The SiteRoot team7 min read
The site has been up for two months. It looks good, people say nice things about it, and the contact form has produced precisely nothing. Not a quiet trickle. Zero.
Before you rewrite a word of the page, send yourself an enquiry through your own form, from your phone, right now. In our experience the most common cause of a silent form is the boring one: the form is broken, or the email it sends is landing in a spam folder, or it is going to an address nobody has opened since the site was built. Rule that out first, because everything else in this post is wasted effort if the plumbing is disconnected.
If the plumbing is fine, the reason is almost always one of five: nobody can find the form, it asks for too much, it gives nothing back, your phone number is missing so the people who wanted to ring gave up, or the page above the form never answered the question they arrived with. Here is how to check each one.
Step one: send yourself an enquiry, properly
Do it as a customer would, on your phone, on mobile data, with a real email address and a real message. Then work through this:
- Did the page say anything after you pressed send? If nothing visibly happened, a visitor assumes it failed.
- Did an email arrive? Check junk and spam. Check the Other or Promotions tab. Check any rule you set up years ago that files things into a folder.
- Look at who the email came from. A lot of forms send the message using the visitor's address as the sender, which mail providers increasingly treat as forgery and bin silently. A form should send from an address on your own domain and put the customer's address in the reply-to.
- Is the destination address still live? Forms get built pointing at an old mailbox, a staff member who left, or an info@ nobody reads.
- Ask a friend to send one too. Mail you send to yourself follows different rules from mail a stranger sends you, so your own test can pass while everyone else's fails.
If you find the fault here, you are done, and you have probably also found a folder with three months of enquiries in it. It happens more than you would think. Reply to all of them anyway.
Step two: can anyone actually find it
A form that exists only on the Contact page, reachable only from the menu, is a form most visitors never see.
Open your home page on a phone and scroll. How far down is the first way to contact you? If it is past two or three swipes, that is the problem. A visitor decided on your services page and had nowhere to act.
Fix: put a way to make contact at the end of every page, not just on the Contact page. On a phone, a button that is always visible works well, as long as it does not cover the words.
Step three: count the fields
Every field is another reason to stop, and on a phone with a thumb, that goes up sharply.
Three fields is enough for most small businesses: name, how to reach them, and one box for what they need. That is it. You can ask everything else when you ring them back, which you were going to do anyway.
Things to take out today: company name, budget dropdown, how did you hear about us, postal address, preferred contact time, a required second phone number, and a "subject" line that the visitor has to invent.
Then check the ones you kept are not fighting the visitor:
- A phone field that rejects a number with spaces or brackets in it. People type 0412 345 678.
- A postcode field that strips a leading zero, which quietly excludes the Northern Territory.
- A required email field on a form aimed at people who would rather be phoned.
- A puzzle or image challenge that is hard on a phone. Spam protection that works invisibly exists, and a visitor should never be asked to identify a traffic light to request a quote.
- A submit button that does nothing on mobile. Test it. It is more common than you would like.
Step four: is your phone number there, and is it tappable
Some people will never fill in a form. They want to talk to a human, decide in forty seconds, and get on with their day. If your number is not visible at the top of the page and not a link that starts a call when tapped, those enquiries are not showing up as a form problem. They are not showing up at all.
The other side of that is people who will never ring: they do not want to be sold to, or they are at work, or it is 11pm. Offer both, always. For a trade, an SMS link is worth adding as a third option, because a surprising number of customers would rather text you a photo of the broken thing than describe it.
Step five: what does the form give back
Press send on most small business forms and you get a grey message that says "Thank you, your message has been received". The visitor has no idea whether that means anything.
Better, and it costs you one sentence: say what happens next and when. "Thanks, that has come through to Dave's inbox. We answer enquiries the same day, or first thing if it is after 5pm." Then send an automatic email confirming it, because a message in their inbox is proof the thing worked and a record of your name.
If your form sends nothing back at all, some people will fill it in twice and then ring a competitor.
Step six: the honest one, about the page above it
If everything above checks out and the form is still silent, the form is not the problem.
A form is the last step of a decision that was made further up the page. If the page did not answer do you do this thing, do you come to my suburb, are you a real business, and roughly what does it cost, then the form is just a box at the bottom of a page that did not convince anyone.
Read your own services page as a stranger who has never heard of you. Count how long it takes to find the answer to those four questions. If the answer is that you cannot find them at all, that is your afternoon's work, not the form.
The fifteen minute diagnosis, in order
- Send yourself an enquiry from your phone. Check spam.
- Have someone else send one. Check it arrived.
- Confirm the destination address is one you read daily.
- Count how far down the page the first contact option sits.
- Count the fields. Remove everything past three.
- Tap your phone number and confirm it dials.
- Read the thank-you message. Make it say what happens next.
- Read the page above the form as a stranger.
Most silent forms are fixed in the first three steps.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
The sites we build have the plumbing done the right way round, because this is the failure that costs the most and reports itself the least.
The enquiry form emails you at your own address rather than filling a dashboard you have to remember to open. Phone numbers are tap-to-call links, not typed text. The forms are short by default, because a long form is an owner's wish list and a customer's exit.
And if it is not producing enquiries, you can change the page above it by asking in plain language and seeing the result in a preview before it goes live, which means fixing it is a five-minute job rather than an email with an hourly rate attached.
Go and send yourself one now, before you read anything else about this. You will know within ten minutes which kind of problem you have.
