Domains, delivery and craft
What is Uptime monitoring?
An external service checking that a site responds correctly at regular intervals and alerting when it does not. Without it, the first report of an outage usually comes from a customer, which is both slower and considerably more expensive.
Also called: availability monitoring · downtime alerts
What to monitor beyond the home page
- A page that touches the database, not only a cached front page
- The checkout or contact form endpoint, where money and enquiries live
- Certificate expiry, with warning weeks ahead rather than on the day
- Response content, not only status — a 200 returning an error page is still an outage
- From more than one geographic location, to separate real outages from local routing faults
Certificate expiry is the common one
An expired certificate produces a full-page browser warning that stops every visitor. Automated renewal is normal now, and automated renewal that silently stopped working is also normal — which is why the expiry date needs monitoring independently of the renewal process.
Alert somewhere you will see it
An alert to an email address you check twice a day is not monitoring. Route it to a phone. The value of the whole arrangement is the minutes between failure and awareness.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Who actually owns your website — a checklist you can verify today covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.