Portland Academy of Self-Defense — CRM Integration

The Challenge

What needed solving

Leads were quietly being lost. The CRM token in production had been revoked, so every website lead was saved and emailed but never reached GoHighLevel — while visitors still saw a thank-you page. The enquiry form also failed intermittently with "Submission expired or invalid", free-text and workshop fields were dropped before reaching anyone, and a repeat enquiry could wipe a contact's earlier program tags.

Our Solution

How we built it

We traced the failure to a 401 from GoHighLevel, replaced the token and verified the live API. We then rewrote the integration as one shared, non-blocking function: it finds existing contacts by email or phone, keeps the original lead source, merges tags instead of replacing them, and adds a readable note with the prospect's program interest and message. Each of the four lead forms maps to its own GoHighLevel source and tags. The form's CSRF check was changed to a ring of single-use tokens, so a second tab or debugging session no longer breaks submissions.

Results & Outcomes

What we achieved

• Website leads reach GoHighLevel again — verified on the live contacts API
• Four lead forms each mapped to their own GoHighLevel source and tags
• Repeat enquiries keep the original source and merge tags into one contact
• Messages and workshop details now captured in the CRM contact note
• "Submission expired" form errors fixed without weakening CSRF protection