The Fall Audit: Forms, Emails, and Phone Numbers
We have found sites that had not delivered a single contact form submission in eight months. The page looked perfect. The form submitted successfully. The confirmation appeared. And the email went nowhere, because a mailbox had been retired.
Check every path a message can take
List every way someone can reach you from the site: contact form, quote request, booking widget, newsletter signup, chat widget, order receipts, support requests, and the plain email address in your footer. Then send a real message through each one and confirm a human receives it.
Where these break
- Retired recipients. An employee left, their mailbox was deleted, and the form still points at it.
- Spam filtering. Notifications sent from your own domain by your own server are a classic false positive. Check the junk folder before assuming the form is broken.
- Authentication drift. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records change when you switch mail providers or hosts, and misconfigured records quietly send your notifications to spam everywhere at once.
- Plugin or integration lapses. An expired license or a revoked API token stops delivery without an error a visitor would see.
- Autoresponders that stopped. The customer no longer gets a confirmation, so they submit again, or call a competitor.
Then check the numbers
Every phone number on the site should be current, tappable on mobile, and answered during the hours you claim. Call your own number from outside the building. Businesses change phone systems and leave two-year-old numbers on interior pages more often than you would think.
Make it a standing item
Add "test every form and phone number" to a recurring monthly or quarterly reminder, and do it after any change to email, hosting, or DNS. It takes fifteen minutes and it protects the entire commercial purpose of the site. Of everything on a maintenance checklist, this is the item with the highest return, and it is the one most often skipped because nothing appears broken.
