Forms not receiving
Submitted a test and nothing arrived? Here's where submissions usually get lost — or where they're hiding.
If you submit a test entry and can’t find it on the Leads page (or the email notification never arrives), work through this list.
Quite often the submission did arrive and is sitting somewhere you didn’t expect. The first half of this page covers that.
Is the site actually published?
Visitors can only reach your form on a published site, and edits aren’t live until you publish them.
- Confirm the form is visible in the editor preview.
- Click Publish / Republish.
- Open the live URL in an incognito window.
- Submit again from there.
Testing from the live address exercises the same path your visitors use.
It arrived, but it joined an existing lead
This is the most common surprise when testing.
PageFork files each submission under a person, matched by email and then by phone. If that person already has an open lead, the new submission is attached to that lead. No new lead appears — not as a new card on the Board, and not as a new row in the List.
So if you test with your own email address twice, the second test doesn’t create anything new to look at.
To find it:
- Open Leads and search for the email or name you used.
- Open the lead.
- Look at its timeline — both submissions are there.
To get a genuinely new lead while testing, use an email and phone you haven’t used on that site before.
A new lead is created when the person’s earlier leads are all closed (won or lost).
It arrived as an “Unnamed lead”
If the form has no field PageFork recognises as a name, email or phone, the lead is created but shows as Unnamed lead. It’s easy to scroll past.
See Form field schemas for which field names are recognised.
Check the site and the filters
On the Leads page:
- The site dropdown may be set to a different site.
- On Pro, a saved view or filter may be hiding the lead — a stage, an owner, a priority, a custom field. Click Clear filters.
- On Pro, archived people and their leads are hidden unless Archived is switched on in the List view.
- On Basic, check the form dropdown is on All forms and the Unread button is off.
Basic and Pro show different things
On a Basic site the Leads page is a plain list of submissions, one row each. Board, Calendar and People show a lock.
On a Pro site the page shows leads, not submissions — one row or card per lead, however many submissions it holds.
If a site’s Pro trial has ended, the page switches back to the Basic list. Your submissions are all still there. See Basic and Pro plans.
Check email spam / filters
Email notifications can end up in spam, especially for the first few submissions on a new account. Check:
- Spam / Junk folder.
- Promotions tab (Gmail).
- Any custom rule that might auto-archive PageFork emails.
Add the PageFork notification sender to your contacts / safe senders so future notifications arrive reliably.
Is the notification email the right address?
Each site has its own notification address. In the site editor, open the Forms tab and look at Notification Email under Form Notifications.
- If it’s set, notifications go there.
- If it’s empty, they go to an owner or admin of your team.
See Email notifications.
Is the form using a third-party embed?
If you asked PageFork to embed a third-party form (Typeform, Tally, Mailchimp, HubSpot…), submissions go to that provider, not to PageFork. Nothing appears in Leads. Check the provider’s dashboard.
Is the form on a different website?
PageFork only accepts submissions sent from your site’s own addresses. A form copied out of a PageFork site and pasted into another website will be refused.
Is rate-limiting blocking submissions?
Submissions are limited to 5 per minute from one address. If you’re firing off test entries quickly, some will be rejected. Wait a minute and retry.
Did something fill in the hidden spam field?
PageFork forms carry a hidden field that real visitors leave empty; submissions that fill it are rejected as spam. A browser extension that auto-fills every field on a page can trip it. Retry in an incognito window with extensions off.
Leads has it, but my other tool doesn’t
A submission that reached Leads but not your spreadsheet, mailing list or automation is a delivery problem, not a form problem.
In the site editor, open Forms → Destinations, open the destination and check its recent deliveries — a failed entry shows what the receiver answered. See Destinations overview.
Destinations are a Pro feature, so they stop sending if the site is on Basic. After upgrading they resume for new submissions; ones that arrived while the site was on Basic aren’t sent afterwards.
Still nothing arriving
Contact support with:
- The live URL.
- The form name / page.
- Approximate time of a test submission.
- What you submitted.