Shine Contact Form Bug — Email Delivery Issue

Status

🔴 Urgent — Contact forms on the Shine Marketing website are not delivering to the client's email inbox. Flagged as high priority in the ^[1] engagement.

Assigned to: Sebastian Gant
Raised in: ^[2]

Problem Description

Contact form submissions on the Shine Marketing website are silently failing — they are not arriving in the client's (Katie Geiser's) email inbox. The issue has persisted despite Katie's own troubleshooting attempts with Bluehost support.

Key Observations

• The A New Dawn Therapy website uses the same setup (WordPress, WPForms, Gmail Workspace) and its contact forms work correctly.
• Both sites share the same Gmail Workspace account for email.
• Both sites are hosted on Bluehost.
• Katie has already worked with Bluehost support without resolution.
• The divergence between the two sites suggests the issue is likely site-specific — a misconfiguration in the Shine WordPress install, WPForms settings, or email routing rather than a platform-wide problem.

Environment

Likely Causes to Investigate

1. WPForms email notification settings — Verify the "Send To" email address is correctly configured in the Shine form's notification settings.
2. WordPress mail sending (wp_mail) — WordPress relies on wp_mail() by default, which uses PHP mail and is frequently blocked or silently dropped by hosting providers. Check whether an SMTP plugin (e.g., WP Mail SMTP) is installed and configured on Shine but not on A New Dawn, or vice versa.
3. SMTP plugin misconfiguration — If an SMTP plugin is present, verify credentials and the authenticated sending address match the Gmail Workspace account.
4. Spam/junk filtering — Confirm submissions aren't landing in spam on the Gmail Workspace side.
5. Bluehost PHP mail restrictions — Bluehost sometimes restricts outbound PHP mail; the fix is typically to configure SMTP authentication.
6. Form plugin version or conflict — Check for plugin conflicts or outdated WPForms version on the Shine site specifically.

Resolution Steps

• [ ] Log into the Shine WordPress backend and review WPForms notification settings
• [ ] Check whether an SMTP plugin is installed; if not, install and configure WP Mail SMTP with Gmail Workspace credentials
• [ ] Send a test form submission and verify delivery
• [ ] If SMTP is already configured, re-authenticate and test
• [ ] Confirm no spam filtering is catching submissions on the Gmail Workspace side
• [ ] Document the fix for future reference

Impact

Until resolved, Shine Marketing is losing inbound leads — any prospective client who submits the contact form receives no follow-up. This directly undermines the conversion tracking and Google Ads work currently in progress for this client.

Related

• ^[3]
• ^[4]
• ^[5]
• ^[6]