How to monitor client websites
A practical guide for web agencies and freelancers.
Client sites fail silently: an SSL certificate expires, hosting lapses, a plugin update takes the site down at 2am. If the client notices before you do, the damage isn't the outage — it's the question "what am I paying you for?". Monitoring exists so that conversation never happens.
What to monitor
- The homepage of every client site — the baseline "is it up" check.
- The page that makes money — checkout, booking form, contact page. Homepages can be fine while the order flow 500s.
- SSL certificates — an expired certificate is a full outage with a scary browser warning, and it's 100% preventable.
How often to check
Every 60 seconds. With 5-minute intervals (common on free plans), a 4-minute outage can come and go unrecorded — but a client who was on the site at the time still saw it. One-minute checks mean you're first to know, which is the entire point.
Avoiding alert fatigue
Alerts should fire on state changes only: one email when a site goes down (with the actual error), one when it recovers (with total downtime). If your monitoring re-alerts every 5 minutes during an outage, you'll mute it within a month — and then it's worthless.
Give clients a status page
A public status page with uptime history and incidents answers "is the site down?" and "was it down yesterday?" without you in the loop. Serve it from your own domain (white-label) and it reads as part of your service.
Turn it into revenue
Agencies typically fold monitoring into a monthly care plan — hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, priority fixes. The uptime history doubles as a monthly report that justifies the retainer: "99.98% uptime, one 6-minute incident, resolved before you noticed" is a sentence clients pay to keep hearing.
Setting it up (5 minutes)
- Create a free account — 10 monitors, no card.
- Add each client's homepage and key page as monitors.
- Alerts for downtime, recovery, and SSL expiry arrive by email automatically.
- Share each monitor's status page, or put it on your own domain.