If your WordPress site goes offline overnight, you need to know before the next manual check. Downtime can interrupt WooCommerce purchases or leave visitors unable to reach your landing pages.
Uptime alerts let you start investigating when a monitor detects a failure, reducing the time an outage goes unnoticed.
Uptime monitoring checks whether visitors can reach your website. For WordPress, those checks should also account for caching and the pages you depend on.
How Uptime Monitoring Works
Monitoring services send requests to your website from external servers in different locations to check its availability.
These requests return valuable information, such as:
• HTTP status code: This shows whether your website is accessible (e.g., a 200 status code) or down (e.g., a 500 status code).
• Time to First Byte (TTFB): The time it takes to receive the first byte of data from your site. This includes the round-trip latency to the server and the time the server takes to respond.
• TCP connection time: The time required to establish a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection. This allows data to be transferred between servers by breaking it down into packets.
• DNS lookup time: The time it takes to perform a Domain Name System (DNS) lookup for every new domain requested on the page.
• SSL certificate check time: The time spent verifying the availability of your Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate for secure connections.
If a check detects downtime, the service sends a notification so you can investigate.
Immediate Alerts
When your site fails to respond, the monitoring tool sends alerts through multiple channels, such as email, SMS, or mobile app notifications. For instance, if your site goes down in the middle of the night, you’ll receive a notfication on your phone, allowing you to address the issue immediately.
Detailed Reports
Many uptime monitoring tools provide detailed reports, showing when and where downtime occurred. For example, a report might reveal that your website consistently goes down every Saturday morning, prompting you to investigate further.
A note about how Scanfully does this:
Instead of lumping all checks into one metric off of which the uptime is determined, we’ve opted for a more straightforward uptime monitoring for WordPress. We’ve split off the performance and SSL monitoring into two separate monitoring services.
What to Check on a WordPress Site
Include these WordPress-specific checks:
- WordPress Application Uptime
- Priority Pages Uptime
The generic reasons are:
- Protecting revenue
- Excellent user experience
- Improving SEO rankings
WordPress Application Uptime
An HTTP 200 response confirms that the requested endpoint responded successfully. It does not, by itself, show whether WordPress generated a fresh response behind the cache.
We want to test the WordPress application and confirm that its response was generated recently, rather than receiving an older cached page.
In other words, the actual uptime monitoring for your WordPress site should include a cache busting technique as well as check if what we’re then seeing is freshly generated.
Priority Pages Uptime
A homepage check can miss failures on contact forms, conversion landing pages, or WooCommerce pages. Include those priority pages in your monitoring.
The Scanfully dashboard calls these Priority Pages.
Protecting Revenue
An outage can interrupt a purchase and cost a sale. Uptime monitoring alerts you to the detected failure so you can start restoring access.
Improving SEO Rankings
Search engines, particularly Google, prioritize websites that are consistently available and quick to load. Frequent downtime can lead to a drop in search rankings, making it harder for potential visitors to find your site.
Enhancing User Experience
Visitors need access to your content when they follow a link or return to the site. Monitoring helps you identify interruptions and begin fixing them.
Reasons Why a WordPress Site is Down
Three common sources of downtime are:
1. Unreliable Web Hosting
Cheap hosting often leads to downtime due to overloaded servers, traffic surges, or data center issues. Opting for fully managed WordPress hosting ensures better performance, security, and support, making it a worthwhile investment.
2. Plugin and Theme Errors
Small coding mistakes or poorly coded plugins/themes can crash your site. Always test changes in a staging environment and stick to well-reviewed, regularly updated plugins. Keep plugin use to a minimum to avoid conflicts and security risks.
3. Insufficient Server Resources
Growing sites need more CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. If your host can’t scale with your needs, your site may slow down or crash during traffic spikes. Look for a provider that not only understand WordPress, but that also offer scalable resources.
Read more about the reasons why your WordPress site may be experiencing downtime.
Best Tools for WordPress Uptime Monitoring
Scanfully
Your Scanfully dashboard combines WordPress uptime checks with separate performance scans and SSL certificate monitoring.
Notification options include email, Pushover, Slack, and Discord.
Jetpack
Another solution that provides an uptime monitor within a suite of solutions is Jetpack. It, for instance, also provides the following features:
- Brute-force attack protection, and spam filtering
- WordPress backups.
- Secure logins with two-factor authentication.
And don’t get us wrong, with over 5 million active installations, Jetpack is a popular solution for a great many things, but it’s uptime monitoring is a limited version, and they don’t have performance and SSL monitoring available.
Uptime Robot
One of the more traditional and basic version of uptime monitoring is Uptime Robot. They do also provide SSL certificate monitoring, and other premium features.
Uptime Robot applies general website availability checks to WordPress sites as well.
Check the Application and Its Priority Pages
Choose checks that reach WordPress behind its cache, include your priority pages, and send alerts through a channel you will see.
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