Troubleshooting

The form does not appear

Check the ID in your shortcode matches a form that still exists. View the page while logged out — administrators see a red error where visitors see nothing.

If you are using a caching plugin, clear the cache after adding a form to a page.

Notification emails are not arriving

Check spam first, then Entries — if the submission is there, the form works and the problem is mail delivery.

Sense Forms shows an admin warning when delivery fails. Setting up SMTP fixes this permanently; it is the single most common issue on shared hosting.

Everything shows as “direct”

Direct means no referrer was available. Legitimate causes:

• Campaign links with no UTM parameters
• Clicks from mobile apps, PDFs or desktop email clients, which often strip referrers
• A visitor moving from an HTTPS site to an HTTP one

Tag your campaign links with UTM parameters. That is the only reliable fix, since referrers are outside your control.

If everything is direct including organic search, check that tracking is enabled in Settings and that a caching or optimisation plugin is not stripping the script.

No attribution on submissions

Confirm Enable tracking is on. If you are testing while logged in as an administrator, note that Track logged-in administrators is off by default — log out or use a private window.

Real submissions are being rejected as spam

Usually one of:

• Rate limit too low for an office where many people share one IP
• Time trap too high for a very short form
• Blocklist term that appears in ordinary language
• reCAPTCHA threshold too strict — lower it to 0.3, or turn reCAPTCHA off

Conditional logic is not working

Check the rule tests the field you intend, and remember greater than and less than compare numerically — using them on text rarely gives the result you expect.

If a field should be hidden but appears briefly on load, that is the page rendering before the script runs. It resolves immediately and does not affect what is submitted.

The form looks wrong on the front end

Your theme’s styles may be overriding the form’s. Use Preview in the builder to see the form in isolation — if it looks right there and wrong on the page, the conflict is with your theme.

Scope a fix using the form’s ID, as described in styling forms.

File uploads fail

Files over the limit are rejected. The default is 5 MB, but your server’s upload_max_filesize and post_max_size are often lower and take precedence.

Files are validated by actual content as well as extension, so a mislabelled file is rejected even with an allowed extension.

Still stuck

Note your WordPress version, PHP version, active theme, and whether the problem persists with other plugins deactivated. That narrows almost every remaining issue quickly.