Contact Forms: What to Ask, and Why Yours Gets No Enquiries
There are two reasons a website contact form gets no enquiries. Either it asks so much that people give up halfway, or it’s quietly broken and nobody has noticed. The second one is far more common than anybody wants to believe, and it’s the more expensive of the two, because you never see what you lost.
This is a short guide to both halves: what a contact form should actually ask a stranger, and how to be sure the thing works. Neither takes long. Both are worth an afternoon.
Every extra field costs you enquiries
A contact form is not a survey. Somebody has landed on your site, decided you might be the right person for the job, and is now weighing up whether filling this in is more effort than shutting the tab. Each box you add tips that judgement slightly further towards the tab.
For most small businesses, the whole form is three things:
- Their name. So you can open the reply properly.
- How to reach them. Email or phone. Ask for one, make the other optional.
- What they need. One open box, with a real prompt above it — “What’s the job?” or “Tell us what you need and roughly when” — rather than the word “Message” floating on its own.
That’s it. That’s a form that gets filled in.
A fourth field earns its place only if you genuinely can’t answer the enquiry without it. If you cover a service area, a postcode is justified — you need to know whether the job is twenty minutes away or two hours, and the customer would rather find out now than after a phone call. A full postal address is not justified. You don’t need someone’s street name to reply to an email, and asking for it at first contact feels like being processed.
The same test kills most of the other usual suspects. A twenty-item “service required” dropdown makes people hunt for the closest wrong answer. A “how did you hear about us?” box is your marketing question, not their problem — ask it later, once they’re a customer. A budget dropdown asks a stranger to name a number before you’ve told them what things cost.
Make the phone number optional and say so. Plenty of people will happily type an email address but won’t hand over a phone number to a business they’ve never dealt with, and forcing it turns a warm enquiry into no enquiry at all.
The failures nobody notices
Here’s the part that actually matters. A form that asks the right three questions is worthless if the answers never arrive.
It’s going to spam. The single most common cause. Check your junk folder right now — go on. If enquiries are sitting in there, there are two fixes and you want both. First, mark them as not junk and add the sending address to your contacts. Second, and more importantly, the form should send from an address on your own domain, not from the visitor’s address. A form that pretends to send as stranger@gmail.com is doing exactly what a spoofing attack does, and mail providers treat it accordingly. Send from website@yourbusiness.co.uk and put the visitor’s address in the reply-to field instead. If you haven’t got an address on your own domain yet, that’s the prerequisite — we’ve written about why that’s worth sorting.
The reply-to isn’t set. Related, and infuriating. You get the enquiry, you hit reply, and the reply goes to your own website rather than the customer. You look like you ignored them.
Nobody ever tested it. The form was checked on the day the site launched, if that, and never again. Meanwhile the email address it points at was changed, or the mailbox filled up, or a plugin updated.
It broke silently. This is the nasty one. Forms don’t announce their own failure. The visitor sees “thanks, we’ll be in touch”, the message goes nowhere, and everyone involved thinks the other person is rude.
So: test your own form once a month. Not from your desk — from your phone, on mobile data, as a real customer would. Fill it in properly, send it, and time how long the email takes to land. Diarise it the way you’d diarise anything else that quietly stops working.
| Symptom | Usual cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| No enquiries at all, ever | Form never worked, or sends to a dead address | Send yourself a test from your phone |
| Enquiries arrive days late or in batches | Filtering or a rule you forgot you set | Check junk folder and inbox rules |
| Replies bounce or go nowhere | No reply-to address configured | Set reply-to to the visitor’s email |
| Drowning in rubbish submissions | No spam handling at all | Add a honeypot field or basic filtering |
Spam, without punishing real customers
You will get spam. Everybody does. The mistake is fighting it with something that also punishes the customer.
A honeypot — a hidden field that humans never see and bots fill in anyway — catches a good share of it and costs the visitor nothing. Basic keyword filtering handles more. What you want to avoid is a puzzle: the image grids where you pick every traffic light, the sums, the “type these wobbly letters”. They’re a real barrier for anyone in a hurry, on a phone, or with a visual impairment, and they turn away genuine enquiries to save you deleting a few emails.
If you’re comparing tools, plenty of hosts and site builders bundle a free website contact form. Fine — just check what it does about spam and where it sends from before you rely on it.
The legal bit, in one paragraph
A form that collects someone’s name and contact details is collecting personal data, so two things need to be true. You need a privacy policy on the site, linked from the form itself, and you need a plain sentence next to the button saying what happens to the information — something like “We’ll use these details to reply to your enquiry and nothing else.” Don’t pre-tick a marketing consent box; if you want to add them to a mailing list, ask separately and let them leave it blank. There’s more on what a UK site legally needs in our guide to website legal requirements.
Where the form should live
Not only on the contact page. The form should be at the bottom of the page somebody is already reading — the service page, the about page, the homepage — because that’s the moment they’ve decided, and making them navigate elsewhere loses a proportion of them every time.
Put your phone number and email in plain text as well, big enough to tap on a phone. Some people will never use a form, and a site that works properly on a phone matters more here than almost anywhere else on the site. And whatever you do, don’t make the form the only way to reach you.
Here’s where we declare our interest: this is exactly the sort of thing we set up as standard on the sites we build, and we do that build free from your Google Business Profile — the details are on our free website offer. But nothing above depends on using us. It’s a contact form. Ask for three things, send from your own domain, and test it from your phone on the first of the month. For the rest of what belongs on the site around it, see what to put on a small business website.