Broken Contact Forms Could be Costing You Thousands
- January 27, 2026
- Bradley Taylor
Contact forms are simple in theory. You fill out a form and click the submit button. The business owner receives an email with your contact information and then follows up with you. Cut and dry, right? Not really.
Contact forms collect information then have to go through the server Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). When your web developer set up the contact form, he or she also configured it to run through your SMTP.
The problem arises when hosting companies like Godaddy change server settings or otherwise make changes to mail settings without ever telling clients. What happens is that the contact form breaks and the website owner doesn’t know. Weeks or even months go by before they discover the situation. Meanwhile, dozens of sales leads have been lost and tens of thousands of dollars in sales are lost as well.
According to one industry analysis, around 70 % of companies lose leads daily because of poorly working or poorly designed forms.
There are no direct studies on how much money is lost every year because of broken contact forms but there is data on something called “digital friction” and contact form failures fall under this category. It is estimated that digital friction costs companies over 3 trillion dollars per year worldwide.
For many small–to–medium businesses, losing even a few sales per week due to a broken form can easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars per year. That’s why it is imperative that you test your own contact form weekly. Just make a habit of visiting your website weekly and filling out the contact form like you are an interested party. Avoid using spammy phrases or numbers so that it doesn’t get blocked by spam filters.
We routinely test our customers contact forms to make sure they are getting the leads they deserve. We want to make sure that our clients never lose money because of a website we built or manage.
If your web developer discovers that everything is set up properly at the server level but you are still not receiving contact forms, they will probably install a third-party SMTP client and have the emails delivered outside of your server.
Companies like Sendgrid specialize in this product. In fact, there is an entire industry dedicated to making sure business owners receive their contact forms outside of their hosting server. This tells you how unreliable shared hosting companies like Godaddy truly are. And they are not alone. These kinds of complaints pop up for just about every major host.
Unfortunately, these services are not cheap. Their starting price is usually around $20 per month for small businesses and can reach up to $100 per month for larger ones. That’s an expense that adds up over time.
Some small business owners have decided to post their email address on the contact page instead of the oft-failing forms. This is not the perfect solution as an exposed email address quickly gets scooped up by spider bots and added to just about every spam list you can imagine.
Spam costs U.S. citizens and firms billions annually, with estimates suggesting nearly $20 billion in yearly costs due to lost productivity and security measures. Specific, recent data also shows that scams, including phone and text, cost consumers over $158 billion in a single year as of 2025.
