I used to run my business on somebody else's software. Then it started dropping form submissions.
Not all of them. That's the thing. All of them would have been obvious, I'd have noticed inside a day. It was some of them, quietly, and I only worked it out because a guy mentioned in passing that he'd filled out my form the week before and never heard back.
I went looking. There were others.
There's no way to know how many, because the ones that vanished left nothing behind. That's the part that still bothers me. You can't count something that didn't happen.
So I built my own thing to handle leads, mostly out of spite, and I've run everything on it since. That's the origin story and I'm not going to dress it up. It wasn't a business plan. It was a guy who got burned deciding he wanted the leads to land somewhere he could see.
Then I started auditing other contractors' sites, and I found out how normal this is.
The thing about broken forms
Every other kind of website problem announces itself.
Site's slow, you can feel it. Site's down, the phone stops. Wrong hours, somebody tells you. Broken form? Nothing. The page says "Thanks, we'll be in touch!" The customer believes it. They wait a day, decide you're not interested, and call the next guy.
You experience that as a slow month.
Which means the failure mode isn't just that you lose the lead. It's that you lose the lead AND you get bad information about your business. You start thinking the market's soft, or your prices are too high, or the marketing isn't working. You might fire somebody over it. Meanwhile there's a form somewhere quietly eating the answer.
The test. Five parts, five minutes.
1. Submit it from your phone, on cell data
Turn the wifi off first. This matters more than it sounds, because your office wifi may be on a network that behaves differently than a customer standing in their yard.
Fill it out like a real person would. Real name, real message. Not "test test test," because plenty of setups filter obvious junk and you'll get a false pass.
2. Go find where it landed
Not "did I get a notification." Where did the actual thing land.
Check the inbox. Then check spam, because that's where most of them are. A form that mails from a random server address gets junked constantly, and once one lands in spam every one after it does too.
3. Check which address it went to
This is the one that catches people.
I audited a landscaper's site and told him he had three different email addresses collecting leads across the site. Three. One was his, one was his old developer's, one was a version of his business name that didn't have a real inbox behind it at all.
He had no idea. Why would he. Nobody checks which address a form points at, and forms get built one page at a time by different people over years.
So find out where yours go. All of them, on every page that has a form. Then ask the harder question: is that an inbox a human opens every day? A shared info@ address that everybody assumes somebody else is watching is functionally the same as no inbox at all.
4. Send a second one and see if you can tell them apart
Most people stop at one. Do two.
The second one tells you whether your setup can handle volume, whether it's deduplicating things it shouldn't, and whether you can actually tell which page each lead came from. If both arrive looking identical with no source on them, you've got leads but no idea what's producing them.
5. Time it
Note the minute you hit submit and the minute it arrives. Instant is right. Two minutes is fine. Twenty minutes is a problem, and an hour means it's queued somewhere, which means it'll silently stop one day and you won't know.
What happens after it arrives
Assume it all passed. There's a second half nobody tests.
- Who gets it. If it goes to one person and that person's on vacation, you have a one-person outage. Two recipients minimum.
- What it tells you. A useful lead email has the name, the number, the message and which page it came from, right there in the body. If you have to log into something to read it, you'll read it late.
- Whether you can call back from it. On a phone, the number should be tappable. It sounds small. It's the difference between calling back at the stoplight and calling back at nine at night.
- Whether there's a copy. If your only record of a lead is an email you might delete, your customer list is one cleanup away from gone.
That last one is the whole reason I stopped renting the important part of my business. Not because the software was bad at everything. Because the leads were the one thing I couldn't afford to be casual about, and they were living somewhere I didn't control.
Do it quarterly, and put it on the calendar
Forms don't break when you're looking. They break when a plugin updates, when hosting migrates, when an email provider changes a rule, when somebody deletes an old address.
None of those events send you a warning. So test on a schedule instead of on a hunch. Four times a year, five minutes, right after you check the smoke detectors.
And if you've read this far and haven't opened your own site yet, that's the actual point of the post. Go do it now. The reading is not the thing.
If you want to know how I handle the whole path from form to phone call, that's the part I actually sell. But nothing on this page requires buying anything, and the test above works exactly the same on a site I've never touched.
Run it, then send me the screenshot of where it landed. I'll tell you what's wrong with it. If the answer is nothing, I'll tell you that too and you can go back to work with one less thing to wonder about.