GoHighLevel is one of the most powerful all-in-one platforms available for coaches, course creators, and agencies. The CRM, funnels, automations for the price point are truly amazing.
But if you've been trying to use GHL's built-in SMS (called LC Phone), you may have run into some frustrating walls. Walls that tend to appear at the worst possible moments - right before a webinar, in the middle of a launch, during a promotion where every hour matters.
This guide covers the 7 most common GoHighLevel SMS problems we see, why each one happens, and what you can do about it.
We'll be upfront: we run Roezan, an SMS platform built specifically for info marketers, coaches, and course creators who use GHL, so we've seen these issues up close, over and over. But everything in here is genuinely useful regardless of what you decide to do.
Let's get into it.
Problem #1: A2P Registration Getting Rejected (Or Just... Stalling)
This is the one that catches people most off guard.
Before you can legally send any marketing SMS in the US, you have to go through something called A2P 10DLC registration.
This is a carrier-level compliance process that verifies your business, your use case, and how you're collecting opt-ins. It's required across all platforms. There's no (legal) way around it.
The problem with GHL's process is that it can be confusing, slow, and often ends in rejection without any clear explanation of what went wrong.
You submit your information, wait a week or two, get denied, and then receive a vague response that doesn't tell you what actually needs to change. Support tickets get buried. You resubmit. You wait again.
We've talked to people who spent months going back and forth without getting approved, and some who eventually just gave up entirely, which meant they couldn't send SMS at all.
Why it happens:
A2P registration is handled by third-party carriers, not GHL directly. The requirements around opt-in language, sample messages, privacy policies, and business verification can be strict, subjective, extremely nuanced, and updated frequently. What got approved in the past might not get approved today. This is easy to get wrong, especially if you've never done it before. And when you get denied, the feedback can be vague or even incoherent.
What to do about it:
If you're stuck in the GHL approval process, go back and audit three things specifically:
- Your opt-in language (it needs to explicitly mention SMS, not just "marketing messages"
- Your privacy policy (it must mention SMS and state you won't sell data),
- Your sample messages (they need to match your actual use case exactly).
These are the three most common rejection triggers.
Check out our guide on A2P verification here and our sms compliant anding page / optin guide here.
If you've been denied and can't figure out why, or if you're on a deadline and can't afford more waiting, that's where working with a platform that has compliance contacts and can push things through becomes worth it.
At Roezan, getting people approved, including people who've already been denied elsewhere, is something we do every day. Every client we've onboarded has been approved.
Problem #2: You Got Approved, Then Found Out About the GHL "Warm-Up" Period
This one is particularly brutal because it feels like a bait and switch.
You go through the A2P process. You get approved. You connect your number. You're ready to send to your list for the big launch you've been building toward...
And then you find out you can't. Not at volume, anyway. Because GHL's LC Phone system has a mandatory warm-up period where your sending is capped and gradually increased over days or weeks.
Here's how it works:
You start at 100 messages per day. To unlock the next level, you have to send your full daily limit within a 24-hour window, and then you're restricted again for the next 24 hours before you can move up.
The full warm-up to meaningful volume can take a week or more, depending on how quickly you move through each level.
We've spoken to people who had a webinar coming up in three days, got approved thinking they were ready to go, and then found out they couldn't send to their list of 5,000 people.
The warm-up had barely started. Their "starting now" reminder - the most important SMS of the whole sequence - went out to a fraction of their list. The rest of their registrants never got it.
Why it happens:
The warm-up is designed to protect sender reputation and prevent abuse. It makes sense from a carrier perspective. But it's a serious operational problem if you're doing time-sensitive promotions and didn't know about it going in.
How Roezan can help fix it:
The honest answer is: plan around it or use a platform that doesn't have one.
If you know you want to send to a large list in two weeks, start warming up now. Build the warm-up timeline into your launch calendar as a non-negotiable step, not an afterthought.
If you need to send at full volume immediately, which most webinar and launch-focused marketers do, that's where GHL's SMS falls short by design.
Roezan has no warm-up period. Once your number is verified, you'll have immediate unlimited sending.
Problem #3: Your SMS Sending Gets Blocked Mid-Launch Because of Opt-Outs
You're in the middle of a promotion. You send a broadcast. A small percentage of people opt out — maybe slightly higher than usual because this list is older, or the message hit at a bad time, or any number of normal things that happen in marketing. And then GHL locks your account from sending for 24 hours.
No more SMS. For an entire day. Right in the middle of your launch.
This is GHL's opt-out rate policy:
Once your opt-out rate hits 2%, sending is suspended until midnight UTC.
The intent is to protect deliverability across all users on the platform. But the effect, if you're a marketer running a time-sensitive campaign, is that one slightly rough broadcast can kill the rest of your sequence.
The damage isn't just the messages you can't send. It's the webinar attendees who don't show up because they never got the "starting now" text, the sales that don't happen because your cart close sequence went silent. One 24-hour block can cost real money.
Why it happens:
GHL's LC Phone system is shared infrastructure. Carrier reputation is collective, so they enforce strict thresholds to protect everyone on the platform. At 2% opt-out, the system automatically suspends you without manual review.
What to do about it:
The best prevention is list hygiene, regularly clean your list of contacts who haven't engaged in 6+ months, and make sure everyone on it genuinely opted in and knows who you are.
Personalization also helps; messages with first names and context opt out less often than generic blasts.
But if you're already blocked? You wait. That's really the only option with GHL.
At Roezan, we don't automatically block you for a one-time opt-out spike.
If your rate is trending high, we'll flag it and work with you to diagnose why, but we won't shut you down in the middle of your launch. We treat it as something to solve together, not a reason to go dark.
Problem #4: You Got Blocked Because of a High Error Rate, Even Though It Wasn't Your Fault
This one is similar to the opt-out block, but even more frustrating because it can happen through no fault of your own.
GHL will suspend sending for 24 hours if your error rate hits 10%.
Errors happen for a few reasons: invalid numbers, landlines, numbers that have been disconnected. All reasonable things to track.
But errors also happen when a carrier filters your message, and that's classified as an error too (Twilio 30007), even though it has nothing to do with the quality of your list. You could have a clean list, send a perfectly compliant message, trigger a carrier filter for some unrelated reason, and get blocked.
Why it happens: Same logic as the opt-out threshold, GHL is protecting platform-wide deliverability. But the blunt instrument of a blanket 24-hour block doesn't distinguish between "this person has a dirty list" and "this person hit some carrier-side turbulence."
What to do about it: The best way to reduce errors proactively is automatic list cleaning like we do at Roezan, looking at the response code every time a message fails and opting out hard-bounced numbers immediately so you're not sending to them again.
You should also vary your message content across broadcasts using merge tags so messages aren't identical, which helps avoid carrier filtering.
On the Roezan side, we do automatic list cleaning on the backend as standard. Every "hard bounce" gets opted out immediately.
We also have a full guide on avoiding carrier filtering that covers message structure, link handling, and send patterns. And again, we don't block you if you hit a spike. We help you fix it.
Problem #5: Slow SMS Sending (Messages Take 30 min+ or Hours To Go Out)
This one is less about getting blocked and more about a fundamental infrastructure limitation that most people don't realize is a problem until they're already in trouble.
Most SMS platforms, including GHL's LC Phone, send messages pretty slowly a rate of a few messages per second.
That sounds fine until you do the math.
If you have 10,000 contacts and you're sending a "webinar starts in 10 minutes" broadcast, and your platform sends at 3 messages per second, that broadcast takes nearly an hour to finish. By the time the last person gets the text, your webinar is already underway, or over.
The entire point of that message was urgency. "We're starting now, click here to join."
Delivered an hour late, it's useless. Worse than useless, actually, because people click through to a room that's already in full swing or already closed.
Why it happens: Standard 10DLC and toll-free numbers have throughput limits imposed at the carrier level.
Most platforms operate within those standard limits. Getting higher throughput requires specific number types and infrastructure configuration that most platforms don't build for.
What to do about it: If your list is under 1,000 and you're not doing time-sensitive sends, GHL's throughput is probably fine.
If you're above that and running live events, you need a platform with high-throughput numbers.
Roezan is one of the very few SMS providers that operates high-throughput infrastructure specifically for this use case.
We send at 10x to 100x the speed of most providers. A broadcast that would take 45 minutes elsewhere goes out in under a minute with us.
Problem #6: Your Messages Aren't Getting Delivered (30007 Errors)
Poor deliverability is a sneaky problem because it's often invisible.
You send your broadcast, it shows as "sent" in GHL, and you have no idea that a meaningful percentage of those messages never arrived.
You just notice that fewer people showed up than expected, or response rates seem low, and you can't figure out why.
One of the most common deliverability errors in GHL's Twilio infrastructure is the 30007 error code, which is a carrier filtering error.
It means the carrier decided your message looked like spam and blocked it before delivery. You paid for the message. It shows as sent. It never arrived.
Why it happens:
Carrier filtering is triggered by a combination of factors: message content, link types (shared short domains are heavily filtered), sending patterns (identical messages to large lists), and sender reputation.
GHL's underlying Twilio infrastructure is large and shared, which means sender reputation can be affected by how other users on the same infrastructure are behaving, not just you.
What to do about it:
Follow our Carrier Filtering guide.
Use merge tags to make each message slightly unique, avoid shared URL shorteners, and keep your list clean.
Roezan's average deliverability across the platform is above 97%, including for brand new accounts importing large lists.
And if something goes wrong or you have questions, we have experts on the team who can look at your account and diagnose the issue.
Problem #7: International Sending Is Confusing
If you have any part of your audience in the UK or Australia, GHL's international SMS setup can be complicated.
The registration requirements differ by country, the approval processes are separate, and it's easy to end up with a setup that works for the US but fails silently for international numbers.
Why it happens: International SMS involves country-specific carrier regulations layered on top of US A2P requirements. It's a separate approval process that isn't well-explained in GHL's interface.
What to do about it: If you only need US and Canada, this doesn't apply, standard toll-free registration covers both.
If you need UK or AU sending, you'll need to go through country-specific registration separately.
At Roezan, US and Canada sending (+1 toll-free) is included by default. We can also add UK and Australian two-way sending and help handle the approvals for you.
So What's the Bottom Line?
GHL is a great platform for running your business. The CRM, funnels, and automation are genuinely valuable, and most people should keep using them.
But if SMS is a core part of how you drive webinar attendance, run launches, or communicate with your list, and especially if you're working with any meaningful list size, GHL's native LC Phone has real structural limitations that can hurt you at the moments that matter most.
The good news is you don't have to choose.
Roezan has a native GHL integration, which means you can keep running everything in GHL and just swap out the SMS layer, or just add Roezan natively on top of what you're already doing.
Your workflows stay the same. Your contacts sync automatically. You just don't have to deal with the blocks, the warm-up periods, the deliverability issues, or the slow throughput anymore.
If that sounds useful, you can start a free 14-day trial at Roezan.com.
Or if you want to talk through your specific setup first, book a quick call with our team here.
