The expensive failures are silent
A site that is down is noticed within hours. A contact form that stopped delivering can run for months, and it costs far more.
Ask yourself how you would find out if your contact form stopped working today. For most businesses the honest answer is that they would not.
Four things to monitor
- Uptime — checked every few minutes, alerting a real person
- PHP errors — logged and reviewed, not just suppressed
- Form delivery — an automated test submission, weekly
- Performance — page speed checked periodically, not just after a rebuild
Form monitoring is the underrated one
An automated weekly submission that checks the notification arrived. If it does not, you find out in days rather than when someone asks why you never replied.
It is a small piece of work and it protects the most valuable thing the site does.
Errors should be logged, not displayed
- Error display off on the live site, always
- Errors logged to a file you can read
- The log reviewed occasionally, not just during an incident
- Notices and warnings taken seriously — they precede failures
Route alerts to someone who will act
An alert to a shared mailbox nobody owns is not monitoring. Name the person, and make sure they can reach whoever fixes things.
Out of hours, decide in advance whether a downtime alert warrants waking somebody. For most business sites it does not.