Quick gut check: how many forms does your website actually have? A contact form, maybe an enquiry form for a program, an online booking, an enrolment form for something you run each year. Now the real question: are you 100% confident every single one of them still works, right now, today?

I ask because this trips up almost every organisation I work with at some point, and it’s rarely anyone’s fault. Forms don’t usually break because something was built badly. They break because the website they sit on, and everything underneath it, never actually stops changing.

Nothing has to go wrong for a form to stop working. Something just has to change.

True story: last week I was auditing a website with eight distinct forms, built up over as many years. A few routed through to Mailchimp, one connected to Zapier, another to Stripe for billing.

One form was completely broken. It had been built on a piece of software the organisation wasn't even subscribed to anymore.

Nobody could tell me where all eight forms actually lived on the site, and nobody had checked any of them in a long time either. Two were sitting on pages that had quietly dropped out of the menu entirely, with no link anywhere a visitor could actually find them. One had received exactly one signup in the past two years.

Nobody knew how many enquiries had gone missing in just the last twelve months. There's no way to find out now.

That's not hypothetical. That was last week.

So come back to the question. Are you confident? And be honest: when did you last actually check?

Most people can’t answer that. It’s not carelessness. Testing a form has just never once made it onto anyone’s actual to-do list.

The test itself takes two minutes. Open your website, fill in one of the forms the way an actual visitor would, on your phone if that’s what most people use, and time how long the email takes to land in your inbox.

If it turns up within a few minutes, that’s genuinely good news. It means the form is working today.

But today isn’t really the question. Every non-profit, council, and small regional business I work with is run by people who are already stretched, and re-testing a form every few weeks was never going to make anyone’s priority list. So time and again, I hear the same story: someone realises a form’s been broken, with no way of knowing how long it had been sitting like that. A week. A season. Long enough that a board member or a funder had already noticed and said nothing.

These forms exist to do a real job. Someone wants to get in touch, enrol in a program, ask a question, or hand over their details to buy something. When the form fails, a real person tried to reach you and got nothing back. No auto-reply. No follow-up. Nothing.

So let me get technical for a moment, because understanding what’s actually happening is the difference between guessing and knowing.

Most forms on a website don’t send an email themselves. The form hands your message to your hosting server, and the server is the one actually responsible for getting it into your inbox. That handoff is where things go wrong, quietly. Spam filters reject messages that don’t look properly authenticated. Some hosting providers throttle or block outgoing mail without ever telling you. Either way, the form still tells the visitor “message sent,” because as far as the form’s concerned, it did its job. What happens to the message after that is out of its hands, and often out of yours too, unless your plugin happens to also save a copy of every submission inside your WordPress dashboard as a backup.

How to check it yourself, properly

If you’re going to monitor this yourself, do it properly, not once and never again. Test every form on the site the way a real visitor actually would, on a phone as well as a laptop. Do it at least once a month. Do it again every time a plugin or piece of software on the site gets updated. Do it any time something else on the site changes that could plausibly have broken something.

Keep that up for as long as the organisation exists, and you’ll actually know your forms are working, instead of just assuming they still are.

Or let someone else carry it

The other option is straightforward: work with someone who does this for you as a matter of course, so it’s never something you personally have to remember. On the contact form specifically, that looks like this: if a plugin update touches anything connected to a form, that form gets tested the moment the update goes live, not assumed to still work. Every form on the site also gets swept and tested on its own regular cycle regardless of whether anything’s changed, because the failures that actually cost you are the ones nothing else would have caught.

That’s one part of the same baseline every tier of RBT’s Website Care Plans covers: backups taken regularly, software and security updates applied and checked by hand, plugin and theme licences kept current, and a plain-English report each month explaining exactly what was checked. Plans starts at $79 a month for that baseline, and scale up depending on how much support you need access to each month.

It’s the same story everywhere else on the site

A contact form is just the easiest thing to test yourself in two minutes. The same pattern, something changes quietly and nobody notices until it costs something, runs through almost everything else on a website too. A plugin update sits unapplied for months because the last one broke something, and the security hole it was meant to patch doesn’t announce itself either. A software licence lapses and a feature quietly stops working. A backup job fails silently in the background, and the first anyone finds out is the day something actually goes wrong and there’s nothing to restore from.

None of this shows up on an invoice. It shows up as an enquiry that never arrived, or a funder who visited your site before signing off on a grant and found something two years out of date.

Is it worth it, compared to rebuilding later

Here’s the honest comparison, because peace of mind isn’t a number. Once a site’s been neglected long enough that patching it stops being realistic, a full rebuild often runs upward of $5,000, sometimes $10,000, sometimes $20,000 or more, depending on the size of the site and what needs to be salvaged.

A website care plan starts at $79 a month, a fraction of any of those figures, spent on making sure you never actually need one of them. A care plan and a rebuild solve different problems, so this isn’t a perfect like-for-like comparison. The honest point stands anyway: steady, small checks are cheap insurance against a much bigger bill later.

What actually changes

Practically, almost nothing changes about how you use your website day to day. What changes is that something small gets caught and fixed before a visitor ever runs into it, before it costs you an enquiry, and before it becomes the kind of thing a board member or a funder notices before you do.

That’s really what you’re paying for. Not the fix itself. Never having to wonder whether anyone’s actually checking.

So, test it

Right now, send yourself a test enquiry through your own website. Check it lands in your inbox, and check whether it’s also sitting in your dashboard as a backup copy. If either of those doesn’t happen, or if you genuinely can’t remember the last time you checked, that’s worth more than a passing thought.

Tried it and not sure what you found? Email me what happened and let’s get it sorted →