain settings with the possibility of inadvertently breaking a connection in SMTP validation. It happens more than you might think.

This is why Giant Donut tests our clients’ contact forms every month, but it is also why it’s not a bad idea to test weekly if you depend on contact form submissions for business.

The added bonus of using Gravity Forms is that even if your contact form submissions aren’t sending to your email, they still automatically save in the back end of your website. You can just compare these entries with what you’ve actually received in your email at any given time to verify that any given form is working correctly.

So whether you take care of your own site, or have someone else do it, you’ll want to make monthly contact form testing a part of your business routine to make sure you aren’t missing customers who are trying to connect with you!

The post Are Your Contact Form Submissions on Your WordPress Site Getting to Your Email Inbox? appeared first on Giant Donut Marketing.