Your contact form is sending enquiries to your agency, not you

How this happens in the first place

When an agency builds your site, they have to put an email address into the contact form so it knows where to send enquiries. The lazy default is their own address. Sometimes it is a generic one like enquiries@theagency.co.uk. Sometimes it is the developer's personal inbox.

The intention is usually that they forward the leads on to you. In practice, forwarding gets patchy after the first few weeks. Then someone leaves the agency. Then the address is dead. Then your leads are vanishing into a mailbox that no one checks.

This is not a technical mistake. It is a setup decision that benefits the agency. As long as the leads come through them, you are dependent on them. The day you leave, the form keeps sending to them, not you.

How to check where your form is sending

You do not need to log into anything. Just fill in your own contact form as if you were a customer. Use a personal email address the agency does not know about. Write something obvious like "test from owner, please ignore".

Then wait. If the enquiry lands in your business inbox within a few minutes, you are fine. If it does not arrive at all, the form is sending somewhere else. That somewhere else is almost always the agency.

If you want confirmation in writing, email the agency and ask plainly: "Where do contact form submissions from my website get sent? Please send me the email address." Any straight answer that is not your own business email is the problem.

Working out how many leads you have lost

This is the part that stings. If the form has been misrouted for a year and you average even one enquiry a week, that is fifty potential customers who tried to reach you and got nothing back. For a plumber or a therapist, half of those would have converted into paid work.

The agency will not be able to tell you how many leads came through. They will say the inbox was "monitored" and most enquiries were "spam anyway". Ask them to forward the last six months of submissions. Watch what happens.

The leads you never saw are gone. There is no recovering them. The only thing you can do is stop the bleed.

How to get the form sending to you

Technically, this is a five-minute job. Someone with access to the website's code changes the destination email address from theirs to yours. That is the entire fix. There is no good reason it should take longer than a single afternoon.

What you want to ask the agency for:

• The destination email on the contact form changed to your business address, today
• A test submission sent and confirmed received in your inbox
• Any backup copies of past submissions they still hold, forwarded to you
• Confirmation in writing that no other forms on the site are sending elsewhere

If they drag their feet, charge you a "development fee" for the change, or tell you it is more complicated than it sounds, that is your answer. The agency that set up the form to point at themselves is not going to enthusiastically point it back at you. Charging you to undo a problem they created is, at this point, standard practice.

If you are leaving the agency, make sure this is sorted before you go. Once the relationship is over, getting them to change anything becomes much harder.

What to do next

Whether you stay with the agency or move on, you need two things going forward. First, the contact form sends directly to an inbox you control. Second, you get a copy of every enquiry by email the moment it comes in, not via a forward from someone else.

If you are moving away from the agency anyway, this is one of the first things a replacement should sort out. SkipTheAgency's Maintained plan, at £65/month, includes the migration of your site, a clean contact form that sends straight to you, and direct contact when something is not working. No tickets, no forwarding chain, no missing leads.

Whoever you end up with, the test is simple. Fill in the form yourself. If the email lands in your inbox, you are in control of your own enquiries again.