Website monitoring sounds simple: request the page, see if it answers. In practice, the difference between a useful monitor and a noisy one is in the details. This guide covers what to check, how often, and how to make alerts trustworthy.
Check the right things
- Status code: 2xx is healthy; 3xx to a login page usually is not
- A keyword that only appears when the page rendered correctly
- Response time, so slowdowns are visible before outages
- SSL certificate expiry
- Domain expiry
Choose an interval
Every 5 minutes is fine for a blog. For a shop or SaaS, every minute means you know within two minutes instead of ten. Faster than 30 seconds rarely helps and adds load.
Avoid false alarms
Require two or three consecutive failures before alerting, or a confirmation from a second location. A single timeout is often the network, not the site.
Where the alert goes
Send alerts to the channel you actually watch: Telegram or Slack for most teams, PagerDuty for on-call rotations, email as a backup.
Tell your users
A public status page saves support time during outages and builds trust afterwards.