Imagine waking up one morning, coffee in hand, ready to check your WordPress site’s overnight performance, only to find that it’s been offline for hours. This is a nightmare scenario for any website owner, especially those making money with their site–either directly with for instance WooCommerce, or indirectly with landing pages. What you need is uptime monitoring for WordPress!
The loss of potential visitors and revenue can be significant. This is where uptime monitoring becomes crucial. By alerting you to any issues as soon as they occur, you can quickly address them, minimizing downtime and ensuring your site remains reliable and professional.
Uptime monitoring involves using tools that continuously check if your website is accessible to users. And while uptime monitoring is great, uptime monitoring for WordPress is better.
But first, let’s talk about how uptime monitoring works in general.
How Uptime Monitoring Works
Uptime monitoring is straightforward. Monitoring services use external servers from various locations around the world to send requests to your website and 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 the HTTP status code shows your site is down, you’ll receive an immediate notification, allowing you to take action before your customers even notice the issue!
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.
In doing so, we’ve made all three monitoring services much more complete and versatile.
Why Uptime Monitoring is Crucial for Your WordPress Site
There are lots of tools out there that do uptime monitoring. We’ll list a couple of examples below, but what you really want it uptime monitoring that fully understands your WordPress. Uptime monitoring that understands your WordPress is essential for several reasons.
When you’ve got uptime monitoring for WordPress there are a few extra benefits:
- WordPress Application Uptime
- Priority Pages Uptime
The generic reasons are:
- Protecing revenue
- Excellent user experience
- Improving SEO rankings
Let’s discuss every single benefit.
WordPress Application Uptime
The vast majority of uptime monitors do little more than ping your site and if the status code is a 200 they call it a day and list your site as being up. While technically they would be correct, it’s not the most complete way of checking (as you can see by the other metrics we’ve listed above).
But there’s a bigger problem still.
We want to be sure that we’re actually testing the WordPress application for uptime and not, for instance, the cache that lives in front of it. And not only that, we also want to know that whatever we’re seeing when we probe for uptime is generated very recently.
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
Whenever your WordPress sites has special pages like pages with contact forms, landing pages that are meant to convert, or you’re running WooCommerce, you’ll have priority pages. That means, if we were to just check the frontpage for uptime we’d be missing a lot of important uptime information about other super important pages.
We call those Priority Pages in our Scanfully dashboard and we think they are crucial in proper uptime monitoring for WordPress.
The list below is what you’ll see talked about at other sites. They are very important, absolutely, but without WordPress context you’re missing out a lot.
Protecting Revenue
For businesses, every minute of downtime can result in lost sales and a tarnished reputation. Imagine a customer trying to make a purchase, only to be greeted by an error page. They might not return. With uptime monitoring you could have mitigated this the very moment the server went down.
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
A reliable website ensures that users can access your content without interruptions. Constant interuptions will deter visitors from returning. Uptime monitoring helps you maintain a seamless user experience by allowing you to address issues before they affect too many users.
Reasons Why a WordPress Site is Down
We’ve written a dedicated artile on the many reasons why your WordPress site can experience downtime, but here are the three most common reasons:
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
We’re biased, of course, but we genuinly believe that the best uptime monitoring for WordPress is provided right in your Scanfully dashboard. For all the reasons listed above, and more. Not only do we monitor much more thoroughly, but we also additionally do a very extensive performance scan and SSL certificate monitoring alongside our uptime monitoring.
Really giving you the best of all the features with email, pushover, Slack and Discord as notification options.
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.
That said, their way to check the uptime for your WordPress site is just like they check the uptime for any type of site: limited.
Conclusion: Ensuring Maximum Uptime for Your WordPress Site
In summary, uptime monitoring, specifically for WordPress, is an indispensable tool for maintaining a reliable and professional WordPress site. By choosing a suitable monitoring tool and adhering to best practices, you can minimize downtime, enhance user satisfaction, and improve SEO performance.
It’s a stable and healthy WordPress site that attracts and retains visitors and boosts your brand’s reputation and success. With the right approach, you can enjoy peace of mind, knowing your site is always being monitored and protected.
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