In this guide, we will talk about how you can easily add uptime monitoring to your WordPress website, get notified, and take precautions that your website doesn’t go down or, if it does, how to fix it.
The most significant loss to an online business is when its website goes down for an extended period. One, you will lose business from potential customers. Two, your SEO efforts will suffer as downtime causes websites to lose rankings. Three, you will have to investigate and fix the cause of downtime, costing you time.
That is why uptime monitoring your website’s uptime is essential, and getting notified immediately is just as important and should be part of your WordPress security policy. Many uptime monitoring services are available that notify you instantly whenever your website goes down.
As we said, many uptime monitoring services are available; we will name some of the most popular ones below. Choosing any of them would serve you well.
No matter which uptime monitoring service you choose, ensure that you use these tools’ features.
For this tutorial, we will use BetterUptime and add it to our WordPress website. This service comes with a free plan that you can later upgrade to access more of its features.
You can create a free account at BetterUptime through their signup process. While creating the account, you can add the website URL you wish to monitor.
You can add more websites to monitor after completing the signup process.
When adding the website URLs to track inside of the dashboard, you will be presented with an option to select the alert type. There are many types of alerts that you can use, but most commonly, we will use the “Becomes Unavailable”. This alert type will generate a notification whenever the website isn’t accessible.
After you have added your website to track, you can view detailed reports inside the BetterUptime dashboard.
If you work with a team, it is best to integrate the Uptime monitoring service with the communication tools that your team uses.
BetterUptime can be easily integrated with Slack, sending notifications to the Slack channel it is connected to.
To do this, navigate to Integrations > Popular and click “Add Another” beside Slack. You will be redirected to another page asking you to connect BetterUptime with Slack and select the channel you want to send notifications to.
That’s it; you can easily connect any WordPress website with BetterUptime and get notifications on your preferred channel, emails, SMS, or Slack.
You do not need to add any plugin or authentication on your WordPress website to use BetterUptime. It just works by simply tracking the status codes of your WordPress URLs.
Acting after the damage is done isn’t necessarily a good strategy; it is best to have remedies in place that let your website survive any significant outage.
There are many reasons a WordPress website might go down; some precautions can be taken to minimize or neutralize common downtime-causing issues.
Having outdated WordPress files, whether it be core, themes, or plugins, will put your website at risk as hackers can gain access to it and take it down if you have a vulnerable code on your website.
You can easily counter this by keeping all your WordPress files up to date. Doing so manually, however, will cost you a lot of time; if you run multiple WordPress websites, it can become a tedious and repetitive task.
You can use a service like Patchstack that notifies you whenever you have an outdated or vulnerable theme or plugin installed on your site. You can also enable automatic updates inside the Patchstack dashboard, and all your themes and plugins will be automatically updated whenever a new version is released.
Hosting your WordPress websites on shared servers or servers with low-end specifications will increase the risk of your website going down.
It can easily happen when your website receives a spike in traffic or if you are executing a PHP code on your website. As you will run out of server resources, that is, RAM and CPU, your website will temporarily go down and be back once the server is up and running again.
Moving to reputable cloud servers like AWS EC2, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure is a good option. Luckily in the WordPress ecosystem, there are many reliable hosting providers like.
Caching repeated requests is an excellent way to reduce the stress on your hosting server’s hardware and can help improve the speed and survivability of your WordPress website.
You can use a caching plugin like W3TC or WP Rocket or ask your hosting provider to help configure necessary caching solutions on your website.
Many new WordPress websites start off with basic hosting packages, and as the websites start gaining popularity and traffic, then it is a good idea to upgrade your hosting plan to a suitable one.
To be better prepared, keep an eye on your server usage statistics, as they can tell you whether you would want to consider upgrading RAM, CPU, or Disk on your website.
CDNs like Cloudflare and BunnyCDN are popular choices in the WordPress ecosystem. CDN will cache the static content on your website, like images, CSS, and HTML, and serve it through its own distributed servers.
A CDN will add another layer of security and performance to your WordPress website, making it survive traffic spikes. In some cases, if your main hosting server goes down, a static version of the website is served through the CDN.
Adding an uptime monitoring service on our WordPress website helps you to be better informed whenever your website goes down. And keeping the logs of past incidents also helps if you want to track the performance of your current hosting setup.
If your website experiences frequent downtimes in a week or a month, you must remedy the problem by identifying the underlying cause and fixing it.
