[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 431, entitled automating WordPress form and checkout testing with Matt Schwartz of CheckView. It was published on Thursday, the 31st of July, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we join Matt, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, today I'm joined by Matt Schwartz. Matt has got something really interesting. It's called CheckView, and it is a way of automating checks on all of the different forms on your WordPress website.
This is of course very important because if your forms aren't working, they kinda silently fail. As far as I know there's no plugin out there which will tell you when the forms are not working. So you need to actually check them yourselves.
Now you can do that manually, obviously go into all the forms and checking them out. However, you could use CheckView to do that for you. And no matter how complicated the form may be, CheckView can fill it out, check if the email has been sent or triggered. It will do all the heavy lifting for you, and it works with pretty much every form plugin that you've ever heard of, plus, importantly, WooCommerce.
So we find out today what it's all about, how it works, what it costs, what's on the roadmap, what support they offer, and much more, and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Matt Schwartz. Hello, Matt.
[00:04:56] Matt Schwartz: Hey Nathan, thank you so much for having me
[00:04:58] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. dear listener. We're gonna be talking today about Check View. I think probably the best thing to do, as always with these episodes, honestly, just press pause now. Go to check view.io. it's exactly as you'd imagine, check view, no hyphens, nothing like that. Io have a bit of a poke around or have it on in the background whilst you're listening to this because it's, they've done their work spelling it out for you.
We're gonna try and tease it out. Of Matt. But Matt, just before we begin, nothing to do with Check View necessarily. Just give us a little bio. Tell us who you are and what you, do.
[00:05:33] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. so my name's Matt. I've been using WordPress since 2010. I started off in, H-T-M-L-C-S-S way back in the day, using tables, all that good stuff back, probably 10 years before that. And then I was like, I want to use some sort of content management system. and, I dabbled in a lot of CMSs.
WordPress is one that I really enjoyed. Once it really got to the point where I felt like it, it could be used for websites. And, yeah. Since then I've been running an agency called inri. We've been around since 2011. and Check View really came out of Inri out of a, a client and our own agency need, which I can talk about.
but yeah, based in Atlanta, love to. Be part of the WordPress community, co-organized WordPress Atlanta, and, yeah. Yeah, which was great. It's been a minute since we did it, but, you can't beat in person. I love in
[00:06:40] Nathan Wrigley: Oh yeah, we do quite a lot in, we did quite a lot in the uk and it's slowly but surely coming back online. But I'm heavily involved with Meet tops and things like that as well, so I appreciate that. Yeah, that's lovely. So, in, in the agency world, you have built a bunch of websites and it sounds, from what you were saying, like you were scratching your own itch when you came up with the idea of check view.
You are gonna explain it better than me. elevator pitch time, what is it in just a few sentences I guess.
[00:07:07] Matt Schwartz: Definitely yes. So Check View is a SaaS platform that connects to your WordPress site, whether you're a owner, an agency or developer. And it allows you to run tests as a browser, as a real browser, on things like your forms and your WooCommerce checkout, to make sure that they're working daily. and it does it in a way that it essentially.
runs the test in the background, making sure people aren't getting test leads and that sort of stuff. but this really came out of, a frustration when a former checkout broke and we didn't always know, and there's that really awkward, so my checkout didn't work for like the whole day. I didn't know how much money did you cost me type situation.
and for listeners that sell care plans or manage websites. this is definitely something that, I think a lot of us have had a fear of. I talked to a lot of other agencies before we started this project. and really I just wanted to eliminate that, concern so I could sleep a little better at night.
it also ended up being a really good way to differentiate ourselves from other care plans. 'cause let's be honest, almost everyone sells care plans and maintenance plans these days if you're in WordPress land. so it was a good way because most people are not doing that. and if they are, they're manually testing it, which is obviously very time intensive.
So this really is a way just to automate this so it can run in the background and, you can also use it as an upsell to clients.
[00:08:41] Nathan Wrigley: so it's it's like everybody does op time monitoring, right? The, if you've got a care plan, you've probably paid to some SaaS service to, to have your website pinged at some point. And if it gets a response, it passes and you never hear anything, and then one day something will go wrong, the server will collapse and you'll get an email because it's pinged and gets no response.
So this is a bit like that. But for forms, right? and obviously forms can mean anything, but, so when we think about a checkout, it's basically a form. It's a complicated form, but it's a form. but it's that kind of thing. You, would go and check periodically, and we can get into the sort of, the nuts and the bolts of how often you go.
Periodically check complete a form, however complex that may be, and then if nothing happens. Nothing happens, but then if nothing happens, oh no, that's the wrong way around. If nothing happens, you'll alert us. But if it's all filled out successfully, then you won't alert us. Is that basically it?
[00:09:39] Matt Schwartz: Basically, yeah, you'll get a, you'll get a notification, email notification if, it's not able to complete the form. We do a lot of extra validation, which we can talk into, but essentially, yeah, it's gonna try to go to the website as a bot. That bot is using Chrome, essentially, and it's filling out the form automatically.
And if it tries one day and it can't, let's say you have. A JavaScript error on submit or a form field says it's required, but, you can't get past that, which honestly is a bug I've seen more than I expected in forms where we thought it was check view broken, Nope. It was the form software broken. We've seen that in multiple form plugins in the past year since launching.
But essentially it will go through and if it gets stuck, it will alert you and then you can watch a video. It, shares a video of what the bot is seeing. it also records all the steps. It gives you network logs, all sorts of information. So you or your developer can take a look and quickly figure it out before your customer does.
And then they get that awkward phone call from one of their customers being like, I tried to fill out your form. I want to buy something from you, and I can't. so that's what we're trying to avoid.
[00:10:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess the real thing here though is let's be honest, nobody's gonna send you an email to say your form is broken. Not really. maybe your parents will, random, customer is not gonna wait around and make the effort, oh, I really wanna buy that widget from you.
But, the form isn't working. No, they're going elsewhere and buying the widget from your competition. So, that's the bit that I'm trying to get into. Like the, what is the point of this? And the point is that, and, I know it sounds trivial, okay, I'm using contact form seven. It's getting filled out a couple of times a week.
Okay. maybe check views, not that for you, I don't know. But obviously if you are an e-commerce shop, your life depends on forms being filled out successfully. Suddenly the need. Is really profound and I guess it's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to encapsulate that unless you've had a failure. I'm gonna raise my hand in the air, and say, right now I once, this is no word of a lie, I want to put a website together for a client.
Four months later, they told me the form had never worked. And oh, the shame, it was a contact form. It was nothing more
[00:11:58] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, it's
[00:11:59] Nathan Wrigley: parochial thing. It didn't really matter. But nevertheless, the fact was. I had in some way taken a chunk out of their business by, my neglect. And that really wasn't on, they're paying for this to work.
And of course, it didn't. and it's not to be underestimated basically, so I, just wonder if you can speak to that, the importance of stuff working, especially forms.
[00:12:26] Matt Schwartz: Definitely, I think you, you have it right, which is, your forms are not necessarily breaking all the time. And I think we all know that, but things do happen and we're not doing, essentially testing the same way. Some sa SaaS platforms like Wix or Squarespace are because everyone controls their own WordPress site, right?
For the most part, unless you're on.com. So that means. if you're not testing your forum and you run a plug and update or something and something breaks, which does happen on occasion, you may not know for hours, days, or months. And depending on the business, that can be a huge chunk of sales, for example.
this whole idea came out of a client that ran a WooCommerce shop. they didn't get a sale for two days, which, looking back, they probably could have told us sooner, but also it was our responsibility managing the site. And, so there was this thing where, they're like, how do we quantify what we've lost?
And, the conversation just turns awkward, and we've also talked to a lot of agencies where they have a similar thing with sales forms. Sales forms, maybe. aren't as direct, but that's one sale form could be equal to a thousand, 5,000, $10,000 lead depending on your company.
And, I start to look in also to the statistics of that. And we have some of these listed on our website, which is nearly 70% of people, if they try to fill out your form and it doesn't work, they will not try again. They'll never try again. and that's a sale you lost. and then even with something like e-commerce.
over 10% of users, if they encounter an issue on your cart, they're not going to try again. so those sort of things do add up over time. Another common issue that we do check for is people submit a form and it submits fine, right? But you never get the email. SMT p's not working, right? And there's some other tools now plugins to work around this.
but we go a little, further with it. We send tests actually to us. because a lot of times if a customer submits a form, another stat I found is, 80% of people will not follow up if they submit a form and they don't hear from you. They just assume that you don't want their business.
when the longer a form sits there and aren't realizing you're not getting the emails, then you know that lead essentially goes cold very quickly and most users are not gonna take you seriously if days. Go by and you have not responded, which I think a lot of salespeople could speak to.
So that is the stakes that I think a, a lot of WordPress owners should be looking at that we're not always looking at, and we don't really quantify. and then those sales are just slipping through when really the whole point of a website is. Typically in outside of nonprofits and that sort of stuff is some sort of sale.
Even with things like nonprofits though, that's engagement for their users, which can lead to donations. So ultimately, it's not something that's happening all the time, but it definitely happens enough that we ourselves felt like this is something that we need to tackle. And we talked to a lot of agencies and they felt the same way.
They had been burned at least a handful of times, and it had cost them. Clients or sales or something along that line.
[00:15:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I guess the, mystery here, the thing which is so infuriating is the silent, failure of it all. if, you were getting, I don't know, somebody submits a form on your website, it somehow failed, but that form plugin then contacted you and said, look, something seems to be wrong.
That, that would be great. you could go in and fix it. But they don't, they, it all just silently fails and that's. You on the SMTP side as well. the emails could fail, the form itself could fail. And you mentioned something which I think is quite interesting in, more recent versions of WordPress, we now have these automatic plugin updates where, you can just go into the dashboard and click update, update, automatically, and it will just, on the Chrome job, it'll just carry on and update things in the background.
So you might have overnight 5, 6, 10, whatever. Plugins updating and you're not gonna know unless you go into the backend and do this sort of stuff, whether there's some kind of conflict, which is now suddenly a arisen that wasn't there yesterday. And so this process of checking things is, yeah, okay. You've sold me on the idea.
I like it. It's, cool. So then how the heck does it work? Because like my form could be email, name, submit, that's it. Or it could be, like 4,000 fields with, I dunno, sections where I have to. Finish a section and then go onto the next section. I've got tabs, or it could be a, I don't know, a WooCommerce thing where I've gotta select the color of the T-shirt.
How do I build in your system? How do I build the test so that I know that it works for every single form, no matter how complicated it's been built?
[00:17:22] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. So this is something that, we've been, trying to solve for. A while here. Our end goal here really was how can we simplify the testing? Because to be honest, there is testing solutions out there today. typically the way they work is use a Chrome extension. You write the steps manually, and you basically are instructing the bot.
Click here, click on this CSS selector this way, basically to select a field. you're writing code sometimes to do it depending on what tool you're using. A lot of automated testing, which is really what this is. At the end of the day, it's testing that's running automatically. it happens in all software.
It's not just WordPress. If anything, WordPress is weak on the automated testing platform side. but essentially what we do is we try to simplify this as much as possible. So we have actually integrated in with a majority of the larger. Form plugins for WordPress. So things like WS Form, WP Forms Ninja Gravity, formidable contact form seven fluent.
and then Woo, we've built in these, so we recognize the fields and our bot's able to basically generate the steps on its
[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, neat. Okay. Okay.
[00:18:37] Matt Schwartz: so, we took a lot of time to do that, and that's really what differentiates this tool from the other ones out there is that. We attempt to create the test for you.
I'm not gonna say it always works 'cause it doesn't always work during the generation there. Sometimes you have to tweak it, but majority of the time it will work. And the good thing is once the steps are written, it's just gonna run like clockwork, either daily, or weekly depending on what you have it set to.
and our system's basically gonna go out to your website. As a bot, and it's going to go through whatever your real form is. It's gonna use a real Chrome browser. So it's just like a real user. It's, no different than a real user in that capacity. we also have a plugin on the website. It's just a small little utility plugin.
For check view. and that allows us to do some additional validation. So when you actually submit a form, it will check that form data and make sure it's saved properly. It will tell the SaaS it's saved, let's say, into WS forms database properly, because sometimes there are issues there where they go blank or something like that.
it will also remove that test
[00:19:44] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice.
[00:19:45] Matt Schwartz: the backend so you don't have to worry about it filling up and. We will actually redirect the test to our inbox. Think of it as a test Gmail inbox. We make sure we at least get some version of that email so you know, your SMTP is working and that way it, the email also does not go to the original recipients.
'cause you don't want your clients or whoever's receiving these, submissions going to. Getting all these tests. So our goal is if it's running every day, you're not getting those. We suppress those, we send 'em to us in a majority of cases. if it's any of the plugins I just mentioned, all of those, we do all of that out of the box, right away.
Technically you can use this with any form software. You don't have to use it with the ones we've listed, but in that case, you have to write the steps and it's not going to do that additional validation. It's gonna send it to the original recipient as well, just 'cause we can't. integrate in with those platforms.
Yeah. But for those plugins that we support, we try to make it as off the shelf, automagically as they would say. so you just basically say, I want you to test this form. Here's the URL. It will create the steps, it will generate that, and it will run the test on, a daily or on a weekly schedule.
And it will basically just alert you if there's issues. and of course we have reports and all that sort of stuff too.
[00:21:10] Nathan Wrigley: let, me try and so this is gonna be a fairly long reply 'cause I wanna make sure I've got all of that. So first thing on the website. The following forms are supported, so you get the best version of the platform from the following things. WooCommerce, WS form, WP Forms, ninja Forms, gravity forms, formidable forms, contact Form seven and fluent forms.
They're the ones that are listed. The others will work, but there's more legwork to be done. You have to de define what the fields are and what have you, but if I, let's say I would go to a page and there's a WS form on there. All I need to do is tell check view the URL of that page. Is that where we begin?
Do I just say there's a form embedded here somewhere on this page? Is that how it begins?
[00:21:52] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so you would install our free plugin. You would go into the website and it's up to you, but I can technically show this to you if you wanna see it. but it may give you some visuals here. I'll share my screen. So I'm just in a demo account right
[00:22:09] Nathan Wrigley: dear listener, I'm getting a view of this and although you won't be able to see it yourself, I will, I'll let you know what I'm seeing. So I'm on, I'm looking at the back end of check view that, is being kindly shared by Matt, and you are just gonna, set one up for me.
[00:22:22] Matt Schwartz: Yep. Exactly. So right now we're in the back end of the, check view dashboard, which you know, is outside of your WordPress site. you would sign up on our site, and you can basically add a site here. You can enter in the URL. And when you do that, it's gonna ask you to install the free check view plugin, which is in the WordPress repo.
You would just get that installed, that's completely free, and once that's actually installed, it will make the connection to the website. So check view can talk to your website only when it needs to, of course. And once that's connected, we can actually add what's called a test flow and just think of that as a text.
That's just a test that's gonna run, based on whatever instructions you give it. So if I say add test flow, it's gonna connect to the website. It's gonna first check to see if there's any form plugins that we support. If it does detect one, let's say something like gravity forms. It will show that on the screen.
it, same thing with Woo. If it detects woo, it will show you that. And then the last option is you can just create one from scratch, which we can talk about if we have time. But let's say you're going with Gravity forms. So with gravity forms, you would select, I want to use gravity. I see it's selected.
It will detect the forms on your website. So it will list all the forms out so you can pick the right one. And then if you're using a. A block based theme that will go ahead and detect the URL as well. So you could pick, maybe I have my contact form on a contact us page and the homepage or something like that.
you could select which page you wanted to test on. if it is a non block based, let's say something like Beaver Builder, you can still do it. It's just requires you to type in the URL and then you can say how often it runs. And so you can pick, daily or weekly, you can set the time of day, that sort of thing.
And when you hit add test flow, it's essentially going to start generating that in the background. You can go ahead and, add multiple ones at once. and it will basically work to create the steps, which does take a few minutes. You probably want to go grab a coffee, that sort of thing. and once it's done, it will actually generate a preview test, which is where it just confirms, Hey, everything's working.
When it runs on the schedule, I know I can pass. If there's some sort of issue, it's gonna warn you and it's gonna show you a video so you can figure out what's going on. Like I said, the most common area, let's say you have a signature field, that's something we don't support outta the box, but there's some ways around it.
but most forms, and we have all this written in our documentation, are auto, generated. So things like check boxes, dropdowns, everything you do is for your standard lead forms, typically. we will generate those steps for you. You don't really have to worry about any of that, including you mentioned earlier what if I have a forum on multiple pages.
We support multiple pages. We support conditional logic even. So we'll keep trying to add the steps for the conditional logic automatically. things like date pickers, so you can, it will actually date pickers try to find the next available date, and that's the stuff that you could technically do in a lot of other software.
but. It's pretty complicated. And our goal here is that everyone's able to test their forms and checkout and use what's called automated testing. Even if you have never done automated testing, which is a little different, like I said, if you're in a different platform besides WordPress, specifically larger software, they're always doing automated testing, in including competitors to WordPress, but because they control that entire stack.
They do automated testing all the time, where again, WordPress Lamb, we don't do this as much like developers do it sometimes, but ultimately developers can only test so much. They can't test your user flow from the point they get on the website to the point where they check out or something like that.
And that's really what Check View tries to solve is. Ultimately you're responsible for your website, whether it's you're an agency or the site owner. and that's a little bit different than, other platforms and we are trying to solve for that as
[00:26:24] Nathan Wrigley: So just to, confirm back to the listener, the, basically the, process of setting it up is, three fields. you, you type in the URL of your website. You pick which form plugin you want, and then you, select where that form might be, the URL and so on, and then pick how frequent.
I think that's four actually. But the point is, I presume once you've done this a couple of times, you're looking at under 10 seconds to complete that process. And then when that's all set up and the wheels have spun and your platform has figured out, okay, we know what's on that page now, how does it do that?
Is it looking for the. The sort of the HTML is it basically traversing the do and saying, okay, they've said its gravity forms, a gravity form. I don't know. Checkbox field looks like this. so we know that's a checkbox field. A WS form one looks like this, a formidable form one looks like this. And, in that way you, fill it by looking at the dom.
Is that basically what your software is doing right now? It's trying to figure out what the, what the DOM looks like, the HTML looks like for, this particular form.
[00:27:29] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, exactly. So essentially what we've done is we have feted all of the fields from the, various form plugins that we support. So it will find those classes. of course, there's a handful of form plugins that will, you change the CSS classes themselves, but majority of 'em. People are using the stock classes, right?
You may restyle it, but you're, using the stock classes because things like gravity will even break if you're not. so yeah, what we do is we basically identify, okay, we're on the right form. It has the right form Id, I see it on the page, it's the bot. Okay, I see there's a text field here. I know it's a gravity text field.
I'm gonna go and fill that out and it's gonna go through and we've trained it on all these different types of fields across, Hundreds of sites basically, so it can recognize these items on its own. And then once it, it actually goes through and, finds the submit form it, it's gonna submit that.
And you do help, like I said, have the option to test email that's optional. now one thing I'll mention is if you do use your own selectors, or something like that, this is a full blown step editing process, which means you can actually go in and edit the steps. And you can say, okay, my text field uses this selector every time.
So if you're more of a developer you can go in and basically customize it. We didn't want to handy, we didn't want to prevent people that have used automated testing or developers from customizing it. Plus from the support side, if someone gets stuck. That's what we do is we're happy to take a look and see why a form is not generating, the test flow properly, and we'll usually get that up and running.
that's part of the service really, that we provide as
[00:29:12] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just, so this is a really weird question, I think, but do you as a, service check view, do you have to be really mindful of things like, I don't know, CloudFlare. And, and malware kind of software that, that may be installed by the hosting providers. 'cause they're obviously constantly in the lookout for things that fill out forms.
do you, how do you mitigate against that? Because obviously if your service is 24 7 filling out forms, how do you ensure that you don't get flagged as. A, a spam bot, essentially, because, it, I can imagine that your service in some ways is fairly adjacent to a, spam bot in what it's trying to achieve.
So how do you sidestep that problem and make sure that your, software can always get the desired result and not get flagged.
[00:30:02] Matt Schwartz: That's a great question and it's definitely a pain point with any automated testing. 'cause like you said, essentially it doesn't matter if it's a scraping bot, a spam bot, or a testing bot like ours, they're all bots, which means a lot of hosts have tools to prevent you from, as a bot being able to fill out a form.
so we have done a couple things obviously to mitigate that on our end. for example, we use real browsers. We use headers. If you're familiar with those developers typically are, to try to avoid any sort of suspicion, any sort of issues there. And it's a little bit of a cat and mouse game because, like you said, the same things we're using for techniques.
So are all the bad. so the other thing that we do is, for example with WordPress security plugins, we have our IPS whitelisted as part of that process. and then things like CloudFlare, you can add our I ips if it gets triggered. And we usually recommend if you use CloudFlare to use, to add those ips.
'cause that will avoid that sort of issue. 'cause we do have dedicated ips, so if you add those, you don't have to worry, it's going to work moving forward. So that's a little bit. You know of a process depending on your site, but for most of our clients, especially agencies, they'll add those rules to their CloudFlare Global account and they'll apply to all their sites so they don't have to keep re adding 'em.
We also have a really easy way to upload those. Rules with the JSON file, for the more tech savvy. so yeah, that is always a concern and something that, we work pretty often on is ensuring that things aren't getting blocked. That shouldn't be. but for the most part, if you are not just going out there saying, Hey, I'm a bot.
I'm a bot, and, you use things like white listing, and white hat type techniques, it's not as big of an issue, as you might
[00:31:57] Nathan Wrigley: Do you get telemetry on your side though if that were to happen? So for example, if you fell foul of, some kind of, let's go with CloudFlare. If CloudFlare just blocked you and what have you, would you get telemetry to say that and then you could obviously contact your customer and say, look, we can see that you're on CloudFlare, follow these steps to make sure that it's all working.
[00:32:19] Matt Schwartz: yes. So we, have pretty deep logs. Only when, again, a test is running. Not, just day to day on a client site. But we do have some logs that basically tell us, if a, a form is getting blocked due to, a security restriction specifically with CloudFlare. we have a lot of details there, and that's something right now we have access to on the sports side.
right now, check fee for the most part. You might be able to see it in the video. 'cause the video will o you know, often if it does trigger it will, CloudFlare will pop up and you can see it in the video. But, if it's something that you can't see, we can see it on our end. And this is something that we're working to bring to customers so that if we recognize these headers are from CloudFlare.
And we can recognize, that it's throwing a certain response. We can tell the client, Hey, it looks like you're on CloudFlare. This is a specific issue, And, our end goal with that is that should be a one-off thing. This should not reflect, every time you run a test. So we wanna make sure we get that, remediated as quickly as
[00:33:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, essentially I'm just drawing that out so that the listeners know that you've got their back with that. Really. And I'm guessing there's, knowledge base articles and things like that you can
[00:33:33] Matt Schwartz: Yes. Yeah, we have. We have a lot of really good documentation. and of course, we're always looking to improve it. but with a product like this, our end goal is to simplify it, and that's what we're working to do. But automated testing is something, like I said, that I think WordPress as a community does not do as enough of.
and I think it's from, the Wild West days of cowboy coding with WordPress, We didn't mature, I think, as much in the, testing side of things as maybe, some other platforms had. that's part of, I think the education, this is something that everyone, for the most part should be doing if sales are important to you in any capacity.
and it's just the responsible thing to do as a, website owner or an agency. to be using something like check view. If not check, view some, something to make sure that those main business critical functions like leads, checkout, are working, and, that sort of thing.
[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask a, question? a lot of the kind of op time monitoring software that I've used in the past has the capacity to delegate. by, based upon things like, I don't know, times of the day who gets the response and things like that. I don't know. It's 4:00 AM in the uk. I am not dealing with that.
I'm fast asleep in bed, but John over there in the us he's wide awake. Let's send the email to John. Do you have anything like that? Like a team or a delegation thing, or a round robin kind of thing, or, anything whereby we can pass it to the person who's actually gonna be able to deal with it and not the person that's on holiday as an example.
[00:35:12] Matt Schwartz: Definitely, So we do have a, you can invite multiple team members, on each of the plans. so you can have multiple team members that can access check view. You can also add either to the alerts for tests. or even the reports you can add, additional emails there. so it doesn't just have to be a team member.
We do have a lot of clients that even do that with their, own customers where they want their customers to receive alerts or maybe the customers ask, Hey, I want to know if my form's not working, so they will actually CC the customer, which you can do in ours. and it will send, a check view alert if there's any sort of issue there, with an easy way to see here's what step it failed on, if it failed, and a link straight to the video, so that you can take a look and, see what's going on.
Like I said, the steps are really helpful because it will often show you, but I think the video is usually what I recommend because. when you look at it as a human and you just watch the video, it just looks like another user on the site, right? So I think it illustrates things to most people better if it's, actually an issue on the form or if something else is going on.
and, like I said, it, could be a mix. I'm, not gonna say there's never any false positives, but there's been definitely been times where we thought it was Check U that had an issue, and then we realized, oh, this was a bug in the form plugin. because what we found is there is a lot of edge case bugs in form plugins 'cause they're complicated.
But a lot of these edge case bugs, people don't really realize need to be patched, with the updates and in the meantime, their users can't get past a certain field or something like that's going
[00:36:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I am. I'm, just gonna alert everybody. Whilst Matt's been talking for the past like 10 minutes, eight minutes or so, he's been setting up in the background and I've got his screen here and what I've just been, whilst he's been talking to this now, I've just been watching a form for. Being submitted.
And, and it, what's curious to me is it does it, nice and slow. it's taken its time. So it's not like boom, all the fields bang go because surely somewhere somebody's gonna have written some software to say, that was a weird form submission that all happened in N Point.
Four of a second. So it was going through every single, so it detected that it was gravity forms and then it was going through all of the fields and it was listing out like, okay, this is a checkbox, and then you could see that it had submitted something appropriate to that. This is a text field and you could see the submitted text.
And then finally it got to the submit button. It went through about, I don't know, 20 fields or something like that. One at a time. Maybe spacing it out 10 seconds between each form field submission. This of course. Would be going on in the background whilst you're asleep, not you don't have to stare at it.
and then finally gets to the end, does the submit, and then after that added in another field, which looked like it was checking the email that took maybe 30 seconds. So that was the bit where you were receiving the email and then somehow check view was going, okay. That email that we just received that matches that form, and then it finally ticked that form off.
When that had all landed. So the whole process, I got to see it. That's, pretty cool. I like that.
[00:38:24] Matt Schwartz: Thank you. Yeah, definitely. We try to make it as simple as possible. Like you said, it's gonna go through each of these pretty slow. That's on purpose because we want it to act like a real human, partly to pick up on bugs, but also because going back to your, your bot protection, bot protection at various hosts, et cetera, definitely takes into account how quickly you fill out a form.
Me, you fill it out like a bot, it's gonna know and it's gonna block you. so we, we do have to fill out a little bit slower to make sure, and that's, for most of our, users, that's not really an issue because once you set this form up, with the test flow, it's going to essentially, run in the background and, you're not gonna be actively in check view.
talking to Kyle at the admin bar about Chat u he said, I'm never gonna go in. I don't wanna go into the
[00:39:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you, the kind of, the point of your service is never to ever visit. In an ideal world, you never come back. You just, it's
[00:39:22] Matt Schwartz: It just runs.
[00:39:23] Nathan Wrigley: It's just running in the background. so I guess one of the things that people are gonna know from this is how, much does it cost? And like, how many times can you ping an email on a webpage, that kind of thing.
So let's begin with pricing. How does that work? And how many seats do you get for the price, and so on and so forth.
[00:39:42] Matt Schwartz: Yep. So our pricing is anywhere from $35 to $110 per month, depending really, it, it comes down to mostly the number of tests that you need to run on a monthly basis. and, we list this out on our website. We also have a calculator. but basically it all comes down to per usage of tests. and this works really well because you can use it on as many sites as you want.
you can really decide what you want to test, and we do. Leave that up to clients, for example. we recommend obviously starting with the most critical test, like your main sales form or checkout. you may have other forms, maybe a schedule, an event that you want to add later once you get to know, check view, that sort of thing.
so we really try to give people flexibility. So at the, bottom tier, our essential tier, you have one login, you get 250 tests per month. and with that, you, that's typically gonna allow you to, test, several websites on a daily, basis. Or you can more test, a lot of websites on a weekly basis, right?
So it really just depends on how you want to determine what's important and what's not. and then once you, move up to our plus plan, you get WooCommerce support. If you want to do checkout, I will let you do that. 'cause Woo, as you mentioned, is a little more complicated. We have to do a lot more around the orders to make sure that it's all working.
and then on the high end, you get, 2000 tests. That middle plan was a thousand. but we also track that so that way we'll alert you if you're running out a test and you are at least aware and you can decide, okay, I wanna sign up for contact support. otherwise it will just, wait till the next month and it will pause test and it'll let you know basically.
but we tried to make this as flexible as possible, knowing that every bot we run does have a cost to us. So that's why it's all basically a, linear process, as far as cost goes. So that's, how we came up with the pricing.
[00:41:46] Nathan Wrigley: just interject there? So with that, am I on all of the plans? Do I have the capacity to do this work on behalf of my clients? So let's say, I don't know, I'm a freelancer. I've got. 35 websites that I'm maintaining. I wanna spread out that between the 35 of them and I wanna do, I don't know, two checks a week on each of them.
That would happily come under your most affordable plan. Is that the kind of thing I can do? And is there a mechanism for keeping my clients abreast of what's happened? in some ways saying, we've checked your, I don't know, we checked your contact form page twice this week and it's all passed, or do I have to do that manually?
You, see where I'm going with that. I think.
[00:42:26] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so right now, and I guess to answer your question, let's say you had 30 sites at two forms per site and you wanted to check every week these forms that would fall under, our, lowest plan. for 35 bucks, you can basically have, let's say 30, 30 clients that, don't have to worry about those forms.
You can also upsell that into your care plans. And if you think about it, it saves one. Sale, It, it, pays for itself very quickly. but to, really, I guess answer the question about customer reports and that sort of stuff. So currently, you can add customers to test flows. You could also add them to reports.
Right now, those reports aren't white labeled. We're definitely looking into that. We have a lot of agencies. I would say actually majority of our clients are agencies. and that's definitely something that, has been brought up to us either providing a white label option for our own reports or integrating into other, maintenance, platforms that don't, support something like this.
'cause this is obviously, it's a pretty involved feature. so you haven't really seen. Grow out into a lot of the other maintenance platforms, primarily, I think just because of, the investment and the resources and they obviously have other things they need to be doing as well. They have to think of all their customers.
So that's something that we're definitely looking into as we build out our API, doing an integration into some other maintenance, dashboards. But currently you can definitely email clients. You can include, them in those monthly or weekly reports and it's gonna give 'em all that data. It.
[00:44:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. The, other thing I'm curious about is the, we're, in a, it feels okay, we might get a new player in the form space, but we, definitely feel like we've solidified on a half a dozen or more. you've got them on your website. There's a few big players and maybe there's some smaller players that will come and go and you can figure those out.
But we do seem to be in a period of. At the minute where there's quite a few, e-commerce solutions dropping in WordPress. So obviously we've got the, elephant in the room, WooCommerce, but we've also got things like shortcut. Dunno if you've heard of North Commerce. They're making a bit of noise at the moment.
And then we've got fluent, I believe it's gonna be called fluent cart or something like that in the process at the minute. Do you have any kind of roadmap for those as well? do you keep your eye on the scene and see what plugins? 'cause obviously they are. They're coming and it would be great if they could be integrated.
So just a quick roadmap question really.
[00:45:00] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, definitely. So currently yeah, we're, focused on Woo, for sure. It's obviously still the. the, you could say Gorilla in the room, right? but definitely things like short Cart are on our radar. We've had some clients even request that we do have a feedback board. if you join Check View, a very, transparent feedback board of what we're doing.
people can vote on all that sort of stuff. But those are definitely ones that we are, watching as they grow, because obviously that's another space where validation and testing will make sense. Just like any other platform, when there's sales involved, you wanna make sure that stuff's running all the time.
So definitely looking at, sure. Cart, fluence, is very interesting, so we're taking a look at that one. But right now we haven't confirmed on those. We really want to get the woo integration, working in a lot. Different scenarios. obviously even things like, subscriptions, right now you could technically run a subscription, but it's not gonna auto cancel itself, right?
So ideally we, would look at those things 'cause things like subscriptions, woo subscriptions are used by, thousands and thousands of sites. so we're taking a look at really all the woo WooCommerce options, but the other e-commerce ones are growing quite rapidly and we're definitely aware.
[00:46:20] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. Okay, so I think at the 40 minute mark, I've probably asked you everything that I wanna ask. So just once more for the listeners, check view.io. C-H-E-C-K-V-I-E-W. Io, go and check it out. there's the usual pricing page and features and what have you. And, having watched it, I know you, dear listener, have been unable to watch it.
I just watched the whole process while we were talking and it worked, so, that's good. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's great. thank you Matt. I appreciate that. Go check it out. Check view.io once more and, appreciate it. Thank you very much for chatting to me today.
[00:46:59] Matt Schwartz: No. Thank you Nathan, so much for your time. if anyone has any questions, feel free to contact me at [email protected] or just submit a contact form on check u.io. we definitely are happy to do a demo or walk through what the process looks like or if you have other things you want to check, I will mention.
Last thing, while we obviously have integrations built in with form software and checkout, you can technically test things like LMSs. This is a full blown bot. You can tell the bot really to test anything. and we have a GUI to do that. We can also do that for you. So do keep that in mind. Reach out, if you have anything else that's mission critical.
Basically, we have a lot of clients that test things like Learn Dash, because if a Learn dash update happens, that's their core business, something breaks, those are the things that we also wanna keep in mind. But thank you again,
[00:47:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Thank you. That's good to drop in at the end. Thank you very much for chatting to me today, Matt. Really appreciate it.
[00:47:54] Matt Schwartz: Of course. Thanks again, Nathan.
[00:47:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's almost all I've got time for this week. I hope that you enjoyed that. If you did, head over to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 431, and leave us a comment there.
In all honesty, if you didn't enjoy it, head over to episode number 431 and leave us a comment there. We'd really appreciate that.
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