Why is nobody contacting me through my website?

Two completely different faults produce exactly the same symptom: a quiet month you put down to trade being slow. Both are invisible from your side. Both take minutes to test.

The first one: the message never arrives

Somebody fills in your contact form. They see a thank-you page. They wait for you to ring back. You never got anything, because the email was never delivered.

Nothing looks broken. The form works. The thank-you page appears. The customer believes they have contacted you and thinks you ignored them.

“I’ve used the same form for a long time. It’s working fine on most sites but appears to have suddenly stopped working on others.”

UK Business Forums, one of several threads on exactly this

It happens for dull reasons. The address it sends to belonged to someone who left. The site moved host and the sending settings did not follow. The email is being sent, and your provider is filing it as spam because the site is not set up to prove the message is really from you.

That last one is the commonest and the most invisible. There are settings that tell the world which servers may send email using your name. If they are missing or wrong, some of your enquiries land in junk and some vanish entirely — and which is which depends on the customer’s email provider, not on you. So it fails for some people and not others, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed for months.

Test it yourself, right now

Go to your own website on your phone, fill in your own contact form, and send it. Then wait ten minutes and check — including your junk folder.

Do it again from a different email address, ideally a different provider. If one arrives and the other does not, you have found it.

The second one: they could not find a way to reach you

This one is not broken. It is a decision somebody made on your behalf, and customers are furious about it.

“I hate when you can’t find a phone number and companies want you to start an online chat.”

“I just want to speak to a human, but, oh no, our virtual assistant will help you first.”

Two of six separate people making the same complaint in one Mumsnet thread

And from a business owner, on a forum thread about why so many websites are poor:

“Speaking as a customer I hate contact us forms. You do not have a record of the message… They are purely for the convenience of the site’s owner.”

UK Business Forums

Web agencies sell contact forms and chat widgets as modern. Read what actual customers say about them and it is some of the angriest language in any of this research. For a garage, a dentist, a plumber, the phone call is the sale. Anything between the customer and the call is money.

Worse on a phone: if your number is typed as text rather than as something tappable, a customer has to memorise it, leave your site, open the keypad and type it in. Plenty of them just ring whoever is next in the results instead.

What we check

We send a real enquiry through your formAnd tell you whether it arrived, where it went, and how long it took.

We check your email is set up to be believedThe settings that stop your enquiries being filed as spam. Missing or wrong on a great many small business sites.

We check a customer can actually reach youIs there a phone number. Is it tappable on a phone. Is there an email address a machine can read, or is it hidden behind a script that most search engines never run.

We check what happens on a phoneBecause that is where the search happened.

You get told what we found either way. If your form works and your number is where it should be, then trade genuinely has been quiet, and at least you know it is not the website — which is worth knowing before you spend anything rebuilding it.

Check my website

Or ring and ask: 020 3422 3453

InSite Scan › Why is nobody contacting me?