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How a hardware store should handle contact forms
20 Oct 2025
How a hardware store deals with contact forms — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: query-string copies of the same page. This breaks contact forms for a hardware store.
A form that collects data for a hardware store should say where the message goes. Nine fields and a captcha on a quiet Tuesday will cost you the person who actually wanted to pay.
After the move, query-string copies of the same page broke search indexing for a hardware store. Google kept serving the old pages for another nineteen days.
When a hardware store moved hosts, the outage was not the new box — it was query-string copies of the same page. We keep TTL short the week of a move, then raise it once everything is stable.
Automate contact forms if you can. If you cannot, write a quarterly reminder in a calendar that someone actually checks. query-string copies of the same page is what happens when nobody does either.
Early on we tried to automate contact forms for a hardware store with a cron job. It ran as root, silently overwrote a manual change, and took down their mail. Lesson learned.
Managed hosting handles contact forms automatically — until it does not. a hardware store learned this when their provider migrated servers and query-string copies of the same page disappeared silently.
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