How Can I Be Sure the Forms on My Website Are Working?


Original Question

“I recently discovered that one of the contact forms on my website is not working. How can I make sure they are always working correctly?”

Short Answer

Testing them yourself on a regular basis is the only surefire way to do this.

 

Background:

The following talks about websites that are specifically built on WordPress. However, most of the detail applies equally to websites built on any platform.

Most forms on a website are a source of some type of lead for the website owner. While this can vary by market, form fills average between 20% – 30% of total leads. The remaining 70%-80% of leads come from phone calls.

Related Statistic:

It’s a sad fact that a lot (most in our testing) of small businesses, do not consistently answer the phone.

Testing shows that approx 25% of people that call a company will not leave a message, and if they do, they will not wait for the company to call them back. They go on to call another company, the next in line in the search results. People that do not want to wait are usually those that are most intent on buying.

In testing, we found that companies that say they answer the phone all the time, in practice, only 40% – 60% do so consistently.

CONCLUSION: Companies that do not answer the phone consistently, all the time, potentially lose a quarter of incoming leads.

There are many things that can go wrong with forms on a website, both directly and indirectly.  The most common include:

  • They just stop working because the form plugin fails, it gets old, and or the vendor stops support for it
  • An update to another unrelated plugin causes a conflict with the form plugin
  • A core WordPress update causes incompatibility issues with existing plugins
  • A change is made to some other part of the website that affects the form plugin
  • Completed forms suddenly start going into the junk folder of the recipient
  • The site is hacked

All these issues are common and can be fixed; however, the problem is that there is no reliable way to know if they have occurred in the first place, other than to test the forms manually.

Bottom Line

If your business relies on completed forms from your website, we strongly recommend you test them on a regular basis. We recommend doing this on at least a monthly basis.

Most clients know quickly if their forms stop working because incoming completed forms suddenly stop. Also, sometimes their clients will let them know when they experience a problem with the form.

We also test plugins on a website whenever we do some development work that we think might impact other plugins.

Additional Services

At Holistic Web Presence, we do everything we can to ensure that all software on a website functions consistently. However, it is nigh-on impossible to test all forms, on all sites, all the time. Further, no web development company can test all functionality on a website all the time.

While we will always go ahead and fix issues whenever we spot them, we still rely on our clients to let us know if something on their website is misbehaving. We then take action to resolve any issues as quickly as we can.

Mission Critical Website Functionality

For those clients that have mission-critical functionality on their website and require proactive measures to test specific aspects of that functionality, we offer additional services.

Regular proactive form testing can be relatively straightforward. For example, we provide simple form testing once a month at a rate of $50 per month — two forms at $70, three at $90, and so on.

However, things can get more complicated with more complex forms, forms behind a password, clients that require more frequent testing, clients that require testing that a specific recipient actually receives the form fills, and so on.

In addition, there are many other aspects of a website that can be proactively tested, such as basic site availability, load speed, and user login or account creation processes.

If you have a mission-critical aspect of your website and want to initiate some form of proactive testing, please call us so we can discuss viability and potential costs.