Do you want to start monitoring the uptime rate of your WordPress site?
You are in the right place!
In this article, i’ll explain you how to easily monitor your WordPress uptime, downtime, and performance.
This article has been updated in 2023 and will cover the most important aspect of uptime, downtime, and performance monitoring for WordPress.
I’m also going to share with you the best uptime monitoring tools for WordPress and explain you how to use them properly.
So if you are looking to mitigate the damage and loss caused by downtimes, you are in the right place.
Table of contents
Uptime monitoring checks that your website stays permanently online and available for your visitors. It provides an overview and history of the availability of your website and domain. Uptime monitoring tools almost always include an alerting system, so you can instantly know whenever your website goes down.
If you are running a WordPress maintenance business or a WooCommerce site, you MUST enable an uptime monitoring solution.
Monitoring WordPress has never been so easy
Try WP Umbrella for freeUptime monitoring is easy to understand. To check uptime, monitoring services use external servers from all over the world to send requests to your site.
These requests get back with many information such as :
If the HTTP status code indicates that the website is not accessible, you get a notification so you can act before your customers realize that your website is down!
It is exactly the same. Monitoring plugins provide you with data from a self-hosted server. This means that you will be alerted even if your WordPress goes down.
Downtime hurts the professional image of your brand or blog and can ruin any web-related investments.
Here are some terrific figures and facts about the negative impact of downtimes:
Matt CuttsIf a site takes so long to load that we can’t even fetch it, then that will affect your rankings because your site is timing out
former SEO guru working for Google
If your Website uptime is under 99,99% you should definitely look at my guide about WordPress Hosting.
WordPress is an amazing CMS, but you might be surprised about how often downtimes happen. WordPress websites can indeed go down for so many reasons.
Cheap web hosting services often suffer an average downtime of up to 30% caused by traffic spikes or data center problems.
Because servers are shared with many other websites, they are more likely to crash or being very slow. Yet, if the connection between the server and the DNS is too long, your WordPress Website can crash.
If you can afford it, you should always choose a fully Managed WordPress Hosting.
It can also crash because you, or someone who has access to your admin dashboard, broke a line of code.
Error can happen every time you try to edit a theme, a PHP function, or a plugin. A bad piece of code can take down an entire website. If you want to know more about it, you can read my guide about WordPress HTTP errors.
This is why it’s important to select a web host with a staging space and reactive support if you want to troubleshoot downtime quickly or prevent it to happen.
Keep in mind that just because a plugin is in the WordPress directory doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Attacks from hackers can also cause severe downtimes to your website. There are so many kinds of hacker attacks but the easiest is called a DDoS attack.
DDoS attacks overwhelms your serveur with traffic spikes generated by bots. A good web hosting provider should protect your website from DDoS attacks.
The best plugin for uptime monitoring is WP Umbrella. WP Umbrella is an all-in-one solution that make multiple WordPress sites management a breeze (uptime monitoring, automatic backups, update management, maintenance report, etc).
This plugin allows you to:
Step 1: Create an account in WP Umbrella’s application
Step 2: Add a project
Step 3: Select your project and click on the uptime / performance monitoring tab and click on settings
And that’s it! You will be alerted if your website goes down!
You can notify as many people as you want and enjoy WP Umbrella’s slack integration.
Since you are here, you should also activate the automatic daily backup and give a look at the php error monitoring tab of your website!
Jetpack improves the functionality and management of your WordPress website. The main features of Jetpack are:
Jetpack has +5millions of active installations and is the most popular security plugin for WordPress.
You have to pay to get the most part of the features available on Jetpack: backup, scan, anti-spam, search, video hosting, SEO features, and analytics integration.
Uptime Robot is a free tool used to monitor websites. It monitors websites every 5 minutes and alerts you through various channels if your sites are down.
UptimeRobot also provides you with SSL certificate monitoring and Cron job monitoring.
To access response times and monitor performance you need to pay.
ManageWP helps you to manage several WordPress Websites from a single dashboard. The plugin is free, but you have to pay to include the uptime monitoring add-on. Here are the free features of ManageWP:
Note that you have to pay for the premium business plugin in order to receive alerts through email or SMS.
Pingdom is probably the most advanced monitoring solution available on the market. It’s also the most expensive (13$/months by website). It offers a free trial version for 14 days.
This monitoring service provides synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring. You can thus simulate and understand visitor interaction with your website. The features of Pingdom are:
Pingdom doesn’t have a WordPress integration.
StatusCake is external uptime & performance monitoring application. It offers the classic features of this kind of service:
StatusCake doesn’t have a WordPress integration.
It’s no question: you should monitor your site uptime rate!
Hopefully, a ton of third party services are available on the internet and will help you to do.
Some are related to WordPress (like WP Umbrella, Jetpack or ManageWP) others are not (Pingdom, Uptime Robot, Better Uptime, etc).
This is your choice! However, we recommend you to use WP Umbrella, since it also offers all what you need to manage your website effortlessly (automatic backup, safe update, uptime / performance monitoring, etc).
Learn how to manage multiple WordPress sites effortlessly with the best WordPress management tools.
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Check our WordPress website maintenance checklist with 27+ must do tasks!