Business owners
How Do I Find Out When My Website Goes Down?
Rodney Hall, COO— AI-assisted and reviewed prior to publication.
You find out when your website goes down by using an external monitoring service that checks your site every few minutes from locations outside your network and sends an alert by email, SMS, or team chat the moment it detects a failure.
Why does external monitoring matter?
Checking your own site from your office or relying on a customer to report downtime is too late. External performance monitoring is also known as end-user monitoring or end-to-end performance monitoring, and it's the only way to see what visitors outside your network actually experience.
An external check contacts your website from servers in different cities or countries, typically every one to five minutes. If the site fails to respond, the monitoring service usually confirms with an alternate geographic location check, minimizing the potential of false positives, then sends you an alert.
Free tools like UptimeRobot and HetrixTools offer basic monitoring at no cost, while paid services add faster check intervals and more alert channels.
What should you monitor beyond the homepage?
Your homepage may load fine while the parts that generate revenue or capture leads are broken.
Website monitoring tools generally only track server uptime and page response times, not whether the checkout form is functioning as expected. A checkout page can return HTTP 200 while every script that makes the form work is broken.
The pages most likely to break silently are checkout flows, contact forms, login pages, and multi-step transactions. Multi-step checkouts need monitoring at each stage, including shipping address entry, payment information, and order review. Tools like FormTracker, NorthDuty, and CheckView can test whether a form loads, whether fields accept input, and whether the submit button triggers the expected next step.
For small businesses without the budget for form-specific monitoring, at minimum set up a basic uptime check on your checkout URL and test the complete flow manually after every plugin update or site change.
SSL certificate expiration monitoring
SSL certificate monitoring is the practice of continuously checking your SSL/TLS certificates for expiration dates, configuration errors, chain problems, and unexpected changes. An expired certificate triggers a browser warning that will stop nearly every visitor.
The expiration replacement threshold is the number of days before a certificate expiration that a certificate can be replaced and has a default value of 60 days. Most monitoring tools will alert you 30 days before expiry, but you can configure that window.
Pingdom's SSL certificate monitoring is essentially enabled by selecting HTTPS when setting up an uptime check, and it monitors certificate errors automatically. TrackSSL offers free certificate-only monitoring if you do not need uptime checks.
Certificate issues are one of the most preventable causes of downtime. If your monitoring service supports SSL checks, turn it on.
DNS monitoring
If DNS resolution fails or slows down, the site may appear offline or lag, even if the web server itself is working fine.
DNS monitoring is the process of regularly checking your domain's DNS records to ensure they are accurate, responsive, and secure. Common problems include misconfigured A or CNAME records, slow propagation after a change, and registrar expiration.
Regular checks every few minutes can help you find problems like outages or unexpected DNS changes before they affect your website, email, or users. Most uptime monitoring tools include basic DNS checks. UptimeRobot offers DNS record monitoring, and you can configure it to watch specific record types like A, AAAA, MX, or TXT.
DNS failures are rare but catastrophic when they happen. Monitoring catches configuration drift and unauthorized changes before they take your site offline.
What alerts actually get seen
Email should support incident understanding, not carry the full burden of urgent response. Email is fine for recovery notices and summaries, but the only downside of an email notification is that you won't be checking your email every second.
The available personal channels include Email, SMS, Voice Call, Mobile App Push, and Email-to-SMS. The integrations include Telegram, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Google Chat, Mattermost, PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call, Pushbullet, and Pushover.
For a small business, the practical answer is email plus one channel you actually check. If you use Slack all day, route alerts there. If you're away from the desk often, add SMS. SMS should be reserved for incidents where immediate human attention matters.
Most monitoring services let you test an alert before the real thing happens. Send a test to confirm the notification reaches you, and adjust the channel or escalation if it does not.
If you want more than uptime monitoring and are looking for broader website health scoring that includes security, SEO, and performance alongside AI visibility checks, try the free AI-visibility check (/check) or review ActiScore's pricing (/pricing). For an understanding of how monitoring fits into a broader operations and security posture, see the guide (/guide).
Common questions
Why can't I just check my own website from my office?
Checking your site from your own network doesn't show what visitors outside your network experience. External monitoring services check your website from servers in different cities or countries every few minutes, ensuring you see the same failures your customers would encounter. Relying on internal checks or waiting for customer reports means downtime has already damaged your business before you know about it.
What website pages should I monitor besides the homepage?
Monitor pages that generate revenue or capture leads, especially checkout flows, contact forms, login pages, and multi-step transactions. Your homepage can load perfectly while your checkout form is completely broken, still returning HTTP 200 status codes even though every script is failing. Multi-step checkouts need monitoring at each stage including shipping address entry, payment information, and order review to catch silent failures that cost you sales.
Do I need to monitor my SSL certificate separately?
SSL certificate monitoring checks for expiration dates, configuration errors, and chain problems that can trigger browser warnings and stop nearly every visitor. Most monitoring tools alert you 30 days before expiry, though you can configure that window. Many uptime monitoring services automatically check certificates when you select HTTPS during setup, making it a preventable cause of downtime if you simply enable the feature that's already available.
What is DNS monitoring and why does it matter?
DNS monitoring regularly checks your domain's DNS records to ensure they are accurate, responsive, and secure. If DNS resolution fails or slows down, your site may appear offline or lag even when the web server itself works fine. Common problems include misconfigured A or CNAME records, slow propagation after changes, and registrar expiration. DNS failures are rare but catastrophic, and monitoring catches configuration drift and unauthorized changes before they take your site offline.
Which alert channels should I use for website downtime?
Email plus one channel you actually check is the practical answer for small businesses. If you use Slack all day, route alerts there; if you're away from your desk often, add SMS. Email alone won't reach you instantly, and you won't be checking it every second. Reserve SMS for incidents requiring immediate human attention. Most monitoring services let you test alerts before real incidents happen, so send a test to confirm notifications reach you and adjust channels if they don't.