If you haven’t been receiving any notifications lately from your website contact form, the problem most likely isn’t the form itself.
If you don’t get a lot of traffice to your website, or you don’t typically get many submissions on your contact form, you may not even be aware that there’s a problem.
If you’re not sure, most WordPress contact form plugins and other website builders will allow you to log in to your website dashboard and check the form submissions. Any good plugin or site builder will store these for you. If they’re not, consider switching to a more reliable form plugin or site builder.
If you see recent submissions from your contact form, but you know you never received these in your email inbox, that tells you that there is an email delivery issue with your website.
To be clear: the contact form is most likely still sending the email, it’s just not being delivered to your inbox.
Luckily there is a fairly simple fix for this. Most WordPress form email issues can easily be resolved by setting up an SMTP plugin that will provide the proper email authentication to help ensure those emails don’t disappear into cyberspace. Other website builder platforms may have similar plugins to help solve this problem as well, but this solution addresses WordPress websites.
Why is this a problem now, when it worked great for years?
Website email delivery has become a bigger and bigger issue over the years, as email providers tighten up their security to keep all the spam from coming through to your inbox. Yahoo has always had a reputation for poor email delivery from websites and in 2024 both Google and Yahoo implemented even stricter email authentication requirements. For this reason, plus the fact that it’s just more professional as a business, I’ve always recommended a branded email address using your domain name.
Emails sent from your website are sending via the website hosting company. While this will work in many cases, your website host is not an email delivery service. Their primary function is to maintain secure and fast websites. With tighter security limitations from all email providers, it’s not the website host’s job to keep up with those email security issues. As a website owner, that’s your job.
What’s the fix?
- Make sure your website contact form has Honeypot and reCaptcha fields to help prevent spam bots from submitting your form in the first place.
- Make sure your domain name associated with your website has the proper authentication records added. These may already be set up on your domain, as they have been required for some time now, but it’s good to double check.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
This specifies which mail servers are authorized to send email from your domain.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
This adds a digital signature to verify the email hasn’t been tampered with.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication)
This tells receiving servers what to do with emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks.
Some of these records may be added automatically by your domain registrar, but some may need to be added manually. Your email provider will supply the correct records to add for your domain. - Install an SMTP plugin on your website to connect you with an email delivery service and provide you with the proper authentication settings and records to attach to your domain for email deliverability from your website.
SMTP plugins fix this because they change how your website sends email — from sketchy to trusted.
🌟 They send through a real email provider instead of your web server. Instead of your website blasting emails directly from hosting servers (which inboxes don’t trust), SMTP plugins route messages through an email service that already has a strong sending reputation.
🌟 They use proper authentication automatically. SMTP connections use verified accounts with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC already aligned, so inbox providers can confirm the email is legit instead of treating it like spoofing.
🌟 They drastically improve deliverability and reliability. Instead of messages disappearing into spam purgatory or never arriving at all, emails get delivered consistently and you can log or track them.
There are numerous WordPress plugins to provide an SMTP service, however the one I’ve been using is Easy WP SMTP. This plugin will allow to you connect to a mailer or SMTP server. There are over a dozen to choose from, and most of them are paid services, however SMTP 2 GO offers a free account up to 1000 emails per month (for now), so I have been using this for my own and all my client sites so far.
Full instructions for each plugin or mailer/SMTP server are available for whichever you decide to use.
If your website contact form has been yelling into the void, take these steps and start using a real, trusted mail carrier instead of your web host’s email server so you don’t miss those important leads and connections!
