A form that silently fails is worse than a form that errors. The visitor believes they contacted you, and the only evidence is an enquiry that never arrives.
Forms are the one part of a marketing site where a failure produces no error and no log entry — just silence.
The AJAX endpoint a submission posts to has to reach PHP every time. Cached even briefly, it returns somebody else's success message and the entry is never written.
A form advertising 25 MB attachments on a host capped at 8 MB fails at the moment the visitor is most invested. The limit is set to match the form, not the default.
Entries, entry meta and entry fields grow together. A busy form makes the entries screen the slowest admin page on the site within a year.
Form notifications sent through PHP mail are the most commonly silently dropped mail on WordPress. Authenticated delivery and a log means you can prove it sent.
Every spam submission is a write, a notification and a row. Filtering at the edge keeps the cost off the database rather than cleaning up afterwards.
When somebody says they filled in the form last week, you want an answer better than checking whether it looks like it works.
The page caches beautifully. The submission behind it cannot, which is the part that decides whether the campaign produced anything.
These differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan, and each follows from a form being the one uncacheable thing on an otherwise static page.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Submission endpoints | Excluded from the page cache without exception | A cached form response returns a stored success message to a visitor whose data was never written, which produces a happy visitor and no enquiry. |
| Upload size limits | Raised to match the largest attachment the form advertises | A form offering a file size the server rejects fails at the final step, after the visitor has already filled in everything else. |
| Entries tables | Indexed, with a retention policy applied | Entries, meta and fields grow as three joined tables, so the admin listing degrades long before anybody thinks of the form as high volume. |
| Notification delivery | Authenticated SMTP with a per-message log | Form notifications sent through PHP mail are dropped by recipient providers without a bounce, so nothing on either side records that the message existed. |
| Spam handling | Filtered at the edge before a row is written | Every spam submission otherwise costs a database write, a notification attempt and a row somebody has to delete later. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, endpoints exempt from cache, and a delivery log that proves the notification sent.