5 Ways To Check The Uptime of Your WordPress Site

When your website is down, your business halts. Sales drop, as no one has access to your products and services: how are people supposed to buy from you if your pages are out of reach? Even if your website is not commercial, its downtime is likely to affect your target audience, be it a recipe blog or a school website.

Running your own website means you have to take care of it. It’s just like having a cat – you have to feed her, groom, vaccinate, take her to the vet should she fall ill, etc. A website requires regular maintenance too: it should be paid for, updated, filled with new content, and monitored closely. Not only do you have to keep in mind that its storage has limits (save your ahem-s for yet another unlimited bundle which later turns out to be limited), but you also should make sure it is always online.

Of course, it is something that you delegate to your hosting provider: you cannot affect the performance of their servers, as you have no access to them, and it is implied that if you buy a certain pack of services from a hosting provider, you are guaranteed decent uptime, security and other features with which high quality services are characterized. But quite often it’s just the opposite: you pay for hosting services only to find your website down. It is especially true of cheap hosting providers or those with outdated hardware.

So how can you check whether your pages are actually available most of the time?

To do it, you can use a wide range of website monitoring services available online. These usually track the performance of the servers used by hosting providers, and judging from their statistics, you can make up your mind whether you should keep on paying them, or it might be worth looking elsewhere.

1. UptimeRobot

This service checks the availability of your website pages every five minutes and reports if something goes wrong. You are provided with detailed statistics on website performance, notifications can be sent via SMS and other means of communications, such as various messengers and social networks (Twitter, Telegram, etc.), and you can pause the monitoring process if it is maintenance time.

2. WordPress plugins for browsers

You can also install plugins for your browser to monitor your website performance. With such plugins, you can have the statistics available inside the WordPress dashboard, be notified when server failures occur, get to the root of the problem by identifying which particular element of the system fails, and use many of these services for free. Among these are Jetpack, ManageWP Worker, Orbit Fox, etc.

3. HRANK

HRANK is a website designed to provide the user with an opportunity to choose a hosting provider wisely. The system monitors server performance using bots which do not slow down the servers themselves yet provide accurate information on their status, response, and number. It can also be used at the initial stage of building your website, when you haven’t chosen a hosting provider yet – the statistics can help you do it.

To check whether your hosting provider manages to live up to its promises, go to your provider’s page on HRANK and look through the data available there. You can track how it is developing by the number of servers employed, how fast it is, and if it is reliable in terms of downtime prevention. The chart enables you to see the data collected over several months.

4. InternetVista

While this system is not free, InternetVista is a comprehensive solution designed for businesses that take their website performance very seriously. All stats provided are displayed in a special dashboard, so there is no need for plugins. Adjustable alerts and the ability to add not only websites, but also landing pages and other URLs make it a valuable service for many.

5. DownNotifier

It is a tool which is capable of notifying you when your website is down or when a particular text on it is missing. It is so simple to start using it that its notification system might be one of the best options for beginners and new websites: all you have to do is to go to their homepage, specify the website you want to monitor, the email address to which notifications will be sent, and whether you want SMS alerts. Just that simple. This basic service is free, and extra features come at around fifteen dollars a year.

Monitoring your website is a must if you want it to function properly and serve people. Use one or several of the services mentioned above to stay informed, and make sure your website visitors always have access to the information they need.