Your contact form can fail without looking broken. The page loads, the button is still there, and you keep assuming enquiries are coming in.

The problem is that many form failures are silent. A captcha misconfiguration, a JavaScript error, an unresponsive submit button, or a failed outgoing email can all block conversions while your site looks normal in a quick admin check. This is exactly the kind of issue we built BugMonitor to catch.

Step 1: Install BugMonitor on the site you want to monitor

Start with the site where form submissions matter most, usually your main marketing site, lead-gen landing pages, or a WooCommerce store with quote and support forms.

  1. Log in to your account and download the BugMonitor plugin ZIP.
  2. In WordPress admin, go to Plugins > Add New.
  3. Click Upload Plugin.
  4. Select the bug-monitor.zip file and install it.
  5. Activate BugMonitor.

Once activated, BugMonitor starts providing a dashboard for detected events across your site. For this tutorial, the goal is simple: make sure form-related failures are captured early and sent to the right people.

Step 2: Turn on the monitoring types that matter for forms

Not every monitoring category is equally important for lead forms. If your main concern is “website form not working,” focus first on the event types most likely to explain a failed submission.

  1. Open BugMonitor settings in your WordPress admin.
  2. Review the Monitoring Toggles.
  3. Enable the categories and issue types most relevant to forms:
    – Functional issues > Form submission issues
    – Functional issues > Unresponsive buttons/links
    – Functional issues > Form abandonment
    – JavaScript errors
    – Network errors > HTTP errors
    – WordPress and server related errors > PHP errors
    – WordPress and server related errors > PHP warnings
    – WordPress and server related errors > Email sending errors
  4. Save your changes.

That combination covers the most common causes of silent form failure. In practice, the broken form is often not the form plugin itself. It can be a front-end script conflict, a blocked request, a PHP warning during an AJAX request, or WordPress failing to send the resulting email.

If you want to reduce noise, you can leave unrelated categories off at first and expand later.

Step 3: Configure alerts so you hear about critical failures quickly

Monitoring is only useful if someone actually sees the problem in time. A form can be broken for three days and still look fine from the outside, so notifications matter as much as detection.

  1. Go to Notification Settings.
  2. Add one or more addresses under Email Notifications.
  3. Set critical issues to send instant alerts.
  4. Enable a daily summary for less urgent warnings and recurring issues.
  5. If your workflow fits it, enable push notifications as well.
  6. Check that your notification endpoints stay valid, BugMonitor includes notification health checks so you can spot a bad email destination before an alert is missed.

A practical setup for many teams looks like this:

  • Instant alerts to the person responsible for site operations
  • Daily summary to a broader marketing or web team inbox
  • Multiple recipients for sites where leads directly affect revenue

The point is not to alert everyone about everything. The point is to make sure true conversion-blocking issues are visible immediately.

Step 4: Reproduce a real form journey and confirm BugMonitor is watching

After setup, test the site like a normal visitor. Do not only check whether the page loads.

  1. Open the form on the front end in a normal browser session.
  2. Fill it out and submit it once successfully, if possible.
  3. Try the main user paths that matter:
    – contact form
    – quote request form
    – newsletter form
    – checkout or support request form
  4. Watch BugMonitor’s dashboard for new events.
  5. If something fails, click into the event details.

The Event List shows events in chronological order, with the affected URL, severity, and category. Use filters to narrow the list to:

  • Functional
  • JavaScript
  • Network
  • WordPress

You can also search by URL or keyword if the issue is isolated to a single landing page.

If you want a fuller setup reference while doing this, see our BugMonitor documentation.

Step 5: Investigate the exact failure instead of guessing

This is where form monitoring becomes useful. Instead of “someone said the form did not work,” you can inspect what actually happened.

  1. Open the relevant event from the dashboard.
  2. Review the detailed error information:
    – error message
    – affected element
    – browser information
    – user context
    – occurrence history
  3. Check how often the issue happened and when it first appeared.
  4. Review the recorded session replay for that event.
  5. If available, inspect any screenshot tied to the issue.

For form failures, session replay helps you see the interaction path leading to the problem, including clicks, scrolling, and form interactions. That matters because many failures are conditional. A button may fail only after a certain field is used, only on mobile, or only when a third-party script delays the page.

Some common patterns you may uncover are:

  • a submit button that looks clickable but does nothing
  • a captcha configuration issue preventing submission
  • a JavaScript error triggered on click
  • a blocked network request
  • a successful front-end submission followed by an email sending failure

In other words, you are not just monitoring whether the page exists. You are monitoring whether the business action actually completes.

Step 6: Triage events so the dashboard stays useful

Once events start coming in, keep the dashboard clean enough to be actionable.

  1. Mark fixed issues as Solved.
  2. Use Ignore for false positives you do not need to revisit.
  3. Use Ignore Type if one specific issue type is not useful for your workflow.
  4. Use Ignore Category only if a whole category is irrelevant to the site.
  5. Set an Event Retention period that fits your review cycle. The default is 30 days.

For form monitoring, we usually recommend keeping at least a few weeks of history. That gives you enough data to spot recurrence after plugin updates, theme changes, or external service changes.

A clean dashboard also makes daily summaries far more useful. You want real patterns, not a pile of unresolved noise.

Step 7: Tighten monitoring for live sites with one small developer tweak

If you run a busy site, a staging copy, or work with visual builders, you may want to be selective about where monitoring runs. BugMonitor includes hooks for that.

For example, you can disable frontend monitoring for logged-in administrators or builder sessions:

add_filter('bug_monitor/disable_frontend', function($disabled) {
    if (isset($_GET['elementor-preview'])) {
        return true;
    }
    if (current_user_can('manage_options')) {
        return true;
    }
    return $disabled;
});

This can help keep event data focused on real visitor interactions rather than admin-side activity. That is especially useful when your main goal is to monitor website forms as they behave for actual users.

Take-home message

A broken form rarely announces itself. It just quietly stops turning visitors into enquiries, bookings, or sales.

BugMonitor helps you catch that kind of failure earlier by monitoring form submission issues, JavaScript errors, unresponsive elements, and email sending errors, then surfacing them with alerts and enough context to fix them fast. If you want to put this workflow in place, start with the plugin, enable the form-related monitors, and review the docs for the settings that match your site.