Monthly Website Uptime Audit Checklist

Setting up monitoring is the first step. Maintaining it is the ongoing work that most teams neglect. Alert contacts go stale when team members change. SSL certificates approach expiry without anyone noticing the lead time shrinking. New services get deployed without corresponding monitors. Check frequencies that made sense at launch are never reviewed.

A monthly audit takes 20–30 minutes and catches these gaps before they become incidents.

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SSL Certificates

• Review all SSL expiry dates — identify any certificates expiring within 60 days. Certificates within 30 days should be renewed immediately. See what is SSL certificate monitoring
• Check for any SSL alerts that fired in the past month — if any certificate triggered a warning, verify the renewal was completed successfully
• Verify certificates cover all active subdomains — new subdomains deployed since last month may not have SSL monitoring configured
• Confirm Let's Encrypt auto-renewals completed for any sites using Let's Encrypt. See Let's Encrypt renewal failed for common failure modes to watch for

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Domain Expiry

• Check all domain expiry dates — flag any domains expiring within 90 days
• Verify auto-renew is active on all domains and payment cards are current. See why domain auto-renew fails
• Confirm WHOIS contact details are current — renewal reminder emails go to the registrant email; make sure that's still monitored
• Review domain expiry monitoring coverage — are all domains you operate included in monitoring, or have new domains been added without corresponding monitors?

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Alert Contacts

• Review all notification contacts — are the phone numbers and email addresses still valid?
• Remove contacts for team members who have left — stale contacts miss alerts
• Add contacts for new team members who should be in the alert chain
• Verify on-call rotation is documented and contacts are assigned to the right monitors
• Test that alerts are actually delivering — send a test notification from your monitoring tool. See how to test your website monitoring setup

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Monitor Coverage

• List all currently monitored endpoints and compare against your actual live infrastructure
• Identify new services, APIs, or pages deployed since last month that aren't yet monitored
• Remove monitors for decommissioned services — stale monitors for retired endpoints generate noise
• Verify content checks are still valid — if a page's content changed (a rebranding, a CMS update), content check strings may need updating
• Check that monitor URLs are still correct — redirects or domain changes may mean a monitor is testing the wrong endpoint

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DNS Records

• Review DNS record change history — check your monitoring dashboard for any DNS alerts in the past month; investigate any that weren't expected
• Verify nameservers match expected values on all monitored domains
• Check for any new subdomains that should have monitoring added
• Look for CNAME records pointing to decommissioned services — see how to audit your DNS records

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Uptime Performance Review

• Review uptime percentages for the past month across all monitored endpoints
• Identify any recurring downtime patterns — specific times of day, specific days of the week, or correlation with deployments. See how to interpret uptime reports
• Review response time trends — are any endpoints getting consistently slower? See website slow loading causes
• Note any incidents and their root causes — track whether the same issues are recurring

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Alert Quality

• Review any false positive alerts from the past month — if alerts are firing for transient failures, consider adjusting confirmation thresholds
• Review any missed incidents — cases where downtime was discovered by users rather than monitoring
• Adjust check frequency for any endpoints where current frequency is too slow to detect incidents before user impact. See how to choose monitoring check frequency
• Review alert fatigue risk — if your team is ignoring or dismissing alerts due to volume, see how to reduce alert fatigue

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Scheduling the Audit

The easiest way to ensure this happens monthly is to block 30 minutes in a recurring calendar event — first Monday of each month works well. Assign ownership to a specific person; "the team" doesn't audit anything.

Domain Monitor consolidates uptime, SSL, domain, and DNS monitoring into a single dashboard, making the monthly audit quick to complete. Create a free account.

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Related Articles

• How to Interpret Uptime Reports
• How to Test Your Website Monitoring Setup
• How to Reduce Alert Fatigue in Your Monitoring Setup
• Domain Portfolio Audit Checklist