A lead-generating site that has to just work.
CenTrak's marketing team runs on its website: every demo request, sample kit order, and event registration starts on a Craft form and lands in HubSpot. We took over the site in late 2022 and have kept it running since.
Craft CMS 5FormieHubSpotMonthly care since 2022
At a glance
At a glance · Monthly care since 2022
- 01 / Backups
- Day one
- nightly full backups, after a damaged database was recovered and migrated
- 02 / Queue
- Watched
- Watchtower caught backlogs of hundreds of pending jobs
- 03 / Uptime
- 99.9%+
- monthly uptime in 11 of the last 12 months (Oh Dear)
- 04 / Spam
- 3 layers
- a firewall, stricter reCAPTCHA scoring, and spam that never gets stored
The challenge
No clean restore point.
CenTrak moved its site to us in November 2022. Before we could migrate it, we found a database table that was damaged beyond repair. Full backups failed, so there was no clean restore point. A site that collects leads every day can't run that way.
Over the following years the site grew busier, and new kinds of pressure came with it:
Background jobs backed up
Craft sends every form submission to HubSpot through its queue. When the queue stalls, leads sit in Craft instead of reaching sales.
Bots found the forms
Spam submissions crowded real leads, and the marketing team needed to trust that a real person filling out a form would never be blocked.
Security reviews raised the bar
As part of a larger parent company, CenTrak goes through regular vulnerability scans, penetration tests, and security reviews, and the website has to pass them.
What we did
Running, current, and protected.
Recovered the site and made backups work
We worked with Craft's support team and the Formie developer to isolate the damaged table, rebuilt the one affected form, and migrated the site to our servers. Within a day, nightly backups captured the entire database.
Got the queue and HubSpot sync under control
We moved the Formie-to-HubSpot integration to HubSpot's current API, removed a plugin interfering with Craft's queue, and added Watchtower to alert us when jobs pile up. More in our guide to fixing a stuck Craft queue.
Kept spam out without blocking real leads
We put the site behind a web application firewall and raised reCAPTCHA to Google's recommended score. Each form has its own spam folder, so a real lead can go to HubSpot in one click. Spam is no longer stored.
Kept it fast, current, and secure
We upgraded the site to Craft 4 in early 2023 and Craft 5 in early 2025, added full-page caching, and updated Craft and plugins almost every month. For CenTrak's security team, we patched servers and encrypted firewall-to-server traffic.
From form to HubSpot
Every submission, accounted for.
Form submissions flow from Craft to HubSpot through a monitored queue. When a sync does stall, we see it first and the submissions can be re-sent.
- P.01 / ProtectFirewall + reCAPTCHAWeb application firewall, reCAPTCHA at Google's recommended score
- P.02 / CaptureFormie formEach form has its own spam folder; spam is never stored
- P.03 / QueueCraft queueA dedicated listener, so cache jobs don't compete with form syncs
- P.04 / WatchWatchtowerAlerts us right away when jobs start to pile up
- P.05 / DeliverHubSpotHubSpot's current API; stuck submissions can be re-sent
Uptime and response time from Oh Dear. Response time is last month's average, with full-page caching.
The stack
- Craft CMS 5
Formie- HubSpot
- reCAPTCHA
Watchtower- Oh Dear
Siebird keeps our Craft site stable and secure, and they're quick to jump on anything we need.
The results
The results · Oh Dear monitoring
99.9%+ monthly uptime in 11 of the last 12 months
A site that stays up.
Most months were above 99.98%, as recorded by Oh Dear.
- 11 of 12
- months above 99.9% uptime
- Under 0.1s
- average response time last month
More results
Leads in. Spam out.
Leads reach HubSpot
Form submissions flow from Craft to HubSpot through a monitored queue. When a sync does stall, we see it first and the submissions can be re-sent.
Fast pages
With full-page caching, the site's average response time over the last month was under a tenth of a second.
Current and secure
Craft has moved from version 3 to 5 under our care, with near-monthly updates and a firewall in front of the site.
A long-term partner
Nearly four years in, CenTrak still trusts us with its site. They also served as a client reference when we applied to become a Craft CMS Verified Partner.
The live site
Where every lead starts.
