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Never miss a broken contact form again

Uptime tools check if the page loads. They can't tell you the contact form stopped delivering. Burrow captures form.submitted events from Gravity Forms, CF7, Fluent Forms, and WooCommerce — and flags when submission volume drops to zero.

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[ How it works ]

  1. Inventory revenue-critical forms

    List every form that drives business for each client — contact forms, demo requests, quote builders, checkout flows, newsletter signups, lead magnets. In Burrow, each client's forms are tagged to their project so signals stay organized by retainer, not by site.

  2. Connect form plugins through the Burrow CMS plugin

    The Burrow WordPress plugin captures form.submitted events from Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms, Ninja Forms, and Contact Form 7 automatically. WooCommerce checkout events are also captured. For non-WordPress forms, use the Burrow API or TypeScript/PHP SDKs to send events from any form handler.

  3. Correlate form volume with deploys and changes

    Burrow's per-client timeline shows form submission events alongside GitHub deploys, plugin updates, and CMS changes. When form volume drops to zero at 3:48pm and a plugin update happened at 3:47pm, the correlation is visible immediately — no log searching or Slack archaeology required.

  4. Get notified before the client does

    Scout monitors form volume patterns per project. When submissions drop below expected baselines — especially dropping to zero — alerts fire to your team. The developer investigates the same day instead of discovering the problem from an angry client email four days later.

Tuesday 3pm. The email that every agency dreads.

Your biggest client’s VP of Sales writes: “We haven’t gotten a lead from the website in 4 days. Is something wrong?”

You check the site. It loads fine. 200 OK. The contact form page renders perfectly. You fill out the form yourself — it says “Thank you for your submission.”

But no email arrives. No CRM entry is created. No Slack notification fires. The form has been silently failing since Friday’s plugin update — displaying a success message to visitors while failing to deliver the actual submission.

Four days. Maybe 20-30 lost leads. The client is furious. Your developer finds the root cause in 15 minutes: a Contact Form 7 compatibility issue introduced by a plugin update on Friday at 4:12pm. The fix takes 5 minutes. But the damage — lost leads, lost trust, a retainer that’s suddenly under review — took four days to accumulate because nobody was watching the forms.

This scenario isn’t hypothetical. It’s the number one operational failure I’ve seen across 20 years of agency work, and it’s the primary reason I built Burrow.

Why uptime monitoring doesn’t catch this

Oh Dear, UptimeRobot, Pingdom, ManageWP’s uptime add-on — they all do the same thing: ping the URL and check if it returns HTTP 200. If the page loads, the site is “up.”

But “the site is up” and “the site is working” are different statements. A site can be up while:

  • The form handler throws a PHP fatal error but the template catches it and shows a “thank you” message anyway
  • The SMTP server is blacklisted and no emails are being delivered
  • A Zapier webhook URL expired and form-to-CRM integration silently stopped
  • A DNS change broke the form’s submission endpoint but not the page itself
  • A plugin update conflicted with the form plugin and submissions are lost on the backend

None of these trigger an uptime alert. The page loads. The HTTP response is 200. The monitoring dashboard shows green. And leads are disappearing.

What Burrow does differently

Burrow doesn’t ping the page. It captures form.submitted events from inside the form plugin — Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms, Ninja Forms, CF7, WooCommerce checkout. When a user successfully submits a form and the plugin processes it, Burrow sees the event. When the form plugin stops emitting events, Burrow sees the absence.

The difference is between monitoring the front door (uptime: is the page reachable?) and monitoring the cash register (form health: are submissions actually completing?).

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Before Burrow

Friday 4:12pm — Plugin update happens. Form handler breaks. ManageWP says “all green” because the site loads fine.

Saturday through Monday — Visitors fill out the form, see “Thank you,” and leave. No leads arrive. Nobody knows.

Tuesday 3pm — Client emails. Four days of lost leads.

After Burrow

Friday 4:12pm — Plugin update event appears in the client’s Burrow timeline. Form.submitted event volume drops to zero at 4:13pm. Scout flags the anomaly within the hour.

Friday 5:30pm — Developer sees the alert, identifies the CF7 conflict, and deploys a fix. Total lead loss: approximately 2 hours’ worth, not 4 days’.

Monday morning — Client call goes normally. The monthly digest shows: “Form issue detected Friday 4:12pm, resolved Friday 5:30pm. 187 form submissions for the month. Uptime 99.97%.” The retainer is safe.

Every agency tool ignores this problem

AgencyAnalytics reports traffic. ManageWP reports plugin health. MainWP reports update status. WP Umbrella reports backups and uptime. None of them monitor whether form submissions are actually completing.

It’s arguably the highest-ROI operational signal an agency can track — because forms are how clients turn website traffic into revenue. A contact form that works is worth more than a perfect Lighthouse score, a current plugin inventory, and a 99.99% uptime report combined.

Burrow makes form health a first-class operational signal. Not a footnote. Not a “future roadmap item.” The first thing you see when a client’s forms go silent.

WordPress integration (form plugin details) | Oh Dear integration (uptime context) | Compare with ManageWP | Compare with WP Umbrella

Frequently asked questions

What form plugins does Burrow monitor?
The WordPress plugin captures events from Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms, Ninja Forms, Contact Form 7, and WooCommerce checkout flows. For non-WordPress sites, send form events through the Burrow API from any form handler — Forminator, custom JavaScript forms, Shopify checkout, third-party form services.
Is this synthetic monitoring (like testing the form with fake submissions)?
Not currently. Burrow monitors real form submission events — actual user submissions flowing through your form plugins. This is more accurate than synthetic testing for detecting silent failures (form displays 'thank you' but email never sends). Synthetic monitoring is on the roadmap.
Why don't uptime tools catch broken forms?
Uptime monitors like Oh Dear, UptimeRobot, and Pingdom check whether the page returns HTTP 200. A page can load perfectly — 200 OK, no errors — while the form handler fails silently. The Contact Form 7 mail function throws a PHP error but the page still displays 'Thank you for your submission.' The client loses leads for days before anyone notices.
Does Burrow store form submission content (PII)?
Design payloads to include metadata — form ID, page URL, submission timestamp, form plugin name — rather than message bodies or personal data. Burrow is an operational signal layer, not a form inbox. Follow your DPA and client agreements for what metadata is appropriate.
What if form volume is naturally low?
Scout's anomaly detection accounts for baseline volume per project. A client site that gets 2 form submissions per week has a different baseline than one that gets 50 per day. The alert triggers when volume deviates significantly from the established pattern — not from an arbitrary threshold.
Can Burrow detect email delivery failures?
Burrow captures the form submission event (the form plugin processed the entry). If the downstream email delivery fails silently (SMTP timeout, SPF misconfiguration, inbox routing), Burrow shows the form event happened but can't confirm email delivery. Pair with an email monitoring tool for the full delivery chain.
How is this different from Google Analytics form tracking?
GA4 can track form submission events as conversions, but it can't tell you why submissions stopped. GA4 sees the traffic. Burrow sees the form handler event and correlates it with plugin updates, deploys, and other operational changes that explain the failure.

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Self-funded · Independent · Built for the long term