How to monitor a Wordpress website [short guide]

Wordpress is a popular choice for building a website today.

It's no surprise either, over 400 million people visit Wordpress powered websites each month - and your's is one of them.

It's important to consider what happens when your website stops working, and how website uptime monitoring can actually help you avoid website downtime, saving you both time and money.

In this blog post, we'll go through how you can get started with website monitoring and why you should monitor your Wordpress website today.

Are you ready?

Let's dive straight in...

What is website uptime monitoring?

Website uptime monitoring is the process taken to ensure the availability of a server that might be running:

• A website
• A blog
• An API

Or something else.

It's often set up by web agencies and medium sized companies who manage many client websites and systems and helps alert developers of downtime that a client website might be having so that they can take action.

But website monitoring and domain monitoring isn't strictly just for web agencies.

It's also vitally important for Wordpress website owners like yourself.

Do I need to pay for a website uptime monitoring service?

The short answer is, no.

But would we recommend it?

Almost certainly, and this is because this usually unlocks additional monitoring intervals and features that will make monitoring your Wordpress website even easier.

Okay, how do I monitor my Wordpress website? [step by step]

Let's go through, step-by-step how to get up and running with a Wordpress website monitor so that you can be notified of downtime on your website so that you can take action.

1. Account creation

Firstly, create your account on the Domain Monitor platform (it's free) which shouldn't take no more than 30 seconds.

Once you've created your account, you'll need to verify it, this will mean checking your email (and spam folder) for an email from us for you to confirm your account.

2. Set up a new monitor

Next, we need to create a new monitor, you can do this by going to the Monitors section from within your account (look out for the Monitors link in the menu)

Give your monitor a friendly name

Now for the fun part.

Give your monitor a descriptive name, something that you'll recognise when you get a notification from us to let you know that your website is down.

How about a description?

Need to add more detail about what your monitor is about?

This is optional, but can sometimes be useful to add context to your monitor that you're setting up.

Monitor type - choose HTTP(S)

Basic website uptime monitors (the one that will check to make sure your website is up) are called HTTP monitors, these monitors will send HTTP GET requests to your website and will return a HTTP status code for us to find out if your website is down.

Typically, if a website is down, it'll return a status code such as:

• 500
• 400
• 422

Of course, there are many other status codes, but for now, we'll take care of this for you.

How often would you like your Wordpress website checked?

Now it's time to set a check frequency for your monitor, this will be how often we check your website.

If you've got a simple blog with little monthly website traffic then setting this value to something like "Every 15 minutes" should be sufficient.

If you've got a lot more traffic to your Wordpress site then setting this value to 5 minutes would provide quicker website down detection.

Check even faster with our Pro plan

Set a monitor timeout

What's this you ask?

When you visit a website it doesn't load straight away, and, if you've got an older device or are in an area with poor signal it may not load at all, this duration when a website is loading is the number of seconds before you see something.

The same concept applies to your monitor that you're setting up, our monitoring engines will wait for this maximum defined duration and if we don't receive an answer in this time, we'll mark your monitor as down.

We recommend around 20 seconds for this value, but you can always change this later.

Tell us your website URL

You'll need to enter the Monitor URL of your Wordpress website that you're monitoring, this is known as the domain name and usually starts with https://, the part that contains www. at the top of the screen.

Simply copy this and paste it (or manually type it) into the monitoring URL field, this is important when setting up any monitor on Domain Monitor as we won't know if your system is up or down without it.

3. Finally, get notified of downtime alerts

That's it!

It really is that simple to monitor the uptime of your Wordpress website with Domain Monitor, we'll send you alerts through email, and optionally a text message if you prefer along with any other notification channels that you set up.