Guides · Updated 06 Aug 2026
How to tell whether your contact form is actually working
Submit it yourself, using your own name, and wait five minutes. If nothing arrives, check spam. If it's still not there, your form is broken — and it has been for however long nobody noticed.
This takes five minutes. Most firms have never done it.
Why nobody catches this
A broken form doesn't tell you it's broken.
When an email fails to send, you get a bounce message. When a form fails, the visitor sees "Thank you for your enquiry" and leaves satisfied. You see nothing at all.
There is no alert. No error. No log you'd think to check.
The enquiry count just drops, slowly enough that you put it down to a quiet month.
Test it
1. Open a private browsing window. Your normal browser may have cached an older version of the page.
2. Fill in the form as a client would. Use your real name, your real email, and write something you'll recognise. "Testing the form — 14 March" is fine.
3. Send it.
4. Wait five minutes. Check your inbox.
5. Check your spam folder. This is where a third of failures hide.
6. Check the other inbox. If your firm has both info@ and reception@, check both. Forms often send to an address nobody has opened in two years.
If the message is there, your form works. That's most of the value of this article, and it took five minutes.
If it isn't, keep reading.
The four ways forms break
1. The address it sends to no longer exists
The most common failure, and the most invisible.
A firm moves from firmname@gmail.com to info@firmname.co.za. Everyone's mail moves across. Nobody thinks about the form, because the form isn't a mailbox — it's a setting in a file somebody wrote in 2019.
The form keeps sending. Nothing keeps receiving.
How to tell: if you've changed email provider, domain, or mail host since the site was built, assume this until proven otherwise.
2. Your own mail server is filtering it
Your website sends mail claiming to be from your domain. Your mail server checks whether the sender is authorised to do that.
If your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records don't list your website's sending service, your own server treats your own enquiries as forgeries. They land in spam, or vanish entirely.
This is the failure most likely to be missed, because the form is sending. The message just isn't surviving the trip.
How to tell: search your spam folder for your firm's own name. If old enquiries are sitting in there, you've found it.
3. The form silently reloads instead of submitting
A visitor fills it in, clicks send, and the page refreshes with empty fields.
No error. No confirmation. It just looks like nothing happened.
Most people assume they did something wrong, try once more, and then phone someone else.
How to tell: after clicking send, does a confirmation message appear? If the page just reloads, something is broken — even if the message does eventually arrive.
4. The plugin or service stopped
If the site runs on WordPress, the form is a plugin. Plugins get disabled by updates, expire when a licence lapses, or break when the site's PHP version changes.
If the form uses an external service, that service has an account, and accounts have cards attached to them.
How to tell: this one needs someone to look. But if the site is more than three years old and nobody has touched it, it's a live possibility.
What it costs
Assume a firm gets four website enquiries a month. Assume one in four becomes an instruction.
| Enquiries lost in six months | 24 |
| Instructions lost | 6 |
| Value of one divorce, transfer, or RAF claim | R15,000 – R150,000 |
You'd never know. There's no gap in your diary that says this is where the enquiries would have been.
That's what makes it worse than an obvious fault. A site that's down gets fixed in an hour, because everyone can see it.
After you've fixed it
Test it monthly. Put it in your diary. It takes two minutes and it's the single highest-value check on a law firm website.
Send a copy to a second address. If enquiries go to info@, have them copied to a personal address as well. Two mailboxes both failing silently is much less likely than one.
Watch for the confirmation. A form that confirms is a form you'd notice breaking. A form that silently reloads is a form that can fail for a year.
We check this on every site we review, and it's the check that finds the most expensive problem most often.
Send us your firm's URL and we'll test your form — along with about sixty other things — and email you what we find. Free, whether you hire us or not.
Related guides
Check your own law firm website in twenty minutes
Twelve checks from our sixty-check audit — the ones that need nothing but a phone. Most firms find three or four faults they didn't know about.
Why your firm's website gets no enquiries
Five reasons, in order of how often we find them. It is almost never the design.