If your website goes down at night, you might not notice until a customer tells you, or never. Uptime monitoring alerts you within minutes.
How it works
A monitoring service checks your website every few minutes and alerts you by email, SMS or app when it does not respond.
Free and low-cost options
- Popular uptime monitoring services offer free plans that check every few minutes.
- Many hosting providers include basic monitoring.
- Google Search Console reports some crawling and server errors.
What to monitor
- Home page.
- Contact or checkout page.
- SSL certificate expiry.
- Domain expiry.
When your site goes down
- Check whether it is down for everyone or only you.
- Check whether your domain or hosting expired.
- Contact your hosting support.
- Check for recent changes or updates that may have caused it.
- Restore from backup if needed. Read website backups.
Common causes
Expired domain or hosting, server overload, plugin conflicts, hacks and DNS mistakes.
Uptime and hosting quality
Frequent downtime is a sign to change hosting. Read hosting types explained.
Want the full picture? This article is part of Business websites: the complete guide, our in-depth guide with everything in one place.
