Your contact form works. The notifications stopped six months ago.

Form notifications are almost always sent from your website's server to your inbox. That is a handoff between systems, and there are a dozen ordinary, undramatic ways for it to stop:

• The forwarding address changed. Someone left, the mailbox was closed, the form is still sending to it.
• The sending domain lost its authentication. SPF, DKIM and DMARC records drift when DNS is edited. Mail that used to arrive starts being marked as spam, then rejected outright.
• A plugin updated. The mail settings reset to defaults, or the integration key expired.
• The host changed their mail policy. Many now block direct mail from web servers to fight spam, which quietly kills any form not using a proper sending service.
• It is going to spam. Not lost — just in a folder nobody opens.

None of these produce an error the visitor sees. From their side, it worked.

A broken form is worse than no form. No form sends people to the phone. A broken form takes their enquiry and their expectation of a reply.

Do this now, properly, not from memory.

1. Open your site on your phone, on mobile data, not on the office wifi. Use a private window so you are not logged in as an admin.
2. Fill the form in as a customer would, with a personal email address you control — not a company one.
3. Send it. Note the exact time.
4. Check the destination inbox. Then check spam. Then check any shared mailbox or helpdesk it might route to.
5. Reply to the notification. Confirm the reply reaches the address the customer typed, and does not bounce.

That last step catches the second-most-common failure: notifications arrive, but the reply-to header is wrong, so answering goes nowhere.

Testing once tells you about today. The point is to know within a day, every time, forever.

Send through a real email service. Resend, Postmark, SendGrid — any of them. They authenticate properly, they retry, and crucially they show you a delivery log. You can look up whether a specific message was accepted, bounced, or deferred.

Store every submission somewhere other than email. A database row, a spreadsheet, a CRM. Email is a notification, not a record. If email fails, the enquiry should still exist somewhere you can find it.

Send yourself a weekly digest. "Three enquiries this week." Zero is information. A week with no digest at all is a louder signal than a week with a zero in it.

Add a monitor. A scheduled job that submits a test enquiry once a day and alerts you if it does not land. This is fifteen minutes to set up and it turns a six-month outage into a one-day one.

Work out roughly what one customer is worth to you over the time they stay. Then guess conservatively at how many enquiries a month the form used to bring — two, five, ten.

Multiply by six months.

That is the number, and for most of the businesses I have shown it to, it is considerably more than the cost of ever having the form looked at.