Knowing when and how often does your WordPress website goes offline is vital. Having WordPress uptime monitor service will help you correct problem ASAP and get insights on your hosting provider.
Uptime monitoring means periodically checking your site to make sure it’s still up and running. This can mean simply typing in your URL and loading your site, or using a more sophisticated third-party service to monitor your site’s uptime.
Let’s face it. You cannot monitor your website all the time. If you are site owner and generating revenue from the site, you need to be there as soon as possible to fix things up.
Do you think your WordPress site never goes down while you sleep? It can easily stop responding in the middle of the night while visitors try to access it.
This might affect site’s reputation. Sometimes, your site may go down and come back up without you even knowing about it. The longer the site is down, the smaller will revenue be. It may even impact your SEO and traffic.
Even if you don’t make revenue from the site, there’s still a hit on reputation if the site is down for hours (or days) and the owner wasn’t aware. You could lose visitors or loyal followers.
Since we all need to sleep, there are plugins and services out there that can regularly check your site for you often and even every 1-15 minutes depending on how frequently you want to monitor.
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WordPress Uptime Monitor Service
Most services can notify you if your site becomes unavailable so you can quickly fix the problem. These services automatically ping your site in intervals to check it’s still online.
With most hosting companies guaranteeing 99% uptime or more, it’s easy to assume they’re holding up their end of the bargain.
Checking your site every now and again isn’t always effective either since your site could temporarily go down and then back up without you even realize.
- More Downtime Means Loss in Revenue – If your website remains inaccessible for a long period of time you will lose money.
- Reader’s Reliability – Having your website down is not good for business and visitors to your site will probably never return again.
- Search Engine – If your websites are down most of the time, then search engines may penalize it because it fails to maintain 24/7 uptime.
The sooner you know of a downtime, the faster you can get the site up and running again. Luckily, there are web services that check your website from time to time (whether it’s free or paid services) and notify you if downtime happens.
Here’s a compilation of various web services and tools which will notify you if your site/sites go offline.
Free & Paid WordPress Uptime Monitor Service
Here are some of worthy plugins and tools currently available for monitoring your site’s uptime automatically. They’re all updated and regularly maintained to ensure quality and success on your site.
There are free and paid options listed for you to consider that cover many different site requirements to help you find the perfect fit. While not all of them are created specifically for Multisite, they should still work with networks or single WordPress installations.
If you are using WordPress management service, many of them have the option to keep an eye on your site/s uptime.
Uptime Robot
You can sign up for free and immediately be able to monitor 50 websites. Add up to 50 websites and pick time interval to check if the site is up.
There are several ways you can be notified if the site is down. Most popular is email or by SMS. Uptime Robot currently uses the free email-to-SMS gateways.
Apart from website you can test servers, DNS, etc.
Free plan has 5-minute monitoring intervals, for 1-minute monitoring intervals you will need to go with PRO plan which costs 4.5$ a month for 50 sites and includes additional features.
Status Cake
StatusCake is a tool similar to Uptime Robot. The major difference is that they provide more paid options. This is an excellent choice for monitoring hundreds of sites, and they offer more options than just the standard “Is the website up?” service.
Pricing for the paid options is also quite affordable and reasonable.
With free plan, you will get unlimited tests, real browser testing, 5-minute check rate, random test locations, 24-hour support, 250 daily API limit. For more features you will need to pick some of the paid plans.
StatusCake.com has a network of monitoring centers throughout the world. With centers across Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia you can choose where your website’s uptime is monitored from and how often.
You will receive notifications by email, SMS, push notifications for iOS & Android or integration with third-party apps including Zapier and PagerDuty.
JetPack WordPress Plugin
Another popular method is using a WordPress plugin like Jetpack. With more than a dozen modules it is a very popular plugin.
Jetpack Monitor module can automatically notify you by email as soon as it detects that site went down.
If you want to give the plugin a try, you need to have a WordPress.com account first. Once you have an account, just install the plugin and use your WordPress.com account to authorize it. Then, look up the Jetpack Monitor module and activate it.
Monitor.us
Monitor.us is a free version of Monitis. The free version has some restrictions which are not strange. You can track your site’s response time and performance from different checkpoint locations in the main markets worldwide.
Some of the features are:
- Tracking availability and performance from locations in major countries worldwide
- Uptime checks using HTTP, HTTPS, PING, DNS
- Email checks using SMTP, POP3, IMAP protocols
- Public IP checks using TCP, UDP and ICMP protocols
- VoIP checks using SIP protocol
- Web page content checks
- Instant failure alerts via email, instant message, Text/SMS or live voice
- Detailed reporting with service level metrics per interval
SiteUptime
SiteUptime is a website monitoring service that checks your website at regular intervals and notifies you via email or SMS if it becomes unavailable. Multiple monitoring servers around the world run protocol based tests on your website at specific intervals.
If more than one monitoring location detects a connection failure or error, an email or SMS alert is sent to you. The system will also notify you when your website becomes available again. Available monitoring options: HTTP, SSL, DNS, POP3, SMTP, etc.
Internet Seer
Another great monitoring service. Service includes availability monitoring, performance monitoring, link and image checking, transaction monitoring, detailed check and alert reporting.
Internet Seer monitoring systems remotely check your website from several geographic monitoring stations at selected intervals. If the monitoring system is unable to reach the site, an email, cell phone or pager alert is sent to notify you of the problem.
HyperSpin
HyperSpin notifies via email, SMS, and push notification. They monitor your websites and servers from a network of 34 worldwide monitoring stations. Monitoring technology is fully redundant and globally distributed.
Each monitoring location is housed in an enterprise-grade data center and powered by high-performance hardware. At each monitoring interval, they send a request from a random global monitoring site.
If they detect that your website is down, the service immediately seeks a “second opinion” from another monitoring location. If the second location confirms the outage, you will be notified by SMS and email. The use of multiple locations eliminates false alarms and assures the integrity of results.
DownNotifier
DownNotifier is all about simplicity. It’s free, and you don’t even have to create an account to get right down to the business of monitoring your uptime.
All you have to do is enter your domain, email, and optional phone number so that in the event of your site going down they can notify you via email or SMS.
It’s a simple free tool with a premium upgrade available for those who are interested. Free option checks site at 10 minutes intervals while paid every 10 minutes.
WordPress Website Down Paid Services
Free is good, but paid services guarantee more options and check your website more frequently.
If you are serious and want to get close to real-time getting notification when your site is down, these are the recommended services:
- Wormly – Trusted by notable clients like Nokia, SitePoints, etc. Wormly gets you started in less than 10 minutes with price as low as 9.00 monthly.
- AlertSite – Get a comprehensive view of your web site’s performance and availability, with detailed breakdowns of DNS resolution, TCP connect, content download, redirect times and more.
- Pingdom – Monitor your website and servers and let you know right away when anything goes wrong.
- OpenTracker – It is website tracking tool built for website analysis. Analyze website statistics and monitor visitors online and in ‘real time’.
- WatchMouse – Performs all server checks from a customer perspective, thus ensuring that your customers don’t experience problems accessing your servers or services.
Free WordPress Uptime Monitor Service Summary
You can manually check the status of your site by going to Down For Everyone Or Just Me. Put your site URL and you will get a report about down status of your or any other site.
Keeping an eye on your site’s uptime is a necessary step if you’re serious about growing your site’s traffic. After all, if your site is down no one will be able to visit your site.
Once you’re able to monitor your site’s uptime automatically, you can rest easy knowing your site is online and if it becomes unavailable, you’ll be notified so you can fix it without delay. Monitoring site downtime is crucial. You can find out if your hosting company is good or bad (check best affordable WordPress hosting options).
If they claim to have 99.99% uptime and you find out it is lower than that, then you should consider changing hosting company. Free monitoring web services are great but do come with some limitations which vary between service providers.
I use free plan from Uptime Robot and get notifications to my email when one of my sites goes offline, why it went offline (error) and when it becomes online again. But if you need uptime monitor service but also single place to manage all your sites, then I suggest you check WP Umbrella.
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Very interesting article ! Would like you to tryout http://www.netumo.com as well !
Netumo looks interesting and I am sure some of readers will find it interesting.
I would like to add one more tool which is called Anturis, which is a cloud-based tool to monitor websites. Besides, it the tool offers all types of monitoring – in general, it should be great to monitor IT infrastructure of the company with the help of the software. Anturis has an agent which checks everything in the system and alerts you by phone, email, sms if there is a problem or the problem is likley to happen. It also offers troublehsooting. Anturis is both free and you have to pay for rather advanced features.
Anturis looks very interesting too. Will check it out!