Testing Your Own Contact Form Monthly

Why once is not enough

A form that works today can stop working next week without anybody touching it.

An update runs. A mail provider changes its filtering. A certificate expires. A mailbox fills. Somebody edits a page and breaks something adjacent.

None of those announces itself, and all of them are ordinary. Testing at launch proves it worked at launch.

The five minute routine

1. Submit the form from a personal address, on a phone.
2. Time how long it takes to arrive.
3. Check the junk folder if it does not appear.
4. Reply to the message and confirm the reply reaches you.
5. Phone your own number from an outside line.
6. Leave a voicemail and check it can be retrieved.

Six steps, five minutes, and it covers every route a customer would use.

Doing it from a personal phone rather than the office computer matters. Internal networks and internal mail behave differently, and you are testing what a stranger experiences.

Why nobody keeps it up

Worth being honest about, because the advice to test monthly is universal and universally ignored.

It is not urgent, it produces no result when it works, and there is no consequence for skipping it. Everything about it argues for postponement.

So relying on discipline fails. What works is attaching it to something that already happens: the first invoice run of the month, a standing meeting, or whenever you do the bookkeeping.

A task with no natural trigger does not survive past the second month, however sensible it is.

A worked example

An equipment supplier who set a monthly reminder after losing a fortnight of enquiries.

He did it in month one and month two. By month four the reminder was being dismissed, and by month six he had turned it off.

Eleven months later the same failure occurred, from a plugin update, and cost him three weeks.

What worked the second time was different: he added the test to the start of his monthly bookkeeping session, which he never skipped because it had a deadline attached.

Two years later he was still doing it, and had caught two genuine failures, neither of which he would have noticed otherwise.

The lesson was not about discipline. It was that the task needed to borrow urgency from something that had some.

Automating the check

Better than remembering, if you are willing to set it up.

Monitoring services can submit a form periodically and alert you when nothing arrives at the destination. That converts a task you will forget into a system that tells you.

Simpler versions exist. An uptime monitor that checks the contact page loads catches a subset of failures. A rule that flags when no enquiry has arrived in a fortnight catches another.

None of these covers everything, and all of them beat a reminder you will dismiss.

The counter-case

Where monthly is the wrong frequency.

A site that changes frequently, or where several people can edit, should be tested after every significant change rather than on a schedule. The schedule is a backstop, not the primary control.

A site that receives enquiries daily does not need a formal test, because a day of silence is itself the alarm. There, the useful discipline is noticing the silence rather than running a test.

And a business whose enquiries are entirely by phone can reasonably test less often, provided the phone routes are checked instead.

The principle is that something must be capable of telling you. If your volume does that, a test adds little. If it does not, the test is the only mechanism you have.

What else to check while you are there

Since the five minutes is already committed.

That the phone number on the site matches the one on your listing. That the hours are still right. That the certificate has not expired, which shows as a warning in the browser.

And that the site loads at all on mobile data, which catches a category of problem that office wifi hides.

Four additional checks, perhaps two minutes, and they cover the failures that most often go unnoticed for months.

Getting somebody else to do it

A better arrangement than relying on yourself, if there is anybody else.

The test does not require any knowledge of how the site works. Anybody with a phone can submit a form and report whether a message arrived.

Which makes it delegatable in a way most website maintenance is not. An employee, a family member, or whoever does your bookkeeping can run it in five minutes.

It is also more reliable when somebody else does it, because a task assigned to a person gets done and a task assigned to yourself competes with paying work.

If you pay somebody to maintain the site, ask whether this is included. Frequently it is not, and it is a reasonable thing to add.

Keeping a record

A single line per month is enough.

Date, what you tested, whether it worked, how long delivery took.

The value is not the record itself. It is that a delivery time creeping from seconds to minutes over several months is a signal you would otherwise never see.

It also gives you something concrete when raising a problem with a host or provider, which shortens those conversations considerably.

Testing what a customer would actually do

A refinement that catches more than a bare submission.

Fill the form in as an awkward customer rather than a tidy one. Use a name with an apostrophe. Type a phone number with spaces and brackets. Leave an optional field blank. Write a message containing a line break.

Those are the inputs that expose validation written too strictly, and they are what real people type.

Then check what arrived. A message with the line breaks stripped out, or a name mangled by an encoding problem, is a form that works and produces enquiries you cannot read properly.

That variant takes no longer than a plain test and finds a different class of problem.

What to do when it fails

Have the answer decided before it happens.

Know who to contact: the host, whoever maintains the site, or your mail provider. Know which of those covers what.

And in the meantime, make sure the phone number is prominent, so the site keeps producing enquiries by another route while the form is fixed.

That redundancy is the real protection. A site with three contact routes degrades when one fails; a site with one goes silent.

The mechanics of why delivery fails are covered in where the enquiry actually goes.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.