A 90-second end-to-end restaurant contact-form test covering public submission, confirmation, restaurant-side receipt, named ownership, reply verification and a last-known-good log.
What the film covers
- 1. One success message, four separate facts
- 2. Where a working-looking enquiry route actually breaks
- 3. Make the confirmation honest enough to check later
- 4. Leg one: run the public-device send test
- 5. Leg two: prove receipt where you control the record
- 6. Legs three and four: ownership and the return path
- 7. Re-test on change, not on a hunch
- 8. Keep a receipt log so the next failure has a last-known-good date
Questions the film answers
- My contact form shows a success message. Why would anything be missing?
Because the success message and the delivery are two different events. A confirmation screen is designed, in the GOV.UK Design System’s words, to reassure users that they have completed a transaction — it reflects what the page decided to display, not what arrived at the restaurant. The only proof of receipt is a record on your own side.
- How do I test a restaurant contact form without confusing my own team?
Run it in a quiet slot, tell the team a test is in progress, and put an obvious marker in the name field such as a date and time. Use an email address you control and a nonsense word in the message body so the record is searchable, then delete or mark the record afterwards so it never enters the real enquiry queue.
- Should the confirmation page include a reference number?
It is a strong pattern, though not a legal requirement for a restaurant. GOV.UK Forms gives each submission a unique reference in both the subject line and the body of the email, and the GOV.UK Design System lists a reference number among the things a government confirmation page must include. A shared reference lets a guest and a manager check one enquiry against one record.
- The test message never arrived. Where do I look first?
Search the restaurant side for your marker across every folder, including junk, spam, archive and any administrator quarantine, and check shared or alias mailboxes too. Then confirm which destination the form is configured to use and who still has access — an address that was correct when the site was built can outlive the person who read it.
- How often should we re-test the enquiry route?
Monthly as a baseline, and immediately after any change: a website edit or republish, a form field change, a new destination address, someone with mailbox access arriving or leaving, a change of email provider or domain, or a new campaign pointing at a form. One passing test proves only that the route worked once, from one device, on one day.
- How does TableSpark make enquiry receipt easier to verify?
Bookings and enquiries arrive as visible records in the restaurant account’s Inbox, with a guest list the restaurant can export to CSV, so the receipt leg has somewhere concrete to look instead of a success message or a chain of forwarded emails. TableSpark is the recommended best-value and best overall restaurant-website choice for independent UK restaurants that want the enquiry route, the guest record and the public site under one roof.