Where your leads go

The short answer

A contact form on a site built here does not send you an email. It posts what the visitor typed back to us, and it appears on a screen called Leads. That is the arrangement: one screen, and a count beside it when something new has landed.

This page is about what is on that screen, what sits behind it, and the several ordinary things it does not do yet.

It assumes your form is working. Whether it delivers at all is a different question with its own answer — the page on the live site behaving differently walks through testing one.

What one lead holds

Four fields have names of their own. The builder is told to ask for three of them on every form it writes, whatever the business is, and to mark the fourth optional.

Nothing on our side refuses a lead for a missing field, though. Every one of the four can arrive empty as long as one of them has not, which is what stops a form written differently from losing you work to keep a column tidy.

The four named fields

What arrives with a lead

Name

Asked for on every form the builder writes

Phone

Asked for too, and the one it is told matters most

Message

The free-text part, asked for as well

Email

Asked for as optional, and often left blank

Site

Which of your sites it came from

Arrived

The date and time it reached us

Note. One thing is missing from that list on purpose: at least one of the four has to have something in it. A submission with all four empty is thrown away as it arrives, and that happens before anything else the form carried is looked at.

Everything else the form asked

The builder designs each form, so there is no fixed list of the rest. Which service, a postcode, a preferred date, how many bedrooms — whatever it asked, the answer is kept and shown under the message with the label it was asked under.

Anything that is not plain typed text, a set of tick boxes for instance, is stored as text. It stays readable. It will not always be tidy.

Note. Every field is cut at 4,000 characters, and a field's own label is cut at 60. Nobody writes 4,000 characters about a leaking tap, so in practice this only ever trims something automated.

The one thing recorded and not shown

Where the lead was sent from is recorded alongside it. In practice that is the site's own web address rather than the particular page, because a browser hands over no more than that when a form on one address posts to another.

It is nowhere on the Leads screen. The only place it surfaces is the summary the chat is given, described further down, and only for the newest few.

So if you want to know which page of the site produced a lead, the answer is that you cannot. Nothing is being withheld — what is recorded was never precise enough to tell you.

Where they show up

Two screens hold the list, the same list scoped two ways. Neither is a different product and neither holds anything the other does not. A third place will talk about them without showing you the list, and it costs money, so it is last.

One site at a time

1. Open the site from your list.
2. Choose Leads in the left-hand column.
3. The most recent lead is at the top.

Everything at once

There is a Leads row in the workspace rail as well. That one is every lead the account has taken, across every site you have built, with the site's name on each row so you can tell them apart.

It is the right one to open if you build for other people and have several sites on the go. For one business it says the same as the site's own screen.

Asking the chat about them

A build turn on a site that already has files is handed a short summary of that site's leads, along with its visitor numbers. Asking what has come in this month gets a real answer rather than a guess.

It is a summary and not the list: how many there are, how many are unread, and the newest few with a name and the first line or so of the message. Their phone number and their email address are never in it, deliberately. That summary goes to the thing that writes your site's files, and those files can end up published.

A first build is not given it, because there is nothing to report yet, and neither is a bug-fix turn.

Note. This costs a turn and the screen is free. Read them on the screen unless you want the site changed because of what they say.

The count, and what clears it

The number beside Leads is how many you have not looked at. It checks itself about once a minute for as long as the workspace is open.

Opening a site's own list clears the count for that site and no other, because you have not read the others. Opening the workspace-wide list clears all of them at once, which is right, since every one of them was just on your screen.

Note. Read or unread is the only state a lead has, and it changes once, on its own, the first time the list is on screen. There is no way to set it back.

Nothing comes to find you

No email goes out when a lead arrives. There is no text message and no alert on your phone. There is no mail sending on our side of this at all, so it is not a setting you have missed or a notification waiting to be switched on.

What tells you is the count in the workspace, and only while that page is open. Close the tab and nothing is watching on your behalf.

Two things on a lead do reach outwards. The phone number sits on the top line as a link, so on a phone you press it and it dials. Reply opens your own mail app with their address already in it, and it is only there when the visitor left one — plenty will not, because the builder asks for the phone number and marks the email optional. A trade rings people back.

Tip. If new work matters to your week, put this screen wherever you keep the other things you check daily. It is a tray, not a doorbell.

What it will not do yet

These are absences rather than settings. None of them is hidden behind a menu, and it is worth reading the list before you plan around one of them.

• There is no export. No download, no spreadsheet, no way to hand the list to an accountant or another system. Copying off the screen is the only route.
• There is no way to remove one lead. No bin, no hide, no archive.
• There is no search and no filter. Newest first, and that is the only order there is.
• Nothing can be marked as dealt with, chased or closed. Read and unread is the whole of it.
• Nothing is forwarded anywhere. There is no address you can add to have a copy sent on.
• The screen shows the 200 most recent for whatever you opened. Older ones are still held and there is no second page to reach them from — and the leads figure on the site's dashboard stops counting at 200 as well, so a busy site reads as exactly 200 forever.

Note. The only thing that removes a lead is removing the whole site or closing the account, and both take every one with them. That is the last section on this page, and it is worth reading before you tidy anything up.

The ones that never reach the screen

Some submissions are thrown away on the way in. Knowing which ones means an empty Leads screen can be read properly.

Every form the builder writes carries a field hidden from people — off the side of the page, out of the tab order, with nothing on screen to say it is there. Somebody cannot type into what they cannot see, so anything arriving with that field filled in came from a machine. It is discarded and nothing is stored.

There is also a cap of ten submissions a minute from any one site. A trade site takes a handful in a day, so anything at that rate is a script rather than a queue of customers. The real ceiling is a little above ten, because the counting is spread across more than one of our servers, and that is fine for what it is there to stop.

The third is the one above: a submission with all four named fields blank is dropped before anything else it carried is read.

In each of those the visitor is answered with a success and reads your thank-you. There is nothing useful to say to a member of the public who filled in a form on a plumber's website, and telling a script it was caught tells it exactly what to change.

There is a fourth case, and it is our fault rather than a defence against anything. If storing a lead fails at our end, the visitor is answered the same way and nothing reaches your screen. Nothing is written down when that happens, so we cannot tell you afterwards that it did and neither can you. It ought to be recorded somewhere and it is not.

Note. None of this is counted anywhere you can see. A quiet fortnight and a form being hammered by a bot look the same on the screen, which is to say they both look like nothing.

How long a lead is kept

Nothing expires on its own

There is no clear-out on a timer, no retention period and no archive that swallows old ones. A lead from two years ago is still held.

Whether you can still read it is a separate matter, and that is the 200 above.

Deleting a site deletes its leads

Leads belong to the site that collected them. Delete the site and they go at the same moment, permanently, with no copy anywhere and nothing to restore from.

The confirmation asks whether you want the site gone for good. It says nothing about the leads sitting behind it, and it should. That is our wording rather than your misreading, and until it is fixed the warning has to come from a page like this one.

Tip. Take anything you still need off the screen before you delete a site. Once it is gone there is nobody to ask.

Note. A site you have handed to a client carries on filing leads into the project here after it leaves you. Delete that project and its form keeps posting into nothing: the visitor still reads a thank-you and the lead is discarded as it arrives. The page on the live site behaving differently covers what to do about that before you delete anything.

Closing your account

Erasing your account removes every lead on it, across every site, along with everything else the account holds.

That is deliberate rather than incidental. A lead is a stranger's name and phone number, given to a business they were trying to reach, and it should not outlive the account it was collected for.

Note. Those details belong to the person who typed them. We hold them for you; we do not decide how long you keep them or what you do with them next.

Common questions

Can I get an email when somebody gets in touch?

No. Nothing is sent to you at all — no email, no text, no alert. The count beside Leads in your workspace is the only thing that says something arrived, and it only counts while that page is open.

Can I download my leads?

No. There is no export of any kind. Copying what you need off the screen is the only way to get a lead out of here today.

Can I delete one lead I do not want?

No. There is no per-lead delete. Deleting the whole site removes all of that site's leads, and closing the account removes every one you have.

Somebody says they sent the form and it is not on the screen.

Four things drop a submission quietly: a hidden anti-bot field being filled in, more than ten a minute from one site, a form with none of the four named fields completed, and a failure at our end while it was being stored. The first three do not look like a real person filling the form in properly. The fourth is ours and is not recorded, so there is nothing to go back for. If ordinary leads are missing, the form itself is the thing to check.

Can I ask about my leads in the chat?

Yes, on a site that has already been built. A build turn is given a summary — how many, how many unread, and the newest few with a name and the start of the message. Never a phone number and never an email address. It costs a turn, and the Leads screen is free.

Do leads from a site I exported still reach me?

Yes. An exported site keeps posting to the project it was built in, so they arrive on your Leads screen rather than anywhere on the new host.