If you’re running a business and your WordPress website or WooCommerce online store must be working 24 hours a day to keep your business alive, you need to make sure that the server and software you’re using are always in top shape.
Having a reliable hosting and up to date software is a must, but still once in a while your online services might fail – be it a web server bug, DNS server issue, or just some other unexpected thing may happen. That’s why you need a service that would look up how your website is doing, and would let you know when something’s not right so you could fix the issue without too much damage to your business.
I have a few blogs which generate hundreds, sometimes a few thousand visitors a day. And I run them on VPS server, so if the server goes down, it’s my responsibility to get the service working again. Here’s what I can personally use and recommend.
How to get notifications when WordPress website is down
It does not matter if you’re running WordPress website, WooCommerce store, or any other CMS or e-commerce platform. The service I use works with any type of websites and software. And that service is UptimeRobot.
By the way, I’m not this service affiliate, or have anything else related with the company behind this tool. It just works for me, so I can easily recommend it to anyone.
UptimeRobot has a few plans. It’s free plan monitors websites every 5 minutes, and notifies about issues via email. Their paid plan checks sites every minute, and it able to notify about website issues via email and SMS. You can check it’s pricing and all features here.
In this tutorial we’ll set up a free plan for the website you’re reading right now. The same way you can start using UptimeRobot to monitor your WordPress website status too.
Open UptimeRobot.com, and hit Register for free, and fill registration form. For your convenience I’d recommend to register with the email you want to get notifications about website issues here. P.S. don’t use email which is hosted on the same server as your website is hosted. If server goes down, you won’t get email notifications too. Better use Gmail, or any other email which is hosted elsewhere.
After registration you’ll need to active your account by hitting a link which was just sent to your email.
Once your account is activated click + Add New Monitor in UptimeRobot dashboard.
Adding uptime monitor to your WordPress website cannot be easier – just fill the monitor form:
- Monitor type – HTTP(s)
- Enter any name to Friendly Name field – it will help you know which website stats you’re using (if you’ll have more than one uptime monitors for multiple site)
- Enter website URL – for the website you want to monitor.
- Select email where you should get notification about website down times and up times.
That’s it – you may leave all the other settings as they are now.
Here you can see what data you’ll see in your UptimeRobot Account Dashboard after using uptime monitor for some time.
As you see you’ll see all the history when your website could not be accessed, and when it was back online.
The most important thing – you’ll get notified via email when your WordPress website is down or up working again. So you won’t need to monitor your website constantly – UptimeRobot will do it for you.
