Why your website needs uptime monitoring and a status page

Uptime monitoring checks your website from outside, every few minutes, the way a visitor would, and tells you as soon as it stops answering. Without it, you usually find out a site is down when a customer complains. A status page is the other half: a simple page, kept apart from your site, that tells customers what is wrong and when it will be fixed. Free, open-source tools such as Uptime Kuma, Gatus and MainWP do both jobs.

Check from outside, the way a visitor does

Google's site reliability engineers describe two kinds of monitoring. White-box monitoring reads measurements from inside the system, such as memory or error counts. Black-box monitoring tests what a user would see from outside.

For a website, the outside check is the one that matters most. It notices the problems a visitor would notice: the site not loading, an error page, an expired certificate, a domain that stopped resolving. And it has to run somewhere other than the server it is checking. A monitor on the same server goes down with the site and cannot send the alert.

What a good monitor checks

• That the page loads and returns a normal response.
• That the right words appear. A keyword check catches a page that loads but shows an error message or a blank template.
• That the certificate is valid, so visitors are not met with a security warning.
• That DNS still answers, so the domain points where it should.
• How long the response took, so a slow decline shows up before it becomes an outage.

And it alerts the right person in a way they will see: email, a chat channel or a phone notification.

What a status page is for

When something goes wrong, customers want to know three things: is it just me, what is being done, and when will it be back. A status page answers those questions in one place, so your team can fix the problem instead of answering the same message many times.

A status page should be hosted apart from the site it reports on, so it stays up when the site does not. It should show the current state of each service, any planned maintenance, and short updates during an incident.

Open-source tools that do the job

Uptime Kuma checks websites over HTTP and HTTPS, with keyword and JSON checks, as well as TCP, ping, DNS and more, as often as every 20 seconds. It sends alerts to email and to more than 90 chat and notification services.

Gatus judges each check against conditions you set, such as the status code, the response time, the certificate's expiry date or the text of the response. Its results are kept in memory unless you give it a database, so set one up if you want history.

MainWP suits agencies and businesses with many WordPress sites. Its built-in uptime monitor checks the connected sites on a schedule from every five minutes to once a day and emails you when a site goes down and when it comes back. It checks from wherever the MainWP dashboard is hosted, so host the dashboard on a different server from the sites it watches.

Running a monitor yourself

Each of these tools needs a home of its own, away from the sites it watches. A small Noiz Cloud server with root can run Uptime Kuma or Gatus, installed from the project's documentation. Remember that the monitor then needs looking after too: updates, backups and its own alerting if it stops.

Checks after every update

For WordPress sites, WordPress Care checks after every update cycle that the site loads, the admin works and the forms and checkout still do their job. That is a check after each change, not a monitor watching the site between updates, so a separate monitor still has its place.

If you have questions about monitoring your site, get in touch.

Sources

Checked 19 October 2026.

• Google SRE book: monitoring distributed systems
• Uptime Kuma
• Gatus
• MainWP Dashboard on WordPress.org
• MainWP: uptime monitoring
• Atlassian: what is Statuspage

Noiz

• Cloud servers
• WordPress Care

Note: while some of this content was produced with the help of AI, the final editing has been done by a real human being.