How to Get an Alert the Moment Your Website Goes Down

A monitoring service visits your website on a schedule — every few minutes — from its own servers. If your site doesn't answer, or answers with an error, it checks again to make sure it's real, then sends you an alert. When the site comes back, you get a second message saying it has recovered.

That's it. You don't install anything on your website, and it doesn't slow your site down.

How fast will I know?

It depends on how often your site is checked. With checks every five minutes, you'll usually hear within five to ten minutes of your site going down — including the quick re-check that stops a momentary blip from waking you up. Free plans tend to check less often than paid ones, so look at the check interval before you choose.

Why it's worth it

Your hosting company may promise "99.9% uptime". That still allows almost nine hours of downtime a year — and your host won't text you when it happens. Down alerts mean you find out in minutes, not when a customer tells you.

A basic down alert only tells you one thing: the site stopped answering. But many of the problems that cost you customers happen while the homepage loads perfectly well:

• An update breaks the checkout, so nobody can pay
• The contact form stops sending, and enquiries quietly dry up
• An image, menu or button stops working after a change
• The security certificate expires and browsers warn visitors away
• The domain lapses because a renewal card expired

A simple up/down check won't alert you to any of these. Website monitoring opens your important pages and checks that everything on them still works — so you hear about the broken checkout as fast as you'd hear about the site going down.

Avoiding false alarms

An alert you learn to ignore is worse than no alert. Choose a service that re-checks before it alerts you, ideally from more than one location, so a brief network hiccup doesn't send you a message at 3am. If your current tool cries wolf, see why uptime monitors send false alerts.