A broken contact form gives no warning.
The visitor types their name, their problem and their number, presses send, and gets a page that says thanks. As far as they know, they have contacted you. As far as you know, nobody contacted you. Both of you carry on.
This is an expensive failure, and a common one, common enough that checking yours is worth the five minutes it takes.
The Four Ways a Form Breaks
The email address it sends to no longer exists. Somebody left, the account was closed, the alias was tidied up. The form still submits.
It's going to spam. Form mail is machine-generated and often sent from a server with no relationship to your domain, which is exactly the profile a spam filter is built to catch. Every inquiry is arriving and being filed where you never look.
The service behind it expired. Most small business forms are wired to a third-party service on a free tier. Free tiers have monthly limits and accounts go dormant. The form keeps showing, and the delivery stops.
Nothing was ever wired up at all. More common than it sounds, especially on sites built from a template where the form was part of the theme. It looks finished because the theme was finished.
How to Test a Form Properly
Pressing send and seeing the thank-you page proves nothing. The thank-you page is usually the first thing to keep working when everything behind it has stopped.
Send a real one, from outside. Use your phone on mobile data rather than the office wifi, and use a personal email address, not one on your own domain. Write something recognizable in the message field.
Then wait ten minutes and go looking. Inbox first, spam folder second, and then search your whole mailbox for the recognizable phrase. If it landed in a folder because of a rule you forgot about, the search finds it and the inbox doesn't.
Do it once a quarter. Put it in the calendar. This isn't a thing you fix once.
What Good Looks Like
The form sends you the inquiry AND sends them a copy. They get proof it went somewhere, and you get a second record.
It arrives from your own domain. A form that sends from your domain, with the sender records set up properly, is dramatically less likely to be filtered than one arriving from a service you have never heard of.
Somebody is watching the inbox it lands in. An address that only exists to receive form mail is an address nobody opens. Point it somewhere a human is already looking.
It records the inquiry somewhere other than email. A spreadsheet row, a line in a CRM, anything. Email is a fine notification and a bad system of record.
What to Do About the Ones You Missed
Nothing, mostly. You can't recover an inquiry that never arrived and chasing it isn't a good use of your week.
What you can do is check whether the form has been broken for a while, and if it has, look at your inquiry numbers over that period and adjust your sense of how the site is performing. Plenty of businesses conclude their website does not work when what happened is that the form stopped in March.
Put Your Phone Number on Every Page
If your customers mostly phone, put the number on every page in text a phone can dial, and treat the form as the secondary route. A form isn't automatically better than a phone number. It's better for people who are browsing at eleven at night, and worse for everybody else.
Want us to test yours? Send the address. We'll submit a test inquiry, tell you whether it arrived, and tell you what it arrived as.