When was the last time you checked your website contact forms?
Go on, jump onto your website right now and send yourself a test message. (use your personal email as the test email).
Did you receive it? Did your autoresponder (if you have one set up to acknowledge their enquiry) trigger?
How many times have to send a website enquiry off on someone’s website only to hear absolutely nothing back? Too many right?
You spend all that time and energy getting traffic to the website only for those valuable enquiries to never reach you.
So why do website forms have such a tricky job of getting through to inboxes? It’s because spam filters block them. Technically your website is trying to send an email AS you, which can trigger phishing alerts. This is why you absolutely have to use a system that validates your website emails as authorised from your domain, known as SMTP.
Contact form tips on WordPress sites:
Deliverability Tip #1
SMTP setup is essential. There isn’t a way around it. Use WP SMTP for a robust plugin.
Deliverability Tip #2
Quality hosting will offer an SMTP option as part of your hosting. Get in touch with your hosting provider and ask them if that’s an option for you.
Deliverability Tip #3
Ensure your From email in the contact form is set to something other than your receive email.
Deliverability Tip #4
Ensure you have a copy of your form submissions just in case something goes askew in the delivering you can at least check your website back end and reply to any you’ve missed – people will be grateful you actually bothered to get back in touch even though there was a delay.
Deliverability Tip #5
Ensure your domain is correctly setup for DPF, DKIM and DMARC. I know that sounds like a totally different language but it’s actually a super simple concept – you add records to your DNS that verify your domain is who is says it is.
Deliverability Tip #6
If you’re getting lots of spam via your website form ensure you have reCAPTCHA set up to curtail it.
Deliverability Tip #7
Whilst this tip is not strictly around deliverability, it is ralted to conversion and user experience so worthwhile included here. Ensure you have another contact option listed on your website. An email link and phone number mean your customers can follow up.
