Conversion
Send five test messages through your own contact form and find out where they actually land. Then measure your real median reply time.
Verithora 31 Aug 2026 Updated 28 Sept 2026 14 min read
Most enquiry problems are delivery problems, not traffic problems. Before you pay for another visitor, spend 20 minutes proving that a message sent through your own contact form reaches the phone you carry.
Here is the whole test, short enough to copy.
Contact form delivery test
1. Send 5 messages through the live form, from 5 different
senders, including one from a phone on mobile data.
2. Put FORMTEST and a number in every message.
3. Within 30 minutes, check inbox and spam on every device
that should receive enquiries.
4. Reply to one and check the reply reaches the sender.
5. Get somebody else, on their own phone and signal, to send
a sixth and say what the screen showed.
Pass: 5 of 5 in the inbox, your reply lands, and the sixth
arrives with a confirmation on screen.Whether the site asks for the enquiry well is a separate problem.
Use the live form on your public site, not a preview.
If you have not had a Yahoo account in years, use any three providers you can lay hands on. Give every message a unique word so you can search for it later.
Name: Delivery test 1
Email: the address you are sending from
Phone: 07700 900123
Message: FORMTEST-01. Delivery test sent on [today's date] at [time]. Please ignore.Within 30 minutes, search every device meant to receive enquiries for FORMTEST, inbox and spam folder both. Then reply to one of the five from the mailbox the form delivers to, and confirm that reply reaches the sender. Four of five is a fail. Five of five sitting in spam is a fail.
Then send the sixth, and it matters most. You filled the form in knowing which fields it wants, on your own phone and broadband. A customer does none of that. Ask somebody outside your house to fill it in on their own signal and tell you what appeared on screen after they pressed send. A form that says nothing after submit loses people who assume it failed.
Google’s troubleshooting page for contact form mail says where the fault usually sits.
Often, the root cause of this issue is how the contact form provider authenticates email.
It is also clear about who owns the problem.
If you can’t resolve contact form message issues by following the steps in this article, contact your form provider for help.
Both lines are from Google Workspace’s page on contact form messages not arriving, checked 31 August 2026. That is why the last section here is a message you send to your host, not a DNS record you edit.
| Result | What it means | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| None of the five arrived | The form delivers to nobody. Every enquiry since this last worked has gone nowhere. | Send the message in the last section to your host today. |
| Some arrived, some did not | Delivery depends on which mailbox provider receives it, which points at authentication for your domain. | Send the same message, with the senders that failed. |
| All five arrived, but in spam | Mail is delivered and then filtered. Marking it as not spam fixes your inbox and nobody else’s. | Mark as not spam, then send the host message anyway, because filtering keys off the same authentication. |
If all five landed on the desktop and nothing woke your phone, delivery is fine and notification is broken.
Start with the mailbox, not the form. Open the form settings, read the address the notifications go to, and check whether anybody still opens it. An old info@ pointing at somebody who left in 2022 is one of the most common reasons a trade business stops seeing enquiries, and nothing on the site looks wrong.
Two other places enquiries sit unread: Facebook Page message requests, which land in a filtered folder most owners never open, and lead-site notifications sent to an address somebody else set up years ago.
The host message below uses one phrase worth pinning down. Your form provider is the plugin or tool that makes the form work: on WordPress usually Contact Form 7, WPForms or Gravity Forms; on Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy, the platform itself.
There are four routing methods you can set up yourself in an evening.
That link is one line, in this format.
https://wa.me/447700900123?text=Hi%2C%20I%20found%20you%20on%20your%20websiteReplace 447700900123 with your own number: drop the leading zero and put 44 in front, so 07700 900123 becomes 447700900123. Use a WhatsApp Business number, not your personal one, and set the out-of-hours away message before you publish it.
Then do the check people skip. Put the phone in your pocket, walk to the van, and have somebody submit the form with the engine running. If you cannot hear it, the routing has not worked. Check again with the phone locked and on mobile data, because an alert that only arrives on office wifi is no use on a roof.
This one is not part of the 20 minutes. It is a separate half hour, worth doing once.
Open your last 20 enquiries, however they arrived: emails, form notifications, WhatsApp threads, voicemails. For each one, write a single line with when it arrived and when you first replied. Not when the quote went out. When a human first said anything back.
Work out the elapsed minutes for every line, sort them smallest to largest, and the midpoint between the 10th and 11th values is your median. Use the median, not the average. One enquiry that arrived while you were away for a week adds thousands of minutes to an average and tells you nothing about a normal Tuesday.
An enquiry you never answered is not a slow reply, it is a lost one, so count those separately. If you cannot find 20, use what you have.
Every supplier selling you speed quotes the same few figures, and on 31 August 2026 we could not stand any of them up.
The Harvard Business Review article underneath most of them, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” from March 2011, is paywalled, so the counts inside it cannot be checked. The author block is readable, and one of the three named authors was chairman and chief executive of a lead-response software company. HBR printed that itself.
The related Lead Response Management study page is readable and does describe its sample: three years of data from six companies, over 15,000 leads and more than 100,000 call attempts. It credits that data to InsideSales.com, whose chairman and chief executive in 2011 was one of those three HBR authors, so the same commercial interest sits behind both. It does not say what country the leads came from, it names no funder, and there is no copy of the study to download. Checked 31 August 2026.
Two more figures circulate in UK trade marketing: that 85 per cent of callers never call back, and that 62 per cent of calls go unanswered. We went looking for the original of each on 31 August 2026 and found no source we could link to.
Ignore the percentages and use the median from your own last 20 enquiries as your baseline. Halve that number over the next month and you have improved something you can measure.
This is a settled change, over two years old, not news. Google’s help page on changes to Business Profile chat and call history still carries the wording, checked 31 August 2026.
As of 31 July 2024, the chat and call history features are no longer available in your Business Profile.
The same page says those records were downloadable until 30 August 2024, so anything you did not pull then is gone.
Be precise about what went, because the common version is wrong. What went is the log of who rang and when. Business Profile Performance still carries a Calls metric, defined on Google’s performance metrics page, checked 31 August 2026.
The number of times a customer clicked on the call button on your Business Profile. Add your phone number to track this metric.
Read that for exactly what it says. It counts taps on the call button, not calls that connected or work you won, and it names nobody. So if a supplier quotes you a number of calls from Google, do not accuse them of inventing it: Business Profile Performance is a real place that figure comes from. Ask what it counts, then check it against your own phone. To know which taps became a conversation, and who was on the other end, you need call tracking or your phone’s own call log. How the call button works for a van trade covers the rest.
Read the VAT column first. Only one of the three states its VAT basis, so these monthly figures are not comparable. Get the basis in writing from the other two.
| Provider | Published price | Calls included | VAT basis on the page | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pocket Receptionist | Starter £75, Growth £145, Pro £230, Enterprise £635 a month, then £2.99 per call over the allowance | 30, 60, 100 and 300 | Not stated on the page | 31 August 2026 |
| ReceptionHQ | MessageExpress from £15 a month | Not published for any tier | Plus VAT | 31 August 2026 |
| The Answer Centre | 99p per call, no monthly fee, no setup fee | Pay as you go | Not stated on the page | 31 August 2026 |
We get nothing if you ring any of these three. No commission, no affiliate link, no arrangement.
Three things to check before you ring them. ReceptionHQ publishes no included call volume for any tier, so its £15 figure is a floor and not a quote. Pocket Receptionist publishes a VAT number on its terms page, which proves it is VAT registered but says nothing about whether the advertised £75 includes VAT. The Answer Centre’s trades page gives standard hours of 8:30am to 6pm Monday to Friday, extended hours at extra cost.
Settle the VAT first, because it decides which number you divide. If you are VAT registered you reclaim the VAT on the fee, so the ex-VAT fee is what the service actually costs you. HMRC is plain about it on its page on reclaiming VAT on business expenses, checked 31 August 2026.
You can reclaim VAT on items you buy for use in your business if you’re VAT registered.
If you are not registered you cannot reclaim it, so the VAT-inclusive fee is your real cost. Either way, keep both sides of the division on the same footing. Mixing them puts the answer out by the whole VAT amount.
Now the arithmetic. Every figure below is an estimate you replace with your own.
On those estimates the service pays for itself if it saves you two-thirds of one enquiry a month. Run it with your own four numbers, then sense-check it. If your test passed and your median reply time is under an hour, an answering service buys you very little, because you are already answering. If two of the five messages vanished, it treats the symptom while the form stays broken, and the form is the cheaper fix.
Forms stop delivering silently. A plugin update, a DNS change, a host migration or a new email provider can each break delivery with nothing visible on the site. Put a repeating reminder in your phone calendar now, monthly, on the first working day, at a time you are not driving.
Contact form delivery test
Repeats: monthly, first working day, 07:30
Send 5 test messages from 5 senders. Check inbox and spam
within 30 minutes. Reply to one. Write down the score out of 5.Run it early any time somebody touches the site, the DNS or your email.
If somebody builds or looks after your site, two safeguards are worth asking for. First, the form should save a copy of every enquiry on the server before it tries to send the email, so a delivery failure loses an email and not a customer. Second, an automatic check should run every day, confirm the form is still connected, and alert a person when it is not or when an enquiry’s email failed to go out. It is how we set up the forms on the sites we run. Neither replaces your monthly test, because an automatic check cannot prove the enquiry reaches the phone in your pocket.
You do not need to edit a DNS record yourself, and you should not. Send the message below to whoever built or hosts the site, filling in the brackets. If you do not know who that is, look on your bank statement for a recurring hosting charge, or run a free whois lookup on your domain.
Subject: Contact form is not delivering, please check
Hello,
I have run a delivery test on the contact form at [your website address].
I sent 5 test messages on [date] from a Gmail address, an Outlook address,
a Yahoo address, an address on my own domain, and from my phone on mobile
data. [Number] of the 5 arrived. Every message contains the word FORMTEST.
Please check these five things and reply with what you find:
1. Does the form provider send mail from its own servers, or from my domain?
2. Does my SPF record include every third party that sends mail for my
domain, including the form provider?
3. Is DKIM set up for the sending domain?
4. Does the form provider need external SMTP credentials, and are the ones
configured still valid?
5. Do the test messages appear in the mail logs at all, and what do the logs
say happened to them?
Please make any DNS changes yourself and tell me when they are live. I will
re-run the test and confirm.
Thanks,
[Your name]
[Your phone number]Those questions come from the Google page linked in step one, which tells site owners:
Contact your form provider to find out if they use their own mail sending servers and require you to set up SPF or DKIM DNS records, or if you have to provide external SMTP credentials for sending contact form messages.
One thing to ignore while you wait. Gmail’s sender rules get quoted at small businesses constantly, and the headline ones do not apply to you. Google sets the threshold.
Starting on 1 February 2024, email senders who send more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail accounts must meet the requirements in this section.
A trade contact form is nowhere near that. What applies at any volume is the baseline, and its first line is the one that breaks contact forms.
Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your sending domains
Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records.
Use a TLS connection for transmitting email
The threshold and the baseline are both from Google Workspace’s email sender guidelines, checked 31 August 2026. If your host says SPF and DKIM are fine and the logs show nothing, the form is not sending at all, and the fix sits in the form settings rather than the DNS.
All five arrived in the inbox and your median reply time is under an hour: set the monthly reminder and leave it alone. Some arrived, or arrived somewhere you never look: that is a routing job rather than a rebuild, and step two is the fix. None arrived: send the message above to your host today. Either way, if you are about to spend on getting more visitors, work out which channel to buy first, because paid traffic into a broken form is wasted.
If you would rather not do any of it yourself, send us the site address and your score out of five and we will tell you what is wrong before we quote a fixed price. Our pay-monthly plans start at £49 a month. The test itself is free and always will be, whether or not you ever speak to us.
Prices, Google pages and HMRC guidance checked 31 August 2026.
This is a plain-English summary of the rules as we read them on 31 August 2026, not legal advice.
Written and checked by Verithora, a small web studio in East Dulwich, London SE22.
Questions
Send five messages through your own live form from five different senders: a Gmail address, an Outlook address, a Yahoo address, an address on your own domain, and one typed on your phone on mobile data. Put a unique word in each message. Check the inbox and the spam folder on every device meant to receive enquiries within 30 minutes, then reply to one and confirm the reply reaches the sender. Five of five in the inbox is a pass. Then get somebody else to send a sixth from their own phone on their own signal, because that is the only one that tests what a real customer meets.
Usually because of how the form provider authenticates the mail it sends for your domain. Google's troubleshooting page for contact form messages says the root cause is often the provider's authentication, and points at SPF records that do not list every third party sending mail for your domain. Delivery can pass at one mailbox provider and fail at another, which is why the test uses five different senders rather than one.
The median. Take your last 20 enquiries, write down the time each arrived and the time of your first reply, work out the elapsed minutes, then sort them and take the midpoint between the 10th and 11th values. One enquiry that arrived while you were away adds thousands of minutes to an average and tells you nothing about a normal working day.
Partly. Google's help page states that as of 31 July 2024 the chat and call history features are no longer available in your Business Profile, and that the records were downloadable only until 30 August 2024. What stayed is the Calls metric in Business Profile Performance, which Google defines as the number of times a customer clicked on the call button on your Business Profile. That counts taps on the call button, not calls that connected, and it names nobody. For that you need call tracking or your phone's own call log.
Work it out rather than guess. Multiply your average job value by the share of enquiries you win to get the value of one enquiry, then divide the monthly fee by that figure. Keep both sides on the same VAT footing: if you are VAT registered you reclaim the VAT on the fee, so use the fee excluding VAT. If you are not registered, use the VAT-inclusive fee, because you cannot reclaim it. If your form test passed and you already reply within the hour, it is probably saving you very little.
Monthly, and again on the same day as any plugin update, DNS change, host migration, email provider change or new form. Forms stop delivering silently, with no visible sign on the website, so the only way to know is to send a message through it and go looking for it.
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