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#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
Daily inquiries, September 29 to October 28. Most weekdays bring 9 to 15 and weekends 1 to 4. Monday, October 19 fell to 5.
Tuesday, September 2912
Wednesday, September 3011
Thursday, October 113
Friday, October 29
Saturday, October 33
Sunday, October 42
Monday, October 514
Tuesday, October 612
Wednesday, October 713
Thursday, October 811
Friday, October 910
Saturday, October 102
Sunday, October 113
Monday, October 1215
Tuesday, October 1311
Wednesday, October 1412
Thursday, October 1514
Friday, October 169
Saturday, October 174
Sunday, October 182
Monday, October 195
Tuesday, October 2013
Wednesday, October 2112
Thursday, October 2211
Friday, October 2310
Saturday, October 243
Sunday, October 252
Monday, October 2614
Tuesday, October 2712
Wednesday, October 2813

What happened, Monday, October 19

  1. Scheduled test submission passes. The email lands in 34 seconds.

  2. 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.

  3. Volume watch: no inquiries since 6 am, and two is usual by now. Quiet mornings happen, so it keeps watching instead of paging anyone.

  4. Scheduled test submission fails at the first step: the form never submits. A retry five minutes later fails the same way.

  5. 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."

  6. We roll Formwell back to 5.2 and pause its automatic updates.

  7. Test submission passes on all three forms. Delivered in 41 seconds.

  8. 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

Inquiries today0
Next test-Every four hours, a test inquiry goes through each step a real one takes.
Break something

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.

      1. 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.

      2. 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.

      3. 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.

      4. 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