The owner of an education website came to us saying "could you take a look at the site — something feels off." The site was up, the design wasn't bad, visitors kept coming. Within the first half hour of our audit the truth surfaced: the contact forms had not worked for roughly three years. Visitors filled in the form, saw the "your message has been sent" notice, and the message went nowhere. How many parents, how many student enquiries silently vanished over those three years — there is no way to know.
Why Broken Forms Go Unnoticed
Because a broken form throws no error. The visitor is shown a success message; the site owner receives nothing at all. The owner reads "no forms arriving" as "no demand". And here is the painful part: because there is "no demand", money gets spent on advertising, social media and new content — while the enquiries that were arriving all along keep getting lost.
The technical cause was layered: the site's outgoing email was being rejected by the major providers because its server-side sender authentication (SPF) was misconfigured — and the form plugin swallowed that rejection without writing so much as a log line.
The 20-Item Repair List
The forms were only the visible tip of the iceberg. The full audit ended in 20 separate fixes being applied; the highlights:
- Email delivery: sender authentication (SPF) and the envelope address were corrected; forms now reach the owner's inbox and are also stored in the admin panel as a backup copy.
- PHP compatibility: the site's ageing plugins were silently crashing on the current PHP version; all of them, the pricing-table plugin included, were made compatible.
- Broken slider: the homepage image carousel was faulty, and its script errors could lock up other functions on the page — cleaned out.
- Mobile speed: the Google PageSpeed mobile score was raised from 81 to 99: images converted to next-generation formats, unused scripts dropped, load order fixed.
- Measurement: nobody could see what was actually happening on the site; Search Console and Analytics were set up, and search performance is now being tracked.
Rebuild the Site, or Rescue It?
In this case we did not rebuild the site from scratch — there was no need. The content was in place and the design was acceptable; the problem was neglect. The right diagnosis delivered the same result far more cheaply than "let's redo everything" would have. The honest answer to when a rescue is enough and when a rebuild is required only comes out of an audit; either way, we audit first and come back with findings.
When did you last fill in your own website's contact form and check what happened? If your answer is "I don't remember", the case in this article might be your site.
What You Can Check on Your Own Site
- Fill in the form yourself and check whether the message actually lands in your inbox — spam folder included.
- Run your site through Google PageSpeed; if the mobile score is below 70, you are losing customers.
- Is Search Console set up? If not, you don't know how Google sees your site.
- When were your plugins last updated? An answer of "I don't know" is exactly how the three years in this case accumulated.
If you would like a similar health check for your site, take a look at our maintenance and support service, or see what a comprehensive repair would cost in the price calculator. One-off work on an existing site is also an option — the "I already have a site" choice in the calculator exists exactly for that.
