To set up Elementor Forms so every enquiry reaches you: keep Collect Submissions switched on, set the Email action’s From address to your own domain and its Reply-To to the visitor, send the site’s email through SMTP with SPF and DKIM records in place, and add a honeypot field plus reCAPTCHA v3 for spam.
“We haven’t had an enquiry through the website in three weeks.” Sometimes that’s a quiet patch. More often, the form is working perfectly and the emails are going nowhere: into a spam folder, rejected by the receiving mail server, or sent to an address nobody checks anymore.
Elementor Pro’s Form widget is a good form builder. Most problems with it come from what happens after someone clicks Submit. The sections below cover each step.
What happens when someone submits
In the Form widget’s Content tab there’s a field called Actions After Submit. This is a list of things Elementor does with each submission, in order. You can add several. Elementor’s actions after submit documentation lists them all. The ones most small businesses use:
- Collect Submissions: saves a copy of every submission in WordPress. On by default. Leave it on.
- Email: sends the submission to you.
- Email 2: usually used to send a confirmation to the person who filled in the form.
- Redirect: sends the visitor to a thank-you page after submitting.
- Integrations such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, MailerLite, Slack and webhooks (for Zapier and the like), for sending details straight to another system.
A typical setup for a service business is Collect Submissions, Email and Redirect. The redirect to a dedicated thank-you page is worth doing, because it gives you a clean way to track enquiries as conversions in Google Analytics or Google Ads.
Setting up the Email action properly
Open the Email section that appears once you’ve added the action. The fields that matter:
To: where the enquiry goes. Use an address someone checks daily. If several people need it, add them separated by commas, or better, send it to a shared inbox like enquiries@ your domain.
Subject: make it specific, so enquiries are easy to find. “New website enquiry: [field name]” beats the default.
From Email: this is where most delivery problems start. It must be an address on your own domain, such as website@yourbusiness.com.au. Never set it to the visitor’s email address. If your form claims to be sending “from” a customer’s Gmail address, Gmail and Outlook will reasonably treat it as a forgery.
Reply-To: set this to the visitor’s email field, so hitting Reply in your inbox goes to them, not to your own website address.
Message: the default [all-fields] shortcode includes every field. That’s usually fine.
Why form emails go missing
By default, WordPress sends email using the web server’s built-in mail function. The server just hands the message off and hopes. It doesn’t log in to a proper email account, and it often isn’t authorised to send for your domain.
Receiving mail servers check whether a message genuinely came from the domain it claims to. They look at your domain’s SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, which are DNS settings that say which servers may send email for you. Gmail, Microsoft and others have become much stricter about this. An email from your web server, claiming to be from your domain, without those checks lining up, is a prime spam candidate. Sometimes it’s filtered to junk. Sometimes it’s silently dropped.
Elementor’s own form submissions guide acknowledges this and recommends routing site email through a dedicated sending service.
The fix: send through SMTP
SMTP here means the website sends mail by logging in to a real email service, the same way your phone’s mail app does. There are a few ways to set it up:
- An SMTP plugin such as WP Mail SMTP, connected to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace account, or to a transactional email service such as Brevo, Postmark, Mailgun or Amazon SES
- Elementor’s own Site Mailer service
- A mail relay provided by your host
Whichever you choose, the sending service also needs to be authorised in your domain’s DNS. That usually means adding or updating SPF and DKIM records. This is the step that gets skipped, and it’s why a “configured” SMTP plugin still sometimes ends up in spam. Our article on why emails from your WordPress site go missing goes into the DNS side in more detail.
Form delivery is one of the things we check before launch on sites built through our web design service. If you’re not sure where yours stands, the test below will tell you.
Stopping spam
Every public form attracts spam. Elementor Pro gives you a few layers of defence, and you’ll usually want more than one.
Honeypot field. Add a field of type Honeypot. It’s invisible to people, but bots fill it in, and Elementor rejects any submission where it’s not empty. It costs nothing and doesn’t bother real visitors. Add it to every form.
reCAPTCHA v3. Google’s invisible check scores each visitor’s behaviour and blocks likely bots, with no “click the traffic lights” puzzle. You’ll need to create keys in Google’s reCAPTCHA admin and add them in Elementor’s integration settings. The older reCAPTCHA v2 checkbox works too, but adds friction for real people.
Akismet. Elementor can pass form fields to Akismet, the same spam filter many WordPress sites use for comments. It’s more work to set up, because you map specific fields to Akismet, and Elementor’s Akismet setup guide notes it’s only available on Pro plans that include form integrations.
Sensible fields. Required fields and a proper email field type filter out some junk. If you serve the Northern Rivers only, a postcode or suburb field also makes the bad enquiries easy to spot.
Our usual combination is honeypot plus reCAPTCHA v3, with Akismet added if spam keeps getting through.
One caution: spam filters work both ways. Set them too aggressively and real enquiries get blocked. If spam drops to zero overnight, check that genuine submissions are still arriving too.
Checking submissions inside WordPress
Because Collect Submissions is on by default, Elementor keeps a copy of every form entry. In WP Admin go to Elementor > Submissions. You can view each one, and export all or selected submissions to a CSV file.
This is your safety net. If you suspect enquiries are going missing, compare the Submissions list with your inbox. Submissions in WordPress but not in your inbox means an email delivery problem. Nothing in either place means the problem is the form itself, or the traffic.
Check it monthly, even when everything seems fine. If you collect personal or health information, also think about how long you keep it there and who has admin access to see it.
The five-minute form test
Do this after setting up any form, after changing email settings, and every few months as routine:
- Submit the form from your phone, using a personal Gmail or Outlook address as the visitor.
- Check the business inbox. Did it arrive? Was it in junk?
- Hit Reply. Does it address the visitor’s email, not your website’s?
- Check the confirmation email (if you use Email 2) arrived at the personal address.
- Check the redirect landed on the thank-you page.
- Look in Elementor > Submissions to confirm the entry is there.
If any step fails, fix it before you trust the form with real customers.
Get the form itself right too
Delivery is only half the picture. A form with twelve required fields will get fewer enquiries no matter how well the email is set up. Our guide to contact forms people actually finish covers the fields, wording and layout side.
When enquiries go suspiciously quiet, the cause is more often a mail setting or a DNS record than the website itself. Following that trail is everyday work for us, so tell us about it if the test submissions above aren’t arriving.