Why website enquiries go missing — and how to test your lead path

The five places leads disappear

1. The form posts to nothing

A contact form is two parts: the fields the visitor sees, and a handler on the server that receives the submission and sends it on. Redesigns, hosting moves and plugin updates break the second part without changing the first. The visitor fills in the form, sees a thank-you message, and the submission goes nowhere. We recently audited a site where every one of 37 forms pointed to a file that did not exist on the server.

2. The email is rejected or filtered

Many forms send email “from” the visitor's address, through a server that is not authorised to send for that domain. Modern mail providers treat that as spoofing and quietly drop it or move it to spam. The form works perfectly in testing on the developer's machine and fails in production.

3. Nobody watches the inbox

Forms are often set up to send to info@ or to the person who commissioned the site. That person moves role, the mailbox fills up, or a mail rule files website messages into a folder no one opens.

4. The number is wrong

In Saudi Arabia a large share of enquiries arrive by phone and WhatsApp rather than forms. A WhatsApp link with an old number, a number missing the country code, or two different numbers on different pages sends buyers to a dead end — or to a competitor.

5. The visitor is blocked silently

A phone field that only accepts one format, an Arabic name rejected by an English-only validator, a captcha that fails on mobile, an error message that appears off-screen: the visitor tries twice and leaves. You never know they were there.

The 30-minute monthly test

Once a month, and after every change to the website, one person should do the following and record the results in a simple log:

1. Submit every form on the site — main contact, quote request, every service or city page form — using an external email address. Use realistic details, in both Arabic and English.
2. Check arrival. Confirm each submission reached the right inbox, not spam, within a few minutes, with the visitor's details intact and Arabic text readable.
3. Reply to one. Confirm that pressing “reply” goes to the visitor, not to your own website address.
4. Tap every phone and WhatsApp link from a mobile phone. Check the number is current and that WhatsApp opens a chat with the right account.
5. Try to break the form. Submit with a missing field, a badly formatted email and an Arabic-only name. The errors should be clear, next to the field, and in the page's language.
6. Check the thank-you step. If you track conversions, confirm the conversion event fired once — not zero times, not twice.

Fixes that prevent most failures

• Send from your own domain. The form should send from a mailbox such as website@yourcompany.sa, with the visitor's address as “reply-to”. Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the domain.
• Send to a shared address monitored by more than one person, not to an individual.
• Store a copy. Save every submission to a database, CRM or spreadsheet as well as emailing it, so a mail failure does not lose the lead.
• Be honest when sending fails. If the server cannot send, the form should say so and offer the phone number and WhatsApp — never show a success message it cannot stand behind.
• One number everywhere. The same phone and WhatsApp number on every page, in the footer, in the chat widget, in structured data and on the Google Business Profile.
• Accept real Saudi input: Arabic names, numbers starting 05 or +966, and Arabic-Indic digits.

Measure leads, not visits

The reason missing enquiries go unnoticed is that most reporting stops at traffic. Count what actually arrives: form submissions received, calls, WhatsApp chats started — per week, per channel. Compare them with the same period last year. A sudden drop in form leads with stable traffic is almost always a technical fault, and it is far cheaper to catch in a week than in a quarter.

If you use GA4, track a generate_lead event on genuine successful submissions only, and click events on phone and WhatsApp links. Our GA4 setup guide covers the configuration.