Website uptime monitoring: the easy way to know when your site is down
As much as you can care for your website or clients’ sites, it’s always going to go down at some point. There might be hundreds of reasons for downtimes, but the point here is to discuss the simplest and easiest way to monitor your website uptime so you can act fast when it goes down. And fast means before it affects the audience too much.
There is nothing more frustrating than receiving a call from your client asking you what’s going on with their site before you even realised something was up! Ideally you want to be informed first and act as fast as you can to minimise downtime, and above all be able to tell your client that you are aware of it and already actively working on it.
But website uptime monitoring has never been an easy task, and more often than not, helpful tools and services would typically be quite expensive. Thankfully, there is now a free and easy way to monitor website uptime, thanks to Wordfence for adding this amazing feature to www.fastorslow.com. Let’s see how it works, what it does and how it can make your life easier.
The new kid on the block
Wordfence launched www.fastorslow.com back in May 2020. It’s primarily a website performance checker to help web developers understand how sites perform in different locations around the world, what undermines their scores and ultimately help them fine tune their code for better overall SEO.
For those not familiar with Wordfence, they are the creators of the very popular security plugin for WordPress with more than 4 millions active installs to date. Wordfence is one of the most robust security plugin for WordPress, one that I have been using for a while now for my clients’ sites, and part of the list of plugins I recommended in the past.
The team at Wordfence recently added a website uptime monitoring feature and offer it completely free of charge. The only pre-requisite is the creation of an account before adding sites to monitor. This account creation acts more as a security step than anything else, making sure your are monitoring sites you manage to a certain degree. Creating an account takes no longer than a minute and the email verification process garanties a level of security.
Quick and easy website uptime monitoring
Head over to their registration page to create your account. Once done, just verify your email by clicking the link in their email verification. That’s it, you are now ready to add sites right away.
From the uptime dashboard, you can add a site to monitor with a click of the “create” button. The default presets are good for most of us. However I recommend to set the frequency to 1 hour instead of the 5 minutes interval, unless your site requires such stringent checks. Add your site URL, change the interval frequency, and finally choose your 1 location. Here, I recommend the location nearest to your audience.
You’ll get an on-screen and email confirmation when the monitoring is effectively started. That’s all there is to it, now the site will be checked hourly, and you’ll receive an email should it go down.
Website uptime monitoring is now easier than ever. The fact that it’s free is truly amazing and accessible to everyone, no matter the size of your sites. Such opportunity given to us should seriously help making the web a little better now.
We know that support and maintenance is a crucial add-on to any website project, and ultimately something clients need to integrate as part of owning a website altogether. Tools like this just make things that much easier, so have a try and see how this free uptime monitoring can help you in your activity.
Feel free to contact me to discuss your project if you feel you need a freelance graphic designer to help you achieve your goal. I am a freelance graphic designer in Hong Kong, building quality branding across media, from print to digital.
Read more on this topic:
Fast or Slow help section by www.fastorslow.com
Core Web Vitals & Performance Monitoring: Don’t Lose Your Search Ranking in 2021, video on Wordfence’s Youtube channel.
Free SEO tool from Wordfence – Fast or Slow by SEJ
* banner image from Unsplash.com
