How to fix WPForms “The form was unable to submit. Please contact the site administrator.” error

wpforms is an excellent WordPress plugin for creating contact, lead and even payment forms on a WordPress site. A common error we’ve seen customers report is the “The form was unable to submit. Please contact the site administrator.” Unfortunatley this error is sometimes intermittent which makes it harder to identify and solve.

In our experience, the “The form was unable to submit. Please contact the site administrator.” error is caused when caching is being used. There are two common scenarios that we’ve seen cause the problem:

1) Cloudflare wpforms cache

If you’re using Cloudflare it may be necessary to use page rules to bypass the cache for the pages on your site which use forms.

To create cloudflare page rules you can follow this guide: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/218411427-Understanding-and-Configuring-Cloudflare-Page-Rules-Page-Rules-Tutorial-

For each page that uses a form, try and set the cache level to bypass. Here’s an example:

2) WordPress Cache plugin

If you’re using a cache plugin such as WP Fastest Cache, WP Rocket, W3 Cache etc you may need to add an exclusion to stop the pages you’re using forms from being cached.

Here’s an example from WP Fastest Cache:

If you’re using wpforms and having issues submitting the forms with a “The form was unable to submit. Please contact the site administrator.” Let us know in the comments if this article helped or if you found an alternative fix that worked for you.