Website Monitoring: Keep Your Site Online and Fast

Your website can experience problems at any moment. Without monitoring, you only notice this when customers complain - or worse, when your revenue drops. In this guide, you will learn how to effectively implement website monitoring.

Why Monitoring is Important

The Problem

• Average website has 3 hours of downtime per month
• Every minute of downtime costs money and reputation
• Without monitoring, you do not know when problems occur

The Solution

Monitoring detects problems immediately:

• Uptime monitoring: Is your site accessible?
• Performance monitoring: How fast does the site load?
• Error monitoring: Are errors occurring?
• Security monitoring: Are there threats?

Uptime Monitoring

What is Uptime?

Uptime is the percentage of time your website is accessible.

| Uptime | Downtime/year | Downtime/month | |--------|---------------|----------------| | 99% | 3.65 days | 7.2 hours | | 99.9% | 8.76 hours | 43 minutes | | 99.99% | 52.6 minutes | 4.3 minutes |

How Does Uptime Monitoring Work?

1. Service checks your site at fixed intervals
2. If no response, this is marked as downtime
3. You receive an alert immediately
4. After recovery, this is also reported

Free Uptime Tools

UptimeRobot:

• 50 monitors free
• Check every 5 minutes
• Email/SMS alerts
• Status pages
• uptimerobot.com

Freshping:

• 50 checks free
• 1-minute interval
• Multi-location checks
• freshworks.com/website-monitoring

Hetrix Tools:

• 15 monitors free
• 1-minute interval
• Blacklist monitoring
• hetrixtools.com

Paid Uptime Tools

Pingdom:

• Advanced features
• Real User Monitoring
• Transaction monitoring
• From ~$10/month

StatusCake:

• Good price/quality
• Page speed testing
• SSL monitoring
• From ~$20/month

Better Uptime:

• Modern interface
• Incident management
• Status pages
• From $20/month

Setting Up Uptime Monitoring

Step 1: Choose a tool Start with UptimeRobot (free, reliable)

Step 2: Add your site

• URL: https://yoursite.com
• Check interval: 5 minutes (or faster)
• Type: HTTP(S)

Step 3: Configure alerts

• Email: Immediately
• SMS: For critical sites
• Slack/Teams: For team notifications

Step 4: Test the monitoring

• Simulate downtime (if possible)
• Check if alerts work
• Verify contact details

What to Monitor

Basic:

• Homepage
• Most important product pages
• Contact/checkout pages
• API endpoints

Advanced:

• Login functionality
• Payment flows
• External integrations
• Database connections

Performance Monitoring

Why Monitor Performance?

• Slow sites lose visitors
• Performance affects SEO
• Problems get worse over time
• Identify trends

Core Web Vitals

Google's most important performance metrics:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint):

• How fast the largest element loads
• Goal: < 2.5 seconds
• Load hero images quickly

INP (Interaction to Next Paint):

• How quickly the page responds to interaction
• Goal: < 200 milliseconds
• Optimize JavaScript

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift):

• How much the layout shifts
• Goal: < 0.1
• Give images dimensions

Performance Monitoring Tools

Google PageSpeed Insights:

• Free
• Lab and field data
• Recommendations
• pagespeed.web.dev

GTmetrix:

• Free tier
• Waterfall analysis
• Video playback
• Historical data (paid)

WebPageTest:

• Free
• Detailed analysis
• Multi-location tests
• webpagetest.org

Continuous Performance Monitoring

Google Search Console:

• Core Web Vitals report
• Real user data
• Free

SpeedCurve:

• Synthetic monitoring
• Real User Monitoring
• Competitor benchmarking
• Paid

Calibre:

• Performance budgets
• Pull request checks
• Team dashboards
• Paid

Performance Alerts

Set up alerts for:

• LCP above 2.5 seconds
• CLS above 0.1
• Page load time above X seconds
• Page size above X MB

Error Monitoring

What is Error Monitoring?

Automatically detecting and reporting errors on your website:

• JavaScript errors
• Server errors (500s)
• Failed API calls
• Broken functionality

Error Monitoring Tools

Sentry:

• Extensive error tracking
• Stack traces
• User context
• Free tier available
• sentry.io

LogRocket:

• Session replay
• Error tracking
• Performance monitoring
• Free tier
• logrocket.com

Bugsnag:

• Error monitoring
• Stability scoring
• Release tracking
• Paid

Implementing Error Monitoring

Example with Sentry (JavaScript):

import * as Sentry from "@sentry/browser";

Sentry.init({
  dsn: "https://[email protected]/project",
  environment: "production",
  tracesSampleRate: 0.1,
});

What to track:

• Unexpected exceptions
• Failed network requests
• Console errors
• Custom business events

Security Monitoring

What to Monitor?

• SSL certificate validity
• Malware infections
• Blacklist status
• Vulnerability scans
• Unauthorized changes

Security Monitoring Tools

Sucuri SiteCheck:

• Free malware scan
• Blacklist check
• sitecheck.sucuri.net

Google Safe Browsing:

• Automatic in Search Console
• Warns for malware

SSL Labs:

• SSL configuration test
• ssllabs.com/ssltest

Detectify:

• Automated security scans
• Continuous monitoring
• Paid

SSL Monitoring

Why important:

• Expired certificate = site unreachable/warning
• Some hosts do not renew automatically

Tools:

• UptimeRobot (SSL monitoring included)
• SSL Cert Expiration Checker
• Let's Encrypt auto-renewal logs

Dashboards and Reporting

Status Pages

Communicate status to users:

Free options:

• UptimeRobot Status Pages
• Freshping Status Pages
• Cachet (self-hosted)

Paid options:

• Statuspage (Atlassian)
• Better Uptime
• Instatus

What to show:

• Current status
• Uptime history
• Incident log
• Planned maintenance

Team Dashboards

For internal use:

• Combined metrics
• Trends over time
• Alert overview
• Team performance

Tools:

• Grafana (open source)
• Datadog
• New Relic

Alert Strategy

Preventing Alert Fatigue

Too many alerts = ignoring alerts

Best practices:

• Only alert on actionable events
• Group related alerts
• Set correct thresholds
• Review and tune regularly

Alert Priorities

| Priority | Type | Notification | Response | |----------|------|--------------|----------| | P1 Critical | Site down | SMS + Call | Immediate | | P2 High | Major degradation | SMS + Email | < 30 min | | P3 Medium | Performance issues | Email + Slack | < 4 hours | | P4 Low | Minor issues | Email | Next day |

Escalation

Example escalation:

1. Alert to responsible developer
2. After 15 min: to senior developer
3. After 30 min: to team lead
4. After 1 hour: to management

Alert Channels

Per situation:

• Email: All alerts, not urgent
• Slack/Teams: Team awareness
• SMS: Critical issues, after hours
• Phone call: Only P1, auto-dial

Monitoring Checklist

Basic Setup

• [ ] Uptime monitoring for homepage
• [ ] Uptime monitoring for critical pages
• [ ] Email alerts configured
• [ ] SSL monitoring active
• [ ] Weekly performance check (manual)

Intermediate

• [ ] Multi-location uptime checks
• [ ] Performance monitoring active
• [ ] Error monitoring implemented
• [ ] Status page live
• [ ] Slack/Teams integration

Advanced

• [ ] Real User Monitoring
• [ ] Synthetic monitoring
• [ ] Custom dashboards
• [ ] Automated incident response
• [ ] SLA tracking
• [ ] Capacity planning metrics

Practical Example

SMB Website Setup

Tools:

1. UptimeRobot (free) - Uptime monitoring
2. Google Search Console (free) - SEO & Core Web Vitals
3. Sentry (free tier) - Error monitoring

Monitors:

• Homepage: every 5 min
• Contact page: every 5 min
• SSL certificate: daily

Alerts:

• Email to owner
• SMS for downtime > 10 min

Cost: $0/month

E-commerce Setup

Tools:

1. Better Uptime (~$20/month) - Uptime + Status page
2. Sentry (paid) - Error monitoring
3. SpeedCurve (~$20/month) - Performance

Monitors:

• All critical pages: every minute
• Checkout flow: synthetic monitoring
• API endpoints: every 30 sec

Alerts:

• Email + SMS for downtime
• Slack for all issues
• PagerDuty for critical

Conclusion

Effective monitoring requires:

1. Uptime monitoring: Know when your site is down
2. Performance monitoring: Track trends and problems
3. Error monitoring: Catch bugs before users report them
4. Security monitoring: Detect threats early

Start simple with free tools and expand as your site grows. The most important thing is that you monitor at all - even basic monitoring is better than no monitoring.

Need help setting up monitoring? Contact us.

Related Articles

• Website Security Basics - Protection
• Website Maintenance - Proactive management
• Core Web Vitals Explained - Measuring performance