I have been pulling my hair out over the last couple days trying to figure this issue out. Feels like i’ve tried everything, so i’m finally resorting to here. All of a sudden, the contact forms on my site just stopped working. The AJAX feature doesn’t work and there’s a red border under all my contact forms, which is the red border for the error message. When I view the console, a number of errors show up, with resources that are failing to load, all of which are scripts and styles that the plugin depend on to actually work.
But the issue is quite strange, because the forms only stop working when I am connected to a particular network. I have two Wi-Fi networks at home and when I connect to one, the forms work perfectly and when I connect to the other, it breaks. It led me to believe that it was a caching issue so I did the following:
- Cleared my browser cache
- Cleared the WordPress cache
- Contacted Hostgator to clear the server cache
- Reset both my routers
- Even went as far as doing ipconfig /flushdns in command prompt as I saw someone suggest that, because they were having the exact same issue.
None of that worked, and even though I know that the issue isn’t with the theme or conflicting plugins, I still
- Deactivated all the plugins besides Contact Form 7 to see if that would fix the issue
- Switched from my theme to the default WordPress theme
- Reverted to an older version of Contact Form 7 (ver. 5.1.6 as this is the version I have on another site, also hosted on Hostgator, that works perfectly.)
Unfortunately, none of this worked either. I am assuming the problem has to be on either my end or on Hostgator’s end, because I have sent the link to other people who are not on my network, and they don’t have an issue. The forms work as they should. I am really not sure what’s causing this so I am hoping someone would be able to give me some suggestions or support please
Hostgator hasn’t helped me. They checked to see if my IP was blacklisted or something and it wasn’t, and like I said, they cleared the server cache and still nothing. What do I do? After researching the issue on my own, I've realized that this is a problem many people face with Contact Form 7 and Hostgator/Bluehost, but I haven't found a proper solution yet...
UPDATE: Apparently the issue arises because of the word "contact" being in both the URL and the scripts/styles/images? That's the weirdest thing i've ever heard of, but apparently that's the issue? I had a banner image on my site named "contact-bg.jpg" that wouldn't load, got a 409 error for that as well. I changed the name of it to "get-in-touch-bg.jpg" and it loaded just fine. Unfortunately changing the slug from contact-us to get-in-touch didn't work. Is there a way to completely change the name of the contact form 7 plugin, removing the word contact from all the files and still have the plugin work?? See this question: Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 409
So, seems like this issue had nothing to do with plugins or the theme or anything. Apparently it had to do with my IP address and my webhost blacklisting my IP for some reason. I had to contact them and have them whitelist it in order for the contact forms to start working properly. This probably wouldn't work for everyone/wouldn't be the case for everyone, but it worked for me.