# website monitoring
How to Monitor a Webflow Site
Webflow handles a lot for you — CDN hosting, SSL certificate provisioning, DNS management for webflow.io subdomains, and CMS rendering. But "Webflow manages it" is not the same as "nothing can go wrong." Webflow outages happen, custom domain configuration breaks, SSL renewals fail, and CMS-driven pages can return errors while the rest of the site stays up.
External monitoring fills the gap between what Webflow's own infrastructure status page reports and what your visitors actually experience.
What Webflow Controls vs What You Control
Understanding the split helps you know where monitoring effort is best spent.
Webflow controls:
- CDN availability and performance
- SSL certificate issuance for
*.webflow.iodomains - CMS rendering and content delivery
- Site publish infrastructure
You control:
- Custom domain DNS configuration
- SSL certificate renewal for custom domains (Webflow handles this via Let's Encrypt, but misconfigurations in your DNS prevent renewal)
- Form submission endpoint behaviour
- Third-party integrations embedded in your site
The most common Webflow site failures relate to custom domain DNS misconfiguration, Let's Encrypt renewal failures due to stale DNS records, and third-party script failures breaking key pages.
What to Monitor
Your Custom Domain
Monitor: https://yourdomain.com
Expected status: 200
Content check: your brand name or headline text
Interval: 5 minutes
A monitor on your custom domain catches outages regardless of whether the cause is Webflow's infrastructure, your DNS, or your CDN configuration.
Your Most Important CMS Pages
Webflow CMS pages are dynamically rendered. A collection page returning 404 or 500 while your homepage is fine is a real scenario — especially after CMS updates or collection restructuring.
Add monitors for your highest-traffic CMS-driven pages: key service pages, product pages, or your blog index.
SSL Certificate
Webflow provisions SSL via Let's Encrypt for custom domains. If your DNS A-record or CNAME configuration changes and Let's Encrypt can't verify domain ownership, SSL renewal fails silently — until the certificate expires and your visitors see a browser warning.
SSL certificate monitoring with alerts at 30 and 14 days before expiry gives you time to investigate and fix DNS issues before visitors are affected.
Domain Expiry
Your custom domain is registered independently of Webflow. If it lapses, your Webflow site disappears entirely. Domain expiry monitoring catches this before it becomes a crisis.
Form Submission Endpoints
If you use Webflow's native forms, test that the form page loads correctly. If you use a third-party form provider (Typeform, Tally, HubSpot), monitor the endpoint separately — third-party forms fail independently of the Webflow site itself.
Webflow's Status Page vs Your Monitoring
Webflow publishes a status page covering their infrastructure. There are two gaps with relying on it exclusively:
- It doesn't cover your specific configuration. A DNS misconfiguration on your side won't show as a Webflow incident.
- It reports infrastructure status, not user experience. A slow CDN edge in your primary geographic market won't necessarily trigger a Webflow status incident.
External monitoring from Domain Monitor checks from the user perspective — if your site is unreachable from outside, you'll know immediately regardless of what Webflow's status page shows.
Alerting for Webflow Sites
Most Webflow sites are managed by small teams or agencies. Keep alerting simple:
- Email alerts to the site owner or account manager
- SMS alerts if the site is e-commerce or generates significant leads
- Slack notifications if the team uses Slack for coordination
For agencies managing multiple Webflow client sites, see best domain monitoring tools for agencies for how to manage monitoring across a portfolio.
Get Started
Domain Monitor adds uptime monitoring, SSL alerts, and domain expiry monitoring for any Webflow site in minutes — no code changes required. Create a free account.
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