# Leads that never go missing.

Forms fail quietly. A plugin update, a spam filter set too tight or a mail service having a bad day, and inquiries stop arriving while the site looks fine. This is the dashboard we keep for a site's forms, with the day it earned its keep. Then you can break the site yourself.

Halvorsen Pump & Valve is an invented company, and every number here was made up for the demo.

## The Monday a plugin update broke the quote form.

Daily inquiries from Halvorsen's three forms. The pale band is the usual range for that day of the week. On Monday, October 19, an automatic plugin update broke the Submit button at 6:10 am. The 10 am test submission failed, the alert went out at 10:06, and the form was back by 10:38.

- **5** inquiries that Monday, against 14 on a usual Monday
- **4.5 hrs** from the update to the fix, most of it before the 10 am test caught it
- **28 min** from the alert to a working form

| Day | Inquiries |
| --- | --- |
| Tue, Sep 29 | 12 |
| Wed, Sep 30 | 11 |
| Thu, Oct 1 | 13 |
| Fri, Oct 2 | 9 |
| Sat, Oct 3 | 3 |
| Sun, Oct 4 | 2 |
| Mon, Oct 5 | 14 |
| Tue, Oct 6 | 12 |
| Wed, Oct 7 | 13 |
| Thu, Oct 8 | 11 |
| Fri, Oct 9 | 10 |
| Sat, Oct 10 | 2 |
| Sun, Oct 11 | 3 |
| Mon, Oct 12 | 15 |
| Tue, Oct 13 | 11 |
| Wed, Oct 14 | 12 |
| Thu, Oct 15 | 14 |
| Fri, Oct 16 | 9 |
| Sat, Oct 17 | 4 |
| Sun, Oct 18 | 2 |
| Mon, Oct 19 | 5 |
| Tue, Oct 20 | 13 |
| Wed, Oct 21 | 12 |
| Thu, Oct 22 | 11 |
| Fri, Oct 23 | 10 |
| Sat, Oct 24 | 3 |
| Sun, Oct 25 | 2 |
| Mon, Oct 26 | 14 |
| Tue, Oct 27 | 12 |
| Wed, Oct 28 | 13 |

Without the watchdog, the form stays broken until someone wonders why it's quiet. Halvorsen's last silent failure, before we started watching, ran 19 days.

## What happened, Monday, October 19

- **6:00 am.** Scheduled test submission passes. The email lands in 34 seconds.
- **6:10 am.** The host's automatic updates install Formwell 5.3, the site's forms plugin. Its new script clashes with the theme, and Submit spins forever.
- **8:00 am.** Volume watch: no inquiries since 6 am, and two is usual by now. Quiet mornings happen, so it keeps watching instead of paging anyone.
- **10:00 am.** Scheduled test submission fails at the first step: the form never submits. A retry five minutes later fails the same way.
- **10:06 am.** Alert to #10's on-call developer and Halvorsen's office manager: "Request a quote: test submission failed at Submit. Formwell updated to 5.3 at 6:10 am."
- **10:31 am.** We roll Formwell back to 5.2 and pause its automatic updates.
- **10:38 am.** Test submission passes on all three forms. Delivered in 41 seconds.
- **2:00 pm.** Formwell 5.3.1 fixes the clash. We test it on staging, install it, and the 2 pm test passes.

## Break the site. Watch the alert fire.

A live copy of Halvorsen's dashboard on a fast clock: every second here is about 40 minutes there. Inquiries trickle in, and a test submission runs every four hours. Pick something to break. The simulator runs on the page at https://nr10.com/labs/lead-watchdog/ with JavaScript.

- **Update a plugin.** Automatic update installs Formwell 5.3. Submit stops working for visitors. The test fails at "Form submits". The fix: We roll Formwell back to 5.2 and pause its updates until the fix is tested on staging.
- **Make the spam filter too strict.** Someone sets the spam filter to its strictest level after a burst of junk. The test fails at "Passes the spam filter". The fix: We set the filter back to 0.7 and add a honeypot field, which stops most junk without guessing. the held real inquiries come out of the spam folder and go to sales.
- **Take the mail service down.** The site's mail service starts rejecting messages. The forms still look fine. The test fails at "Email lands in the inbox". The fix: We switch the site to its backup mail service. the held inquiries saved in WordPress during the outage are sent on to the inbox.

## Three checks, and a person on call.

Nothing here needs AI. It needs a test that never gets bored, and someone who answers the alert.

- **Test submissions.** Every four hours, around the clock, a script fills in each form like a visitor would, in a real browser, and submits it. If the form breaks, the next test finds out.
- **Delivery checks.** Each test carries a unique code. The watchdog looks for that code in the WordPress database and then in the inbox the form sends to. Saved but not delivered is its own alert, because that's the failure nobody notices.
- **The inbox rule.** A filter in the receiving inbox spots the test code and files those messages away, so your team never sees them and sales reports stay clean. Real inquiries go where they always went.
- **Volume watch.** The watchdog learns how many inquiries each form gets by hour and day. A real drop with passing tests still gets a look from a person, because some failures only real visitors find.

Alerts go to our on-call developer and to whoever you choose on your side, by email and text. Each alert says which step failed and what changed on the site before it, so the fix usually starts with the cause.

## Is anyone watching your forms?

We add the watchdog to WordPress sites we care for, and to sites where the forms are the business. Setup takes a day. [Talk to us](https://nr10.com/contact/)

Human version: https://nr10.com/labs/lead-watchdog/