Website Monitoring: How to Know When Your Site Goes Down

Your website is down. Customers are trying to reach you, orders aren’t processing, and your contact form isn’t working. The problem? You don’t know about it.

Hours pass. A customer finally emails to complain. You check your site, see the error, and scramble to fix it. How long was it down? How many customers did you lose?

This scenario is entirely preventable with proper website monitoring.

Why Monitoring Matters

You Can’t Fix What You Don’t Know About

The longer your site is down, the more damage occurs:

• Lost sales and enquiries
• Damaged customer trust
• Wasted advertising spend (ads still running, site not working)
• Potential SEO impact from extended downtime
• Reputation damage

Most businesses find out about downtime from customers. That means the customer has already had a negative experience.

Problems Happen Outside Business Hours

Servers don’t care that it’s midnight or Sunday morning. Hardware fails, software crashes, traffic spikes occur, and hackers attack around the clock.

Without monitoring, weekend downtime could go unnoticed until Monday morning — potentially 36+ hours of lost business.

Early Warning Prevents Bigger Problems

Good monitoring catches issues early:

• Slow response times before complete failure (see our speed guide)
• Certificate expiration before it blocks access
• Resource exhaustion before crashes
• Error rates increasing before total breakdown

Catching problems early means faster fixes and less impact.

Types of Website Monitoring

Uptime Monitoring

The most basic form: is your site responding?

An external service checks your URL at regular intervals (typically every 1-5 minutes). If it doesn’t get a valid response, you get alerted.

What it catches:

• Complete site outages
• Server crashes
• DNS failures
• Network issues

What it doesn’t catch:

• Slow performance
• Broken functionality that still returns 200 OK
• SSL issues (unless specifically checking)

Response Time Monitoring

Tracks how long your site takes to respond, not just whether it responds.

What it catches:

• Performance degradation before failure
• Database slowdowns
• Hosting resource issues
• CDN problems

Example alerts:

• Response time exceeded 3 seconds
• Average response time up 50% from baseline
• Sudden spike in latency

SSL Certificate Monitoring

SSL certificates expire. When they do, browsers show frightening warnings that drive visitors away.

What it catches:

• Certificates expiring soon
• Certificate misconfiguration
• Mixed content issues
• Chain problems

Alerts typically fire 30, 14, and 7 days before expiration.

Transaction Monitoring

Goes beyond “is the page loading” to “is the functionality working?”

Examples:

• Can a user complete checkout?
• Does the search function return results?
• Can contact forms submit successfully?
• Does login work?

This requires synthetic monitoring that simulates user actions.

Real User Monitoring (RUM)

Collects performance data from actual visitors rather than synthetic tests.

What it shows:

• Real-world performance across different devices
• Geographic performance variations
• Browser-specific issues
• Actual user experience metrics

More complex to implement but provides genuine insight into user experience.

Free Monitoring Tools

UptimeRobot

Cost: Free for up to 50 monitors Check interval: Every 5 minutes on free plan Alert methods: Email, SMS, Slack, webhooks

UptimeRobot is our recommendation for basic monitoring. The free tier covers most small business needs, checking your site every 5 minutes and alerting via email or SMS when issues occur.

Setup:

1. Create account at uptimerobot.com
2. Click “Add New Monitor”
3. Choose “HTTP(s)” type
4. Enter your website URL
5. Set alert contacts
6. Save

Freshping by Freshworks

Cost: Free for up to 50 monitors Check interval: Every 1 minute on free plan Alert methods: Email, Slack, webhooks

Freshping offers faster check intervals than UptimeRobot free tier. Good alternative if 5-minute checks feel too slow.

StatusCake

Cost: Free tier available (limited) Check interval: Every 5 minutes on free plan Alert methods: Email and integrations

StatusCake offers uptime monitoring plus basic page speed tests on the free tier.

Google Search Console

Cost: Free What it monitors: Search visibility, crawl errors

Not real-time monitoring, but Search Console alerts you to significant issues Google’s crawlers detect. Worth having alongside dedicated monitoring.

Paid Monitoring Services

For more comprehensive monitoring:

Pingdom

Cost: From €10/month Features: Uptime, transaction monitoring, page speed, RUM

Pingdom is the industry standard for website monitoring. Transaction monitoring can simulate user journeys like checkout processes.

Datadog

Cost: From €15/host/month Features: Infrastructure, application, log monitoring

For larger or more complex setups. Monitors servers, applications, and can create sophisticated alerting rules.

New Relic

Cost: Free tier, paid from $25/month Features: Application performance monitoring, synthetic checks

Deep application performance insights. Overkill for simple sites but valuable for complex applications.

Site24x7

Cost: From $9/month Features: Comprehensive monitoring suite

Good middle ground between basic uptime monitoring and full APM solutions.

Setting Up Effective Alerts

Having monitoring is useless if alerts don’t reach you.

Multiple Alert Channels

Don’t rely on email alone:

• Email: Good for non-urgent notifications
• SMS: For critical alerts requiring immediate attention
• Slack/Teams: For team visibility
• Phone calls: For critical overnight issues

Configure multiple channels so you see alerts wherever you are.

Alert Fatigue Prevention

Too many alerts leads to ignoring alerts. Prevent this by:

• Setting appropriate thresholds (don’t alert on momentary blips)
• Using different severity levels
• Consolidating repeat alerts
• Acknowledging and resolving alerts promptly

Escalation Policies

If the first person doesn’t respond within X minutes, alert the next person. For businesses with teams:

1. Alert primary contact immediately
2. If no acknowledgment in 10 minutes, alert secondary
3. If still no response, alert management

On-Call Rotations

For larger teams, rotate who receives overnight alerts. Nobody should be on-call 24/7 indefinitely.

What to Monitor

Essential (Everyone Should Have)

• Main website URL — Is the homepage responding?
• SSL certificate — Is it valid and not expiring soon?
• Key landing pages — Critical pages for your business

Recommended

• Contact forms — Transaction monitoring that submits a test
• Search functionality — Does site search work?
• Login pages — Can users authenticate?
• Payment pages — Is checkout accessible? (WooCommerce)

Nice to Have

• API endpoints — If you have them
• Email deliverability — Are emails actually sending?
• Third-party services — Payment processors, CRMs, etc.
• CDN and DNS — Additional points of failure

Responding to Alerts

When monitoring alerts you to an issue:

1. Verify the Alert

False positives happen. Check if the site is actually down:

• Visit the site yourself
• Try from different networks (mobile data vs WiFi)
• Use a secondary tool like isitdownrightnow.com

2. Acknowledge the Alert

If your monitoring service supports it, acknowledge to prevent escalation and let team members know you’re handling it.

3. Assess Severity

• Complete outage requiring immediate action?
• Performance degradation that can wait?
• Transient issue that resolved itself?

4. Diagnose and Fix

Common causes of downtime — see our full troubleshooting guide:

• Hosting server issues — Contact host
• Plugin/theme conflict — Deactivate recent changes
• Resource exhaustion — Check for attacks or traffic spikes
• DNS issues — Check registrar
• SSL issues — Check certificate status

5. Document and Prevent

After fixing:

• Document what happened
• Document what you did to fix it
• Implement prevention measures
• Update runbooks for future incidents

Monitoring for WooCommerce Sites

E-commerce sites need more comprehensive monitoring:

Transaction Monitoring

Set up synthetic checks that:

1. Load a product page
2. Add to cart
3. Proceed to checkout
4. Verify payment options load

If any step fails, you know immediately.

Payment Gateway Monitoring

Monitor your payment processor’s status page. Most have APIs or webhooks for status updates.

Inventory and Order Alerts

Beyond website monitoring:

• Alert on failed orders
• Alert on payment failures
• Monitor order processing queues

The SparkHost Monitoring Setup

All SparkHost plans include:

• 1-minute uptime checks — Fast detection
• Global monitoring locations — Irish, European, and worldwide checks
• SSL expiration monitoring — 30-day advance warnings
• Response time tracking — Performance baselines
• Proactive alerts — We often know before you do
• Incident response — We start fixing, not just alerting

For Managed plans, we handle incident response directly, often resolving issues before clients notice.

Action Items

Today

1. Set up UptimeRobot or Freshping — It’s free and takes 5 minutes
2. Monitor your main URL — Start with the basics
3. Add SMS alerts — Don’t rely on email alone
4. Test the alerts — Verify you receive them

This Month

1. Add SSL monitoring — Don’t let certificates expire
2. Monitor key landing pages — Not just homepage
3. Set up response time alerts — Catch slowdowns early
4. Create an incident response plan — Know who to call and what to do

Ongoing

1. Review monitoring monthly — Adjust thresholds as needed
2. Test alert delivery quarterly — Ensure alerts still reach you
3. Update contacts — When team changes occur
4. Document incidents — Learn from problems

Your website is working for your business 24/7. Make sure you know when it’s not.