Checkboxes not appearing in Contact Form 7

Many WordPress sites serve a stored copy of each page to visitors who are not logged in, and a fresh page to the owner. After you edit the form and add a checkbox, your own view shows the new box, while every visitor keeps getting the stored copy from before the change. The stored copy has the old form, so the box is not there at all. Nothing in your view tells you the cache is involved, which is why the fault can look like a mystery.

• Does a signed-out window show the consent checkbox above the Send button?
• Does the page source for a signed-out visit include a checkbox input in the form?
• Does the checkbox sit under a banner, or behind a style that hides it on phones?
• Does Send refuse to submit with the box unticked, and say so next to the box?

A caching plugin keeps a finished copy of a page and serves it to anyone who arrives without logging in. The copy is made the first time someone loads the page, and it stays until it expires or is cleared. Edit the form and the copy does not change on its own, unless the plugin clears it when you save. So the visitor gets the form as it was, with no checkbox, and the box you added exists only in the admin view and the one page the editor shows you.

A content delivery network or a host-level cache can hold a copy too, in a layer the plugin cannot see. Clearing the plugin's cache then leaves the old page in place for some visitors. If you still see the old form in a private window after clearing, check the host's cache panel, and wait for it to refresh before you test the form again.

Why visitors leave

A theme or form stylesheet can make a checkbox invisible without removing it from the page. A rule for every input of a certain kind can set the box to zero size, move it off screen, or cover it with a label that looks like plain text. The box is still in the markup, so the form refuses to submit until it is ticked, and the visitor cannot tick it. On a phone the rule often applies differently, which is why the box can show on a laptop and not on the phone the visitor used.

Find the rule before you change the box. Right-click the spot where the box should sit and choose Inspect. If the checkbox input appears in the markup but nothing shows on screen, the cause is styling. Note the stylesheet the rule came from, and add an exception for the form rather than changing the whole theme. Then run the signed-out visit again to confirm the rule no longer hides the box on either device.

A checkbox in Contact Form 7 is written as a tag inside the form template, and a typo in the tag name, a missing name, or a stray character in the label can stop the form from reading it. After you save, read any message the form editor shows, because it can report a tag it could not read, and that message is the first thing to check. Without it, the checkbox is absent from the form the visitor receives, and the rest of the form shows normally.

Separate the three causes with one signed-out visit and one look at the page source. A box absent from the source means a stale cache or a broken tag, and the editor's message helps decide between them. A box present in the source but not on screen means styling. Each cause needs its own fix, and the screenshot of that step in the report shows which one a visitor met.

The checkbox can disappear after a change that has nothing to do with the form: a cache plugin update, a theme update that brings a new stylesheet, or a host-level cache setting. Rerun a signed-out visitor on the contact page after each one, on a phone and on a laptop. You catch the missing box on the day the cache changes, not weeks later when a customer asks why the form never asked for consent.