A past web design client of ours copied us in on a group email regarding client enquiry forms not being delivered. The past client was totally unaware until it was brought to her attention by a disgruntled enquirer making a complaint about not receiving a reply. After carrying out a few tests and confirming the enquiries (valuable business leads) for their product were indeed not being delivered hence the email.

On entering the admin area the first thing that stood out was 47 new WordPress ore, plugins and theme updates that needed to be performed. Hours later with everything updated safely and all sorts of tests and compatibility tests performed the enquiries were still not being forwarded to the boss man’s email address.

Now I was somewhat confused by this because when I handed over the beautiful looking website to the client 18 months previously everything was set-up and working like a well oiled machine. After a quick check on the hosting address the mystery started to unravel. The site had been moved to another web hosting presumably by the same person that was tasked with caring for the site.

WordPress by default sends outgoing emails from the website using something called PHP-mail. Now some generic web hosting companies do not support PHP-mail as a standard option so the enquiries were being captured by the contact forms but not being forwarded on to the sales department..

The fix was a simple installation of an email plugin and set-up of a Google App that uses Gmail to send the email notifications and hey presto.

The contact form we used on the website keeps a backup of all the enquiries submitted. This story ends with a excel file download of all the enquiries. A total of 693 enquiries for unique event planning services (not cheap) had not been received in the 13 months since moving web host. Ouch..!

The moral of the story here is that Prevention is Better than Cure to keep your website in tip top shape doing it’s job generating leads, customers and revenue for your business. We know you will be very happy with our service but if you would like a test drive we are offering a 15 day free trial on all of our plans