Contact Form 7 Not Working – How to Fix

Updated: May 18, 2021

Quite often our clients find themselves in a situation when their Contact form 7 is not working. Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular contact form plugins, and we use it in our themes as well. There are multiple reasons because for your WordPress contact form not working.

One of the most common issues with the not working WordPress contact form for Contact Form 7 plugin is the actual failure to send the message. The contact form fields are filled out by your website visitor and the submit button is pushed. However, an error message in with the red border is being displayed. It says “There was an error trying to send your message. Please try again later”.

Please note that images are clickable! Click on images to see it in high resolution!

“There was an error trying to send your message. Please try again later.” error message

If that’s the case, here’s what you can do. It is likely that the reason your WordPress Contact Form Not Working is simple – the contact form may be just not configured to the end. To resolve this problem you simply need to finish configuring it.

How to fix Contact Form 7 not working

To do this go to your WordPress dashboard first. Then go to Contact -> Contact Forms. Select your contact form and press “edit”.
Press “Edit” to edit the contact form

Then go to the mail tab and fill out the missing required fields marked with red. Don’t forget to hit save button at the bottom or at the side to save changes.
Make sure these fields are filled

Please make sure that you use mail-tags in these fields. You can learn more about mail-tags here. And you can learn more about setting up Contact Form 7 in general here.

If you need a quick demo content for your contact form to just make it work, you can use these recommendations:
To: put your e-mail here, the one you want to receive messages to
From: [your-name] <wordpress@yoursite.com>
Subject: Subject: [your-subject]
Message Body: Message: [your-email] [your-message]

So that your settings look like this (click on the image to see it in full size):

This should be enough to make your contact form work. Please note that contact form messages may be hitting your spam folder, that’s why it is recommended that you check it if no mail shows up.

Here’s how contact form settings for our Chromium theme from one of our testing sites look like (click on the image to view the enlarged version):

Also, emails won’t be sent if your server’s mail function is disabled. You may want to consult your hosting provider support on this matter.

Often messages from the contact form will go to your Spam folder. Make sure you check your spam folder first if e-mails don’t seem to reach you.

If this article helped you fix your issue with Contact Form 7, we’ll be thankful if you could follow these links and check out the following plugins: Maybe you’ll find some of them useful.

However, if this article didn’t help, and your problem with Contact Form 7 remains, please create a ticket at https://themeszone.freshdesk.com on the matter – we’ll investigate your case, do our best to resolve your problem, and use this experience to improve this article and make it even more helpful. And all of that is free!

Also, if you want to learn how to add placeholder text in contact form 7, please follow this link.