So, about the WordPress Ninja Forms plugin and missing forms.

If you use NinjaForms and got that forced security update in mid June, 2022, your forms may have disappeared from your Contact page or other places on your site. Chances are the site isn’t really broken. Instead the plugin may have disabled the forms by putting itself into “maintenance mode.”

Here’s how to fix it:

Follow these simple steps

• log in to your site’s dashboard
• visit NinjaForms -> Settings
• manually click the “Remove Mantenance Mode” button near the bottom of the settings page.
• don’t forget to clear any caches too

While this post is specifically about the forced update in June, 2022, you may also run into disappearing NinjaForms forms other times as well, especially after migrating a site to a new server, and possibly when an update requires changes to the database.

I found missing forms on around half the sites I manage that use NinjaForms! To be safe I went ahead and applied the fix on every site that uses NinjaForms. The steps, above, are very simple but when you’re talking about dozens of sites it… takes a while. (I’m posting this while taking a break from the chore!)

This seems like a really awful “feature.” I understand their reasoning, but contact forms and other forms are often the life’s blood of a working website. If those forms disappear it’s bad for your visitors and bad for the site’s owners as well!