#10 Labs · WordPress lead watchdog
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.
Halvorsen Pump & Valve
3 forms watched: Request a quote, Contact us, Service call
All forms healthy
The last 30 days
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.
- 5inquiries that Monday, against 14 on a usual Monday
- 4.5 hrsfrom the update to the fix, most of it before the 10 am test caught it
- 28 minfrom the alert to a working form
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.
| Tuesday, September 29 | 12 |
|---|---|
| Wednesday, September 30 | 11 |
| Thursday, October 1 | 13 |
| Friday, October 2 | 9 |
| Saturday, October 3 | 3 |
| Sunday, October 4 | 2 |
| Monday, October 5 | 14 |
| Tuesday, October 6 | 12 |
| Wednesday, October 7 | 13 |
| Thursday, October 8 | 11 |
| Friday, October 9 | 10 |
| Saturday, October 10 | 2 |
| Sunday, October 11 | 3 |
| Monday, October 12 | 15 |
| Tuesday, October 13 | 11 |
| Wednesday, October 14 | 12 |
| Thursday, October 15 | 14 |
| Friday, October 16 | 9 |
| Saturday, October 17 | 4 |
| Sunday, October 18 | 2 |
| Monday, October 19 | 5 |
| Tuesday, October 20 | 13 |
| Wednesday, October 21 | 12 |
| Thursday, October 22 | 11 |
| Friday, October 23 | 10 |
| Saturday, October 24 | 3 |
| Sunday, October 25 | 2 |
| Monday, October 26 | 14 |
| Tuesday, October 27 | 12 |
| Wednesday, October 28 | 13 |
What happened, Monday, October 19
Scheduled test submission passes. The email lands in 34 seconds.
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.
Volume watch: no inquiries since 6 am, and two is usual by now. Quiet mornings happen, so it keeps watching instead of paging anyone.
Scheduled test submission fails at the first step: the form never submits. A retry five minutes later fails the same way.
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."
We roll Formwell back to 5.2 and pause its automatic updates.
Test submission passes on all three forms. Delivered in 41 seconds.
Formwell 5.3.1 fixes the clash. We test it on staging, install it, and the 2 pm test passes.
Your turn
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.
Halvorsen Pump & Valve
All forms healthy
Test submissions
What's happening
How it works
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.