Testing is a really important aspect of owning and managing a website. How often do you test your website?
A typical area that should be tested on a regular basis would be any contact forms on your website.
They’re not usually something that fails by design or where you should expect to see an error. It’s just an easy place for something to go wrong, and potentially something that may not be noticed for a period of time.
When you work with an experienced digital agency or web designer, they’ll usually set up a proper process to handle “transactional emails” from your website.
Transactional emails are emails such as order confirmations, contact form messages, enquiries, password reset emails and so on. They’re important emails that both you and your customers will want to receive.
A less experienced web designer could choose to send these same emails via a connection known as SMTP. It works in much the same way that you would connect to your favourite email program, such as Outlook or Mac Mail.
This works fine in principle, but it introduces a point of failure as it relies on the connection settings not being changed.
If the password for that email account was to be changed or the account accidentally deleted, no emails would be sent out from your website. This means that you wouldn’t be sent any messages that customers send from your contact page.
So firstly, you want to make sure that your web agency has set up transactional emails properly for your website. If they haven’t done this, then you should reach out to them and ask them to please make sure this is in place.
If your website was designed by us, you’ve already got transactional emails set up. We use a provider called Google Workspace. They’re highly experienced with transactional emails and handle millions of emails each month.
Secondly, you should regularly test your contact forms. We’d recommend doing this on a weekly basis. It’s an easy process, you just need to navigate to any page on your website with a contact form and fill it out.
After filling out the form, check to make sure that you receive the enquiry or message within 5 minutes or so. If you don’t receive the message, then you may have an issue that needs addressing. This should be confirmed with an additional test 10-15 minutes later.
Finally, you may find that messages sent via your contact forms are ending up in your spam or junk folders more than your inbox. If that’s the case, then there are some additional email security steps that can be taken to improve email deliverability. These involve setting up domain records called SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Your web agency should be able to assist with these, so reach out to them and let them know.
Contact forms are just one element of your website that should be tested on a regular basis. There are many other parts that should be taken care of. If you’re interested, this is the type of thing that we assist with through our Website Care Plans. If you’d like to learn more, click here.
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