Why Your Contact Form Gets No Submissions

A contact form is the only part of a trade website that has one job, and it is the part most often broken in a way nobody notices. There is no error message. It just sits there.

First, check it works

Before anything else. Fill your own form in from your phone, with a real message, and see whether it arrives.

I have found forms delivering to an email address from a previous web designer, to an inbox nobody had opened in two years, and to nowhere at all because a plugin updated and quietly stopped working. In each case the business thought the market had gone quiet.

Do this before you read the rest. It takes ninety seconds and it is the only failure on this page that is costing you every single enquiry rather than some of them.

While you are there, check the spam folder too, and check it from a different email provider than your own. A form that sends from your website's server to your own domain is one of the easiest things in the world to misfile, and businesses lose months to it.

You are asking for too much

The most common cause, and the easiest to fix.

Every field is a small decision, and a person standing in a wet kitchen is not in the mood. Company name. Address. Postcode. How did you hear about us. Preferred contact method. Budget range. Each one makes it more likely they close the tab and ring whoever is next on the list.

You need enough to ring them back and know roughly what about. That is a name, one way to contact them, and a message box. Everything else is you collecting data you did not need at a moment when asking for it costs you the job.

If your form has more than five fields, remove one and see what happens. Then remove another.

The one exception worth keeping is a short list of what the job is, as a dropdown. It costs the customer one tap, it routes the enquiry, and it tells you over time which services actually generate enquiries rather than which ones you assume do.

There is no alternative to it

Some people will not fill in a form. They want to talk to somebody and they want it now.

If the only route on your contact page is a form, those people leave. Your number should be on the page, tappable, next to it, not in the footer in grey.

The reverse is also true, and more often forgotten. Some people will not ring. They are at work, or on a site, or it is eleven at night, or they just hate phones. If you only give a number, you lose them to whoever will take a message. You need both, and the form is for the second group specifically.

Nobody knows what happens next

Press send and the page says "Thank you". That is it.

That person now has no idea whether you got it, when you will reply, or whether they should ring somebody else in the meantime. Quite often they do ring somebody else, and that business gets the job purely by replying first.

Tell them what happens: that it reached you, roughly when you will come back to them, and what to do if it is urgent. Three lines. It costs nothing and it stops the enquiry being hedged against a competitor.

Then actually do it. A promise of same day that turns into Thursday is worse than no promise, because the person has now measured you against something.

The small things that quietly matter

• Labels above the fields, not inside them. Placeholder text disappears when you start typing and people forget what the box was for.
• The right keyboard. An email field should bring up the email keyboard on a phone, a phone field the number pad. This is one attribute each and almost nobody sets it.
• Do not clear the form on an error. Making somebody retype everything because one field failed is how you lose them at the last step.
• No CAPTCHA if you can avoid it. A hidden honeypot field catches the vast majority of spam without asking a real customer to identify traffic lights.
• Say which fields are optional. A phone number marked optional gets given more often than one that looks compulsory, because it stops feeling like a condition.

Can you tell how many you are losing?

Partly, and it is worth setting up because it turns an argument into a number.

Make the form submission a tracked event in your analytics, and track taps on the phone number too. Then you can see how many people reached the contact page against how many actually did something on it. A contact page that gets two hundred visits a month and produces four enquiries is telling you something specific, and it is not that the market is quiet.

Without that, every conversation about this is guesswork, including the one you have with whoever built the site.

What this is worth

More than most things on a website, because it operates on people who already decided they were interested. They found you, they read enough, and they got to the part where they act.

Everything upstream of that, the search work and the ads, exists to get somebody to that moment. Losing them there is the most expensive place on the whole site to lose them, and it is usually three fields and a missing sentence.