Forms are a valuable and powerful way to collect information from your visitors. To be successful, they need to work seamlessly with no errors or glitches. Contact Form 7 is an easy-to-use plugin that allows you to create forms quickly and easily on any WordPress site. However, it’s not uncommon for these types of plugins to fail due to incompatibility issues or spam attacks. This blog post will show you how to ensure your contact form is working correctly and what you can do if something goes wrong to get your message through!

Here is a quick guide on how to fix CF7 error messages.

Contact Form 7 plugin has three error types:

  • Yellow
  • Orange
  • Red

You can find the meaning of each error message below.

Yellow Error

A Yellow error tells you there is a form validation error.

Misconfiguration leads to mail delivery failure or other troubles. Validate your contact forms now
Misconfiguration leads to mail delivery failure or other troubles. Validate your contact forms now

Error Message:

“Misconfiguration leads to mail delivery failure or other troubles. Validate your contact forms now.”

Solution:

  1. Go to your WordPress admin dashboard.
  2. Click on the “Contact Forms” button.
  3. Select on the “validate form now” button.
Validate Configuration
Validate Configuration
Validate Configuration Complete
Validate Configuration Complete

Orange Error

The orange error tells us that your form isn’t sending because of spam issues.

Error Message:

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

Solution:

  1. Go to the “Contact” tab.
  2. Click on integration.
  3. Select “remove keys.”
  4. Go to the Google ReCaptcha page.
  5. Sign in and create site ReCaptcha keys for your website (choose reCaptcha V2).
  6. Add the new V2 site keys to the Contact Form
Google reCaptcha
reCaptcha

Red Error

The red error tells us that your website hosting/server is blocking WordPress from CF7 sending emails.

Error:

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

Solution: Install a SMTP Plugin

  1. Install WP Mail SMTP plugin or Mailgun plugin. These plugins help to fix the mail function or php mail sending error.
Mailgun API: a contact form plugin add-on
Mailgun API

Still not working?

Deactivate any caching plugins (WP-Rocket, W3TC, etc…) on your website, re-test.

Replace CF7 with Gravity Forms

I strongly recommend using Gravity Forms instead of CF7; it has a better GUI, has more advanced features, and is easier to use.

The above information should help you get your message through and work again. If any of the solutions we’ve provided did not work for you, please don’t hesitate to email me with a description of what’s going on, and I’ll take it from there. Thanks for reading!

What is Contact Form 7?

Contact Form 7 (CF7) is a WordPress plugin contact form; CF7 allows you to collect information on WordPress websites. You can customize the form and the mail content flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, and so on.