Your contact form might be lying to you
Here is a silent failure that no outside inspection can catch, ours included. The contact form looks fine. A visitor types a question and presses send. The screen says "message sent." And nothing arrives. Not in your inbox, not in your spam folder. It can go on for months. The only people who know are the customers you never heard from.
Why this happens to good websites
A form is a chain with four links. First, the form on the page. Second, the sending service, an outside company that turns what the visitor typed into an email. Third, the mailbox that receives it. Fourth, the spam filter, the guard that stands in front of the mailbox and decides what gets in. Any link can break without a sound. The sending service changes its rules. The mailbox fills up. The filter gets stricter. The person who set it all up moves on. The form keeps smiling and saying "sent" the whole time. It only knows that it tried.
What we measured
Our inspection engine, the program that reads a website and grades it, works from the outside, reading the page the way the server first sends it. It cannot see inside your inbox. So it cannot catch a form that lies.
But it can catch something close to it: a site with no way to get in touch at all. The check has a plain name: A way to get in touch. It looks for a form, an email link, a phone link, or a link to a contact page. If none of those exist, the check fails.
We have measured 78,807 websites so far. Seven of every hundred fail that check. A visitor who wants to reach them has nowhere to click.
What does that cost? We do not put a number on it any more. Until 2026-09-22 the engine paired this failure with a rate from a survey of business buyers. We retired that figure along with our old count of how many visitors in a hundred had a reason to leave. Here is why.
What we can say is measured: the share of sites that fail the check, shown below.
| The check | A way to get in touch |
|---|---|
| Sites we measured | 78,807, newest reading 2026-10-16 |
| Failing the check | 5,379 sites, 7 of every 100 |
Now notice the gap. A site with no link to reach anyone is at least plain about it. Fifty-two of every hundred of these sites show what looks like a phone number as plain text, which the visitor has to copy by hand. The rest show no number we could find, and nothing to click.
A lying form is worse. It offers help, takes the visitor's time, and then loses the message. No engine can measure that from the outside. Only you can. That is what the test below is for.
The two-minute test, do it today
Press the clock button the moment you send your test message. The page counts the minutes on your own clock. Nothing is saved anywhere. Reload the page and it starts fresh.
Five steps.
- Open your own website on your phone. Use it the way a customer would, not the way the owner would.
- Fill in the form as a stranger. Ask a real question a customer might ask. Use an email address you can check.
- Press send, and start the clock. The time matters, because a slow message and a lost message look the same for the first minute.
- Go to the inbox that should receive it. Look in the main folder. Then look in spam. Then look in promotions, if your mail has that tab. Give it a few minutes.
- Did it arrive? If yes: good. Put a note in your calendar to run this test again every season. A form that works today can break next month, and it will not tell you.If no: you found the problem. While that form was broken, anyone who wrote to you through it was never heard. Today, put your phone number and email address on the page as plain links, so people can reach you while it is fixed. Then tell whoever looks after your site, in these words: the form says sent, but the message never arrives. I want to watch a test message land before we call it fixed.
The standard worth demanding
Whoever builds or looks after your website should show you this test passing. Not tell you it probably works. Show you. A real test message goes through, and you watch it arrive. That is not a luxury. It is the minimum for the one part of your website that customers use to give you money.
Our free inspection cannot watch your inbox for you. But in a few seconds it will tell you whether your site gives a visitor any way to reach you at all. And it prints what it looked at, so you can check the finding yourself.