For freelancers
Your client shouldn't be your monitoring tool
When a client's site breaks, you want to hear it from your tools — not from an annoyed client. Sitewatch checks the sites you look after the way their visitors do, and tells you the moment something breaks, so the next message about the site comes from you, not from them.
- You find the breakage first, which is the entire product
- Free for one site, forever — a real plan, not a trial
- Recognises WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace and more, and tailors the fix guidance
Contact form stopped working on a client site
Plain-English summary
A plugin update left the contact form's script missing, so enquiries submitted through the site are going nowhere. The site itself is completely fine.
Free scan
Scan a client site right now — free
See what their current monitoring is missing.
02What can go wrong
The message you don't want on a Sunday evening.
It rarely matters whose fault it was. What the client remembers is that they found it and you did not.
- 01A plugin updates itself overnight on a site you built two years ago.
- 02The site still loads perfectly, so nothing anywhere raises a flag.
- 03But the contact form stopped working, and enquiries have been vanishing for a week.
- 04Your client emails you a screenshot and asks how long it has been like this.
- You cannot answer that, and that is the part that costs you.
03Why traditional monitoring misses this
The free ping tool you already use is doing its job.
It just has a much narrower job than you assumed. We don't just check that the site is online — we check that people can actually use it.
A free ping tool
Perfect for outages. Blind to everything else.
Sitewatch
Only "healthy" once the site still does what you built it to do.
04How Sitewatch catches it
One question, on every check.
Not "is the server up?" — but the one your client will judge you on: does this site still work the way I handed it over?
- ✓The layout loads
- ✓Menus and buttons are there
- ✓Form scripts load
- ✓Images appear
- ✓Fonts load
- ✓Booking and chat widgets load
- ✓Certificate is valid
- ✓Content matches its baseline
05Typical failures we catch
The breakage that makes you look bad.
A plugin update broke the contact form
An overnight update renames the file the form depends on.
→Enquiries vanish for weeks and the client finds out first
A publish left the site unstyled
A stale or missing stylesheet after a platform publish.
→The site looks broken on mobile and you get a screenshot
A hosting move created a redirect loop
DNS and rules disagree after a migration.
→Visitors see "too many redirects" and assume the business closed
Images stopped loading
An image service or media move leaves them unreachable.
→The site looks abandoned even though nothing is down
A booking or chat widget went quiet
A third-party script stops being served from someone else's infrastructure.
→The feature the client cares most about silently stops
The certificate expired
The renewal you set up two years ago quietly stopped working.
→Browsers block the site with a full-page warning
06A real example
A broken form, caught before the client noticed.
Update ships
A plugin updates itself overnight.
The form breaks
Its script is no longer being served.
Incident opened
Sitewatch confirms it is real and opens an incident.
You are emailed
With the site, the page and the missing file named.
Fixed
And you are the one who tells the client.
07What happens the moment we find it
Detection is not the outcome. Being the one who noticed is.
Every alert is specific enough to act on straight from your phone.
We confirm it is real first
Every issue is re-checked before you are emailed, so you are not chasing ghosts on a Saturday.
Explained in plain English
"The contact form's script is missing, so submissions do nothing." Which also means you can forward it to the client as-is.
A status page they can bookmark
Each client gets a page showing their site's health and incident history — which quietly replaces the "is the site okay?" emails.
You can verify the fix
Roll back the plugin, run a check on demand, and tell the client it is sorted with something behind it.
08Who it's for
Built for one person looking after several sites.
WordPress freelancers →
Auto-update season, without checking twenty sites by hand.
Growing into an agency →
The same setup at 25 or 100 sites, with white-label reports.
Client stores →
A broken checkout on a client site is the worst call to get.
Doing a migration →
Move a site on a Friday without spending the weekend refreshing it.
09vs. checking it yourself
Manual spot-checks vs automated monitoring
| Scenario | Checking it manually | Sitewatch |
|---|---|---|
| How often it gets checked | When you remember | Every 5–30 minutes, automatically |
| A broken form or script | Only if you open the site and try it | Every script verified on every check |
| Missing styling | You will not notice until a client does | Caught on the next check |
| After an update or a publish | A quick glance at the homepage | Every monitored page and everything it loads |
| Certificate expiry | A calendar reminder you will move | Warned well before the date |
| Your time | Hours a month, unpaid | None |
| What the client thinks | "They found the bug again" | "They always catch things before I do" |
How often it gets checked
- Checking it manually:
- When you remember
- Sitewatch:
- Every 5–30 minutes, automatically
A broken form or script
- Checking it manually:
- Only if you open the site and try it
- Sitewatch:
- Every script verified on every check
Missing styling
- Checking it manually:
- You will not notice until a client does
- Sitewatch:
- Caught on the next check
After an update or a publish
- Checking it manually:
- A quick glance at the homepage
- Sitewatch:
- Every monitored page and everything it loads
Certificate expiry
- Checking it manually:
- A calendar reminder you will move
- Sitewatch:
- Warned well before the date
Your time
- Checking it manually:
- Hours a month, unpaid
- Sitewatch:
- None
What the client thinks
- Checking it manually:
- "They found the bug again"
- Sitewatch:
- "They always catch things before I do"
10Which do you actually need
Be honest — do you need this?
You are probably on a free ping tool already. Here is where that is genuinely fine, and where it is not.
What you need
What to use
This probably isn't for you if…
- You hand sites over and genuinely have no ongoing relationship — there is nothing to protect.
- You need backups, updates or malware removal. That is a different category of tool.
- You want performance scores. Sitewatch checks whether a page works, not how fast it loads.
Free
For your first site, forever
$9
For up to 25 sites
No code
Nothing installed on client sites
Find out before your clients do
Paste a client URL and you are monitoring in under two minutes. Free for one site, no credit card.
11Questions
Freelancer questions, answered
If you look after one site, yes. It is free forever rather than a trial, and it includes checks every 30 minutes, uptime pings every 5, email alerts, monthly reports and the full set of detection rules. The paid plans are about volume and speed, not about unlocking the useful part.
The fewer clients you have, the more each one is worth. One broken contact form can cost you a relationship you have had for years — and the free plan costs nothing, so the honest answer is: try it on the client you would least like to lose.
No. Paste the client's URL and Sitewatch finds everything the page loads by itself. Nothing is installed on their site, so you do not need hosting access, FTP or a plugin — which also means you can monitor a site you did not build.
Yes. Each site can have a status page showing its health and incident history, which clients can bookmark. On the free plan it carries Sitewatch branding; Starter and Pro let you put your own on it.
Starter is $9/month for 25 sites, Pro is $19/month for 100. Nothing needs migrating — your existing monitoring continues, and you can move up or down whenever you like.
Yes, and this is often where it earns its keep. Because monitoring happens from outside, you can point it at a site you have inherited without touching its hosting or code — useful when you are taking over maintenance and want to know what state it is really in.
The agency page is written for teams running 50 to 100+ sites with client reporting and people to route alerts to. This one is for a solo freelancer or a small partnership, where the stake is one relationship rather than a portfolio.
12Explore more