We were recently helping someone deal with an issue where they were not receiving emails for submissions to the contact page of their WordPress website. There are a multitude of different ways contact form submissions are handled and different ways that could go wrong, but there are three principal problems that lie at the heart of that to sort through if you have that problem. Let’s go through those.
The Contact Form Isn’t Working
The first problem is that the contact form isn’t working. So first make sure that when making a submission, it returns a response that the submission has been successful.
Depending on what plugin you are using to handle contact form submissions, the plugin may store a copy of the submissions. Or there may be an additional plugin you can add that will store submissions. If that is an option, that will allow you to make sure the submissions are really getting through and being processed.
Emails Are Not Being Sent
If the contact form is working, the next possible problem is that emails are not being sent. If you are receiving other emails from the website, you can rule that out. If you are not sure about that, you can use a plugin to test if emails are being sent. You can also use a plugin that logs emails being sent to confirm if emails are being sent.
Emails Are not Being Received
If you know that emails are being sent, then the problem that could be that they are not being received at the intended email address.
One way to test this is to try having the emails sent to another email address at a different email provider. That gives a good chance of seeing if there is a problem related to the email account. It could be that it trips a spam filter.
In the situation we were helping with, it turned out that the email account wasn’t receiving the submissions, but when switching to another account, the emails went through.
Getting Help
If you need help with this type of problem or another problem with your WordPress website, we offer a support service to help.