Add a contact form to your website – one that delivers every inquiry

Signs your contact form is losing inquiries

Contact form problems are easy to miss, because neither the sender nor the receiver sees the failure. Look out for these:

• Form notifications land in spam, or arrive only some of the time
• Daily junk submissions: sales pitches from abroad or random strings of text
• No confirmation page or auto-reply, so customers phone to ask whether their message arrived
• The form is awkward on a phone or asks for so much that people give up halfway
• The browser shows "Not secure" on the form page
• You cannot tell how many inquiries come in each month or from which pages

If any of these sound familiar, send a test message yourself today – from your phone – and check where the notification lands.

Why contact form emails go missing

Most delivery failures come from how the email is sent. Gmail, Yahoo and other providers now filter messages hard when they cannot verify the sender.

• No sender authentication: your domain has no SPF, DKIM or DMARC records, so the message looks spoofed
• Basic server mail: a default WordPress setup may send without any authentication
• Customer address as sender: the form pretends to send from someone else's domain and gets rejected
• Receiving filters: your own mail client or company filter quietly moves form emails to junk

The standard fix: send from an address on your own domain, put the customer's address in the reply-to field, send through authenticated SMTP and add SPF and related records to your DNS. Also store each submission on the server or in a spreadsheet, so an inquiry survives even if an email fails.

How to design the form: fields and flow

Fewer fields means more completed forms. Ask only for what you need to reply, and leave the rest for the follow-up conversation.

• Required fields: name, email address and message as the core three
• A topic selector: quote, booking, recruiting and so on – it makes sorting replies easy
• Phone number: required only if you really call back; optional otherwise
• Mobile comfort: large tap targets, the email keyboard on the email field, errors shown right away
• Privacy: a link to your privacy policy, a consent checkbox and HTTPS on the form page
• After sending: a thank-you page with your typical reply time and an auto-reply with a copy of the message

If most requests are for a specific date and time, a booking tool may suit you better than a form – see booking systems for websites.

Setup options and spam protection

Your options depend on how your site is built. Whatever you choose, plan spam protection and sender authentication together.

• WordPress: a form plugin such as Contact Form 7, paired with an SMTP plugin for authenticated sending
• Shopify or BASE: the built-in contact feature, with the notification address and auto-reply text set up properly
• Embedded Google Forms: quick to start, but hard to match your design or track in detail
• Form services: handy dashboards for responses; check the monthly fee and whether they can send from your domain

For spam, invisible checks such as Google reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare Turnstile work well. Add a hidden honeypot field that only bots fill in and hold messages stuffed with links, and you cut most junk without adding steps for real customers.

Test before launch and track every inquiry

Once the form is on your site, run these checks before you announce it. They prevent the classic "it was never arriving" discovery months later.

• Send test messages from a computer and a phone; confirm the notification and auto-reply reach the inbox on several providers, including Gmail
• Leave required fields empty and enter a wrong email to see that the error messages are clear
• Check that sending leads to the thank-you page and that the submission is stored
• Record the form submission as a key event in GA4, and pass conversions to Google Ads or Meta Ads if you advertise

A dedicated thank-you page makes tracking simple and lets you compare which ads and pages bring inquiries. See conversion tracking setup for the details, and how to get more inquiries from your website for the next step once delivery is solid.

How UNANOBO sets up your contact form: try it in a free demo

Before you commit, UNANOBO builds a free demo with pages in your brand and a working contact form. You try filling it in on a computer and a phone, and decide whether to go ahead after seeing it.

If you continue, we set up sender authentication, spam protection, auto-replies, stored submissions and GA4 key events in one go. The process is free demo, feedback, launch, growth. The founder handles every project personally, so you keep one contact throughout, by message in Japanese or English.