Synthetic monitoring for marketing websites

Synthetic monitoring is the practice of running automated, scheduled checks against your website that simulate what a real visitor would experience — so you catch breakage before your users do. The traffic is "synthetic" because you generate it yourself on a schedule, from outside your infrastructure, instead of waiting for a real visitor to hit the problem. Sitewatch does synthetic monitoring focused on marketing sites: it fetches your pages, validates every asset, and fingerprints the page structure without you writing any test scripts.

Yes. Sitewatch has a free plan that monitors one site with real scheduled checks — no credit card, no trial expiry. It runs genuine synthetic checks: it fetches your page, validates every linked script, stylesheet, image, and font, and alerts you when something breaks. When you need to monitor more than one site, paid plans start at $9/mo for 25 sites.

Synthetic monitoring generates artificial traffic on a schedule to proactively test your pages — it works even when nobody is visiting, which makes it ideal for catching breakage at 3am or right after a deploy. Real user monitoring (RUM) is the opposite: it measures the experience of actual visitors as they browse, so it only sees a problem once a real person has already hit it. Synthetic catches issues before users do; RUM tells you what users are already living with. Sitewatch is a synthetic tool — it checks proactively so you find the broken asset before your visitors arrive.

Traditionally, yes — most synthetic tools make you write and maintain test scripts that break whenever your pages change. Sitewatch does not. You paste a URL and it automatically discovers and checks every asset on the page, validates HTTP status and MIME type, and fingerprints the structure. No scripting, no agents, no maintenance. If you specifically need multi-step flows like login or checkout, that is handled by Sitewatch transaction monitoring, which is a separate feature.

Yes — this is one of its strongest use cases. A deploy can return 200 OK on every page while quietly removing a JavaScript bundle, shipping a stylesheet with the wrong MIME type, or breaking an API the page depends on. Sitewatch fingerprints your page structure and validates every linked asset on each scheduled check, so a deploy that drops or breaks an asset triggers an incident naming the exact URL and HTTP status. Connect a deploy hook and the check runs the moment you ship, instead of waiting for the next cycle.

Tools like Datadog and New Relic are designed for DevOps teams monitoring complex applications. They require writing and maintaining test scripts, and they're priced for engineering organizations. Sitewatch is purpose-built for marketing sites: paste your URLs, and it automatically discovers and checks every asset. No scripting, no agents, no DevOps team required.

No. Sitewatch automatically discovers every script, stylesheet, image, and font on your pages. It validates them all with HEAD requests checking HTTP status and MIME type. You just provide the URLs you want to monitor.

On each scheduled check, Sitewatch fetches the page like a browser would, parses the HTML, and discovers every linked script, stylesheet, image, and font. Each asset is validated for its HTTP status code and content type, the redirect chain is followed, and the page HTML is fingerprinted with SHA-256 to detect structural changes. Across all of this, Sitewatch applies 20 detection rules covering failures uptime pings never see — broken assets, MIME mismatches, redirect loops, API errors, and more.

Check intervals are configurable per site — from every 30 minutes on Free up to every 5 minutes on Pro. You can also trigger on-demand checks anytime from the dashboard or via deploy hooks.

Yes. Multi-region monitoring is available on the Pro plan, which runs your synthetic checks from several geographic locations. That catches region-specific failures — a CDN edge serving a broken asset in one region, or a redirect that only fires for certain geographies — that a single-location check would miss.

Sitewatch includes uptime detection as one of its 20 detection rules (UNAVAILABLE). But it goes much further -- checking every asset on your pages, validating MIME types, fingerprinting page structure, and detecting redirect loops. Many teams use Sitewatch alongside their existing uptime tool for comprehensive coverage.