What is Uptime Monitoring and Why Does Your Website Need It?
Imagine potential customers visiting your website, only to find it offline. Every minute of downtime can mean lost revenue, reduced trust, and frustrated users. Uptime monitoring ensures this doesn't happen to your business.
Whether you're a plumber, a cafe or a clothing store, you need people to trust that what you offer is better than your competition. Trust is hard to build and can be quickly eroded.
When I needed an electrician recently, I searched online and noticed many websites were outdated, confusing, or offline. I was not going to spend hundreds of pounds with someone I could not trust because of their website.
The look and feel of a website, its user interface, and its user experience all help to create an impression of a business. However, the most basic point is that a website must at least load and work.
No business owner wants to find out that their website is down and has been for a while. It's impossible for them to quantify how much business they have lost. Imagine, though, if they were running an online business, such as an e-commerce store. Essentially their entire business has gone if their website does not work.
Uptime monitoring is an essential service for any modern business. It will tell you when your website is offline and can give you the chance to minimise any loss of trust.
When might a website become offline?
The main causes of website downtime are down to at least one of these five factors:
Human error
Cyberattacks
Traffic spikes
Server issues
Software conflict
Around 40% of all significant outages over the past three years have been caused by human errors. If you remember the recent CrowdStrike IT outage, that was due to a mistake in an update. Accidental human errors can be the most fundamental and the most frustrating of all issues.
Whereas cyber attacks are much more deliberate and leave you feeling much more helpless. In 2024, 40% of small businesses reported experiencing some form of a cyber attack.
A final, less recognised but very obvious reason for website downtime is due to spikes in traffic. Every business wants to be successful, but some experience it slightly too quickly. Christmas sales or recent appearances on TV can all lead to a business experiencing a sudden, rapid spike in traffic that overloads its website hosting server.
Servers are one of the most common reasons for website downtime. Power-related problems, maintenance periods and other hardware failures can all lead to a website hosting server going offline.
The final reason can be related to software. With WordPress powering around 40% of the web, conflicts between plugins and code can easily bring down a website. Also, simply running updates can cause a small period of downtime for a website, so updates need to be run at the right time.
How can uptime monitoring help?
Knowing your website is down can help you take the first step in fixing any issues and getting the website back. The impact can also spread to SEO impacts, financial losses, and even potential legal consequences if it is related to a hack. Being aware of an issue and minimising its impact is the biggest help that uptime monitoring can bring.
The key benefits of uptime monitoring are:
Minimising lost revenue
Protecting customer trust
Preventing SEO penalties
Resolving issues faster
Alongside the reporting of the website being up or down, the various systems can also help record how long it takes your website to load. Then, you can expand to look at the time across different geo-locations, before long you have a comprehensive idea of how well your website performs across the globe.
Data from uptime monitoring can help you understand many aspects of your website from downtime even to speed.
How frequently should my website be checked for uptime?
The frequency of uptime monitoring depends greatly on the criticality of your website.
For those running an e-commerce website or one where the sole revenue stream comes from the website, you need to be monitoring your website at most every minute.
If your website is important but does not equate to the entirety of your business, you certainly should be checking every 5 minutes. This gives you a good chance of catching issues and does avoid some of the false positives I've seen that can happen with the more frequent monitors.
Then, if your website is a shop window for your business, one you want working, but is not critical to you, checking every 30 minutes would suffice.
What can't most uptime monitoring tools do?
We have looked at uptime monitoring, its importance and how often it should run. What we have not discussed is what you do when your website goes down. The one thing that most uptime monitoring tools online don't do is explain why. They might say "Header not available" or simply tell you your website is down.
Knowing your website is down often does not give you the information or the tools to fix the issue. Also, quite often you can see reports of your website being down via an online monitoring tool, but when you check it's fine! This is called a false positive. They can be highly frustrating because all of the stress and worry they cause is for nothing. Worse of all, you lose trust in your monitoring tool and can even ignore it when it does correctly report downtime.
What we aim to do at UpWatch is to provide a semi-automatic layer to website monitoring. By this, I mean that the automatic uptime monitoring tools report to us and we check your website. If we do find it is offline we will try to establish why. Then, when you are alerted you will be told not just that your website is down but also why and hopefully some steps to resolve the downtime.
How can I get started monitoring my website's uptime?
If you want to get started with our uptime monitoring, you can sign up now via our Pricing page.
You will find that we do not just monitor your uptime, but offer at least seven different methods for monitoring your website and spotting issues.
You can get all of the following from only £5 per month with UpWatch:
Human-validated uptime alerts
Detailed explanations and actionable solutions
Comprehensive monitoring beyond uptime (e.g. SSL, DNS, and visual checks)
Every second your website is down could mean lost revenue and customer trust. Take control today with UpWatch’s comprehensive website monitoring services. Sign up now and get peace of mind knowing your website is in safe hands.
