The contact form that swallows your enquiries
A client swears they wrote to you weeks ago and nothing ever arrived. The four places an enquiry vanishes in silence, and the three minute test that settles it.
You run into a client down at the marina and they say it straight out: "I wrote to you three weeks ago, about the quote." Nothing ever reached you. You have no way of checking either, and no idea how many others did the same and never crossed your path again.
It's the most expensive fault a website can have, because it's the only one nobody sees. A slow site, you feel. A site that's down, someone phones you about within the hour. A broken form warns no one: it prints "Thanks, your message has been sent", the client walks away happy, and nothing happens.
The four places an enquiry vanishes
The destination address no longer exists. The form writes to a mailbox set up by your previous web company, or to the address of someone who left at the end of last season. The site works perfectly. The messages go nowhere.
The message sends, but lands in spam. The form sends from your host's server: your name on the envelope, a technical address behind it, and nothing proving that server is allowed to write on behalf of your domain. To Gmail, that looks exactly like what a spammer imitates. Your enquiries pile up in a folder you never open.
The script broke. An update, a change of host, a disabled plugin, and the sending stops. The confirmation message still appears, every time. It's the worst of both worlds.
Nobody checks the inbox. The message arrives, into an address someone looks at once a month. In season, a booking enquiry that waits six days is a lost one: that guest booked elsewhere the next morning.
The three minute test
Pick up your phone. Not the office computer, not the wifi at home: your phone, on mobile data, exactly like a customer.
Open your site, fill in your own form using a personal address (a Gmail or a Yahoo, definitely not the work address that receives everything out of habit), type "TEST" in the message, send it.
Then check three things, in this order: did it arrive, how long did it take, and which folder did it land in. If it goes to spam for you, it goes to spam for half your customers.
Run this test the first Monday of every month, and without fail after any work done on the site. Three minutes against a lost quote is not a hard trade.
A form that can't lie to you
Sending by email alone is a promise with no proof. What we build instead comes down to four things, and none of them is a luxury.
The enquiry is stored, not just sent. It sits somewhere you can reopen, even if the email is lost on the way. A record never depends on deliverability.
Sending is authenticated from your own domain, with SPF and DKIM in place. That's the difference between an email that arrives and an email that has to argue its case with Gmail.
The customer gets a confirmation that actually says something. "Got it, I'll reply within one working day, and here are our prices and usual lead time in the meantime" removes half your chasing messages, and tells the customer they aren't shouting into a void.
Finally, a visible fallback next to the form: your number and WhatsApp, both tappable. Some people don't trust forms, and those people are usually the ones in a hurry.
Fewer fields, more enquiries
The instinct, when enquiries dry up, is to add fields to qualify people better. It's the opposite that works. On a phone, in the back of a taxi, every required field is another chance to close the tab.
A name, a way to call them back, two free lines: that's enough to start the conversation. Asking the rest is your job, and it's also what separates a vague enquiry from a signed job, which we go into in the quote request that turns into real work. That short form is what we ship by default on our websites for trades and building firms.
Measurable, not promised
We don't promise anyone the first page of Google, and a repaired form doesn't invent customers who weren't there. It just stops losing them.
Two numbers you can track yourself, and both are honest ones. How many enquiries you receive per week, before and after. And your average time to first reply, because a form that works perfectly into an inbox nobody reads has fixed nothing at all.
Our website pricing is public, lead times included — or get your quote within 24 hours and test ours first.