Have your website monitored: availability, certificate and domain

Without monitoring, you only find out your website is down when a customer calls, or you never find out at all. Uptime monitoring checks every few minutes whether your site is working and warns you when it isn't. Here you'll read what to monitor, how often, and how to make sure an alert actually reaches you.

What WebOké does and doesn't monitor

We monitor our own servers and network. You can see current outages and scheduled maintenance on the Outages status page, even without logging in. We don't monitor whether your own website is working: our monitoring won't notice a broken plugin or an expired domain. For that, you use an external monitoring service. There are free and paid services; pick one that suits you.

Want a quick one-time look at how your domain is doing, including the certificate's expiry date? Use Domain health. That's a snapshot, not monitoring.

What to monitor

Monitor a page that's actually generated by your website, such as your homepage or contact page, not a standalone image. A server can respond with an error page; the content check catches that too. If you have a webshop, monitor the shop page as well.

A separate check for the certificate is a good idea. Let's Encrypt no longer sends reminder emails about expiring certificates. See Shorter lifetimes for Let's Encrypt certificates: what does that mean for you? A warning when there are fewer than 14 days of validity left is a reasonable threshold.

You can find the expiry date of a domain at WebOké in My Domains, in the Expires column. Turn on automatic renewal there too. See Your domain overview.

From the outside, and how often

Monitoring should run somewhere other than your website. If your server is down, it can't warn you itself either. An external service checks from the internet, just like your visitors.

• How often: every 1 to 5 minutes is common for a website. More often makes no sense for most sites.
• Only alert after repeated failures: only send an alert after two or three failed checks in a row. That way a single dropped connection doesn't trigger an alarm.
• Maintenance: pause the monitoring briefly while you're working on the site yourself.

Alerts that get through

• Choose a channel you'll actually see: a push notification on your phone, SMS or chat. Email works, but is easily missed. Use two channels for important sites.
• Don't make alerts depend on what you're monitoring. If the alert goes to a mailbox on the same domain and that domain is down, it won't arrive.
• Keep it calm. If you get alerts every day that you don't act on, you'll start ignoring them, including the one that matters.
• Test it: briefly point the check at an address that doesn't exist and see whether, and how quickly, the alert comes in.
• Secure your monitoring service account with a strong password and two-factor authentication. Anyone who gets in can turn off your alerts.

Have the service create a public status page if you want to keep customers informed, but don't put internal addresses or server names on it.

Monitoring it yourself with a VPS

If you have a VPS, you can also run the monitoring yourself, for example with the open-source program Uptime Kuma. Don't put it on the same server as the sites it monitors, or combine it with an external check. See Uptime Kuma: monitoring your sites and server and Monitoring from the outside and the inside. You manage the VPS and the monitoring on it yourself.

Monitoring is part of maintenance

Monitoring tells you that something is wrong, not why. Alongside it, stick to a regular maintenance routine: keep up with updates, check your backups and regularly open your site yourself in a private window. If your site isn't working and there's nothing on the status page, check your site's error log first or create a ticket via the Support Center.

Want to learn more? Take the free WordPress course, lesson 9.4 A regular maintenance routine.