Found out 87% of agency sites have a broken contact form

I was looking at some industry data last Tuesday from a tool called BuiltWith. Turns out 87% of small agency websites have at least one broken link or a contact form that just eats submissions. I checked my own site after reading that and sure enough, my form had been silently failing for 3 weeks. Missed a potential $2k retainer because of it. That stat really bugged me so I started testing forms on competitor sites too. Found three where the submit button did nothing at all. Has anyone else run into this or am I just unlucky?

2 comments

2 Comments

river1839h ago

Honestly that stat doesn't surprise me one bit. I remember last year I rebuilt my entire site from scratch and tested the form like 15 times before launch. Then three months later a client told me their message never went through. Turns out a plugin update had silently killed the email notification thing. I spent a whole weekend going through every form on my site with a test submission. Found like four other issues that were just quietly failing. It's wild how many people probably think their forms work fine but they're just eating leads.

river1839h ago

Four years ago I set up a contact form on my personal site and honestly I have never checked if it actually sends emails. I just assume it works because I get spam through the other contact methods sometimes. Is it really that serious though? Like if someone really wants to reach me they will find another way. My email is in the footer. My phone number is on Google. Most people who need to contact a business are gonna call or send a LinkedIn message anyway. I think the lead eating panic is a little overblown for most small sites. Unless you are running a high ticket sales funnel where every single inquiry is money, I wouldnt lose sleep over it.