How to monitor your own website: what to check and how often
The worst way to learn that your website is down is from a customer. A little monitoring tells you first. This guide covers what is worth watching and how to keep alerts useful.
What to monitor
- Availability. Does the home page answer with a success code?
- Response time. A slowdown often comes before an outage.
- Your important pages. Check the login, checkout or contact page as well as the home page, since they can fail separately.
- SSL certificate expiry. An expired certificate makes browsers warn visitors away. See SSL certificate errors.
- Domain expiry. Losing a domain takes everything offline. See domain name expiry.
How often
Every minute catches short outages. Every five minutes is enough for most small sites. Checking less often than that risks missing a problem entirely.
Avoid false alarms
- Require two failures in a row before alerting, which filters out one-off blips.
- Check from more than one location so a local network problem does not look like an outage.
- Do not alert on a slow response alone. Alert on errors, then track slowness separately.
When an alert arrives
- Confirm with a second check and a different network.
- Check recent changes, such as a new release, a plugin update or a settings change.
- Look at your host’s status page and your CDN or DNS provider.
- Write down the start and end time so you can measure uptime later.
Using siteupdown.com
A free account lets you add sites to a watchlist, see their uptime history and receive an email when one goes down and when it recovers.
Check a website now
Is it down for everyone, or just you? Paste an address and we test it from fifteen places.
Open the checkerRelated guides
- Uptime percentages explained: what 99.9% really means
- SSL certificate errors explained: what they mean and how to fix them
- What happens when a domain name expires?
Last updated 2 November 2026. Written by the siteupdown.com team. Spotted a mistake?