How to choose a WordPress uptime monitor, plugin or outside service
A WordPress uptime monitor checks your site on a schedule and tells you when visitors cannot load it. It has to check from outside your hosting, because a plugin running inside WordPress goes down with the site. This guide explains plugins and outside services, what to look for, and how to set up WordPress uptime monitoring for free.
The short answer
A WordPress uptime monitor should check your site from outside your hosting, every 1 to 5 minutes, and alert you only when a failure is confirmed. A plugin on its own cannot do it, because it stops when your site does. The best plugins simply connect your site to an outside service.
- What it is: a service that loads your site on a schedule and alerts you when people cannot reach it.
- Plugin or service: the checking must happen outside your server. Inside checks also depend on WP-Cron, which runs only when a page loads.
- What to look for: checks every 1 to 5 minutes, confirmation from more than one location, WordPress error pages counted as down, and alerts somebody will see.
- Free options: Jetpack Monitor and UptimeRobot check every 5 minutes. MarQira Uptime Monitor, our free plugin, connects one site to WPCentrify.
- Self-hosted: Uptime Kuma is free and open source, but it must run on a different server from your site.
What is a WordPress uptime monitor?
A WordPress uptime monitor is a service that loads your site on a schedule, usually every 1 to 5 minutes, and alerts you when it cannot. It checks from the internet, the way a customer would, so it notices a broken site even when nobody has visited it yet, and long before anybody thinks to tell you.
Minutes matter on a site that takes orders, bookings or enquiries, and a long outage reaches search as well. Google says that server errors make its crawlers slow down, and that pages which keep returning a server error are eventually dropped from its index.
How is uptime monitoring different from backups and security?
Each one answers a different question, and only the uptime monitor answers "can people reach my site right now?".
| Tool | What it does | Does it tell you the site is down? |
|---|---|---|
| Backups | Keeps copies of your files and database so you can restore them | No. It helps you recover once you know |
| Security plugin or security monitoring | Looks for malware, vulnerabilities and attacks | No, although an attack can be the cause |
| Uptime monitor | Loads your site from outside and alerts you when it fails | Yes, that is its whole job |
| Performance monitoring | Measures how fast your pages load | No. A slow site is still up |
Can a WordPress plugin tell you your site is down?
Not on its own. A plugin is code that runs inside WordPress, on your server. If the server, PHP or the database fails, the plugin stops with the site and cannot send the alert. That is why a real WordPress uptime monitor always checks your site from somewhere else, on a different network.
There is a second, quieter problem. A plugin that tests your site from the inside has to run its checks on a schedule, and in WordPress that schedule is normally WP-Cron. The WordPress Plugin Handbook explains that WP-Cron "is only triggered on page load". On a site with few visitors, an inside check may not run for hours, which is exactly when nobody else would notice an outage either. Moving WP-Cron to a real server schedule helps the timing, but not the first problem.
So a check from inside WordPress cannot report any of these, because each one stops the plugin as well:
- the server or hosting account is down or suspended
- "Error establishing a database connection"
- a PHP fatal error, which WordPress shows as "There has been a critical error on this website"
- an expired domain or broken DNS, so visitors never reach your server at all
The good news is that most plugins sold as an uptime monitor are not inside checkers. They connect your site to an outside service, and that service does the checking from its own servers.
What are the three kinds of WordPress uptime monitor plugins?
Search the plugin directory for an uptime monitor and you will find three different things under one name. Only two of them can warn you when your server is down, and in both cases it is an outside service doing the work.
| Kind of plugin | What it really does | Alerts you if the server is down? |
|---|---|---|
| Connector to an outside check Jetpack Monitor, MarQira Uptime Monitor (ours), and management platforms such as ManageWP, WP Umbrella and WPCentrify | Links your site to a service that checks it from its own servers | Yes. The service does the checking |
| Dashboard for a paid service Super Monitoring, which needs an account with that service | Shows the results of a monitoring account inside wp-admin | Yes, through the account. The plugin only displays them |
| Inside checker Some small plugins in the directory; read the description | Tests the site from the site, usually on WP-Cron | No. It goes down with the site |
To tell which one you are looking at, read the plugin's description. If it asks you to create an account, connect to a service or paste a key, the checking happens elsewhere, which is what you want. If it says it checks your site from your site, or mentions WP-Cron, it cannot tell you when the server is down.
You do not always need a plugin at all. UptimeRobot, the best-known free uptime monitor, checks any address you type into its dashboard. The most installed UptimeRobot plugin is made by a third party, and its WordPress.org page warns that it has not been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress, which is a good reason to leave it out.
Should you use a plugin, an outside service or both?
For most sites the answer is an outside service, connected with a plugin only if the service offers one. A plugin is handy for showing results inside wp-admin, but the one alert that matters, "your site is down", has to come from outside, because it must still work when your site does not.
| Your situation | What to use |
|---|---|
| One small business site, no budget | A free outside service, such as Jetpack Monitor, the free UptimeRobot plan or MarQira Uptime Monitor |
| A shop, booking site or main source of leads | Checks every minute, confirmed from more than one location, on the checkout or booking page as well as the homepage |
| Several client or company sites | A monitor or management platform that groups alerts, so one email covers a whole host going down |
| You want full control and run your own server | A self-hosted monitor such as Uptime Kuma, on a different server and network from your sites |
| A managed WordPress host | Ask your host what it monitors and whether it alerts you. If the answer is unclear, add an outside check of your own; a free one costs nothing |
What should you look for in a WordPress uptime monitor?
Look at five things: how often it checks, where it checks from, what it counts as down, how it alerts you and what history it keeps. For a WordPress site, the third one matters more than most comparison pages admit.
Check frequency
Every minute or every 5 minutes, not every hour. Free plans usually check every 5 minutes and paid plans every minute. Once a check fails, a good monitor checks again quickly to confirm it. Our guide to how often to check a WordPress site has the numbers for each interval.
Check locations
A monitor that checks from one place turns its own network problems into your outage. Look for checks from several locations, and a rule that more than one must agree before anyone is emailed.
What it counts as down
A basic monitor only asks whether your server answered. WordPress fails in ways that a quick glance can miss: "There has been a critical error on this website", "Error establishing a database connection", a blank white page, or the "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance" notice still showing an hour after an update. WordPress sends most of these with a 500 status and its maintenance notice with a 503, so they show up as errors, but a white screen can still come back as a normal 200. Choose a monitor that reads the page, or one that lets you check for a word that should always be on it.
The opposite mistake costs you sleep. A firewall such as Cloudflare or Wordfence can block a monitor while real visitors get through. A good monitor tells that apart from an outage, so you are not woken for a site that was fine.
Alerts that reach the right person
Email is the minimum. SMS, an app notification or a chat message helps if you need to know at night. Check who receives them, too: Jetpack's free monitor emails only the WordPress.com account that first connected Jetpack, which is a problem if that is a former employee or your old developer.
History and reports
Look for uptime figures over at least 30 days, every incident with its start, length and cause, and a report you can send to a client or your boss. Response time is useful too, but it belongs with performance: a slow site is still up.
Monitor one WordPress site free with WPCentrify
MarQira Uptime Monitor, our free plugin on WordPress.org, connects one site to the WPCentrify Free plan. Your site is checked from outside every 5 minutes, and you get an email when it goes down and when it is back. The plugin only reports uptime: it cannot update or change anything on your site, and it records nothing about your visitors.
Paid plans from $15 a month add more websites, and checks every minute from the Studio plan up. How the free plugin works.
What are the free, paid and self-hosted options?
Free plans are enough for most single sites: they check every 5 minutes and email you. Paid plans add one-minute checks, more alert channels and more sites. Self-hosted tools cost nothing but your time, and they only work if they run somewhere your site does not.
| Option | How it works | How often it checks | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jetpack Monitor | Plugin connected to Jetpack's servers | Every 5 minutes free; every minute with the paid upgrade in Jetpack Manage | Free |
| UptimeRobot | Outside service, no plugin needed | Every 5 minutes free, for up to 50 monitors; every 60 seconds on paid plans | Free; paid from $12 a month billed yearly |
| Better Stack | Outside service | Every 3 minutes free, for up to 10 monitors; as often as every 30 seconds on paid plans | Free for personal projects |
| ManageWP Uptime Monitor | Add-on to a management platform | Every 60 seconds | $1 per site a month, or $25 for up to 100 sites |
| WP Umbrella | Management platform, uptime included | You choose, from every minute to every 60 minutes | $2.19 per site a month |
| Super Monitoring | Paid service with a WordPress plugin | Every minute | From $5.99 a month after a 14-day trial |
| Uptime Kuma | Self-hosted, open source | As often as every 20 seconds | Free; you run the server |
| WPCentrify (our product) | Management platform, with the free MarQira Uptime Monitor plugin for one site | Every minute on Studio and up; every 5 minutes on Free and Solo | Free for one site; paid from $15 a month |
Facts from each vendor's own pages, checked 18 October 2026. Prices are in US dollars. WPCentrify is our product.
Two things to check before you rely on a free plan. First, the terms: UptimeRobot's own terms say it is available for any use, including commercial and business use, while Better Stack describes its free plan as being for personal projects. Second, whether it will still be around: Freshping, once a popular free choice, disabled its free accounts on March 6, 2026.
For a longer, tool-by-tool look, see our comparison of the best website uptime monitoring software.
Self-hosting with Uptime Kuma
Uptime Kuma is a free, open source (MIT license) self-hosted uptime monitor that can send alerts through more than 90 notification services. Its README gives a single Docker command to start it:
docker run -d --restart=always -p 3001:3001 -v uptime-kuma:/app/data --name uptime-kuma louislam/uptime-kuma:2Run it on a server that is not the one your WordPress site lives on, ideally with a different provider. A monitor on the same server goes down with the site, which is the plugin problem all over again. You also take on its updates, its backups and its own uptime.
How do you set up a WordPress uptime monitor?
You can set one up in a few minutes. These five steps work with any good outside monitor; our guide to how to monitor website uptime goes deeper into each one.
- Pick an outside monitor. Choose one that checks at least every 5 minutes from more than one location and alerts someone who will act.
- Add your site and the pages that matter. Add your homepage, then the pages that earn money, such as the checkout, booking form or contact page, using the https address your visitors use.
- Choose who gets alerts, and when. Send alerts to at least two people or to an inbox somebody reads, and ask for a failure to be confirmed before anyone is alerted, so a one-second blip does not wake you.
- Let the checker through your firewall. If Cloudflare, Wordfence or your host's firewall blocks the monitor, it will report outages that never happened. Many monitors publish their IP addresses so you can allow them.
- Test it. Use the test alert most monitors offer, check that every person on the list receives it and that it does not land in spam, then watch the first week of results for false alarms.
How do you read an uptime report?
An uptime report answers three questions: how often your site was reachable, how long each outage lasted and what went wrong. Read the three together. 99.9% uptime in a 30-day month sounds excellent until you see that it was one 43-minute outage on a Monday morning.
Uptime percentage
The share of checks that found your site working over a period, usually 30 days. Each extra 9 cuts the downtime allowed by a factor of ten: 99% allows about 7 hours 12 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month, and 99.9% about 43 minutes. The full table is on our uptime monitoring page.
Downtime length and incidents
Ten one-minute blips and one ten-minute outage give the same percentage but mean different things. Blips point to an overloaded server or a flaky network; one long outage points to something that broke and stayed broken. Look at the list of incidents, not just the number.
Error types
Most reports say what the monitor saw when the check failed. This is where to start looking:
| What the report shows | What it usually means | What to check first |
|---|---|---|
| Timeout or no answer | The server is down, overloaded or blocking the checker | Your host's status page, then server resources and firewall rules |
| 500 Internal Server Error | A PHP error, often caused by a plugin or theme | The critical error email WordPress sends, then the error log |
| 502 or 504 | The web server or a proxy did not get an answer from PHP in time | Your host, PHP workers and any CDN in front of the site |
| 503 Service Unavailable | Maintenance mode or an overloaded server | A leftover .maintenance file after an update, then your host's limits |
| 520 to 526 | Cloudflare could not get a good answer from your server | The origin server and its SSL settings |
| SSL error | The certificate expired or does not match the domain | Certificate renewal and its settings at your host |
| DNS or domain not found | The domain expired or its DNS records changed | Renewal at your registrar, then the DNS records |
If your site is down right now, work through our WordPress site down checklist in that order.
Response time
Many reports also show how fast your site answered. It is worth watching, because a site that answers slowly loses visitors, but it is not downtime. Track it with performance monitoring, alongside Core Web Vitals.
Is WordPress outdated in 2026?
No. WordPress is actively developed: version 7.1 came out on August 19, 2026, after 7.0 in May, and 2026 has also brought 14 maintenance and security releases so far. W3Techs says WordPress runs 39.6% of all websites. For uptime, the question that matters is the setup around WordPress, meaning its hosting, plugins, theme, updates, domain and certificate, and those are exactly what a monitor tells you about.
How does WPCentrify monitor WordPress uptime?
WPCentrify is our product, a hosted WordPress website management platform for anyone responsible for one WordPress site or many. Its uptime monitoring is built around one question: can visitors really see and read the site?
- Checked from outside, from 3 locations. Every site is checked from Malaysia, Canada and the USA, as often as every 60 seconds depending on your plan: every minute on Studio, Agency and Scale, every 5 minutes on Free and Solo, and every minute on every plan once a check fails.
- Confirmed before you are emailed. An alert goes out only after three failed checks in a row and when locations on different providers agree, after a second look on a fresh connection through a different DNS service.
- WordPress failures count as down. A critical error message, a database connection error or a PHP fatal error counts even when the page returns 200, as do an expired or mismatched SSL certificate, a domain that no longer exists and a maintenance page still up after 12 minutes. See what counts as down.
- Not every red light is an outage. WordPress's own maintenance page during an update, a firewall that blocks only our checker and a slow site are not called down.
- Alerts you can act on. On sites checked every minute, the email usually arrives 2 to 3 minutes after the site goes down. You get at most 4 emails per outage, then a back up email. It also warns you about an unreachable wp-admin, a disconnected plugin, an expiring domain and, if you want, an expiring SSL certificate.
- A record to show. Uptime history per site, SLA tracking and status pages, for every site you manage from one dashboard.
One honest limit: alerts go by email only for now. If you need a phone call or an SMS at night, pair WPCentrify with a service that offers them. Full details are on the WordPress uptime monitoring page, and plans are on the pricing page.
Sources
- Cron, WordPress Plugin Handbook
- How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers and Pause or disable a website, Google
- Jetpack Monitor and the Jetpack Manage dashboard, Jetpack support
- Pricing and Terms, UptimeRobot; Uptime Robot Plugin for WordPress, WordPress.org
- Pricing and Check frequency, Better Stack
- Uptime Monitor, ManageWP
- Pricing and Uptime and performance monitoring, WP Umbrella
- Super Monitoring, WordPress.org, and Super Monitoring pricing
- Uptime Kuma, GitHub
- Freshping deprecation FAQ, Freshping support
- Usage statistics of WordPress, W3Techs
- WordPress releases and the WordPress 7.1 announcement, WordPress.org
- MarQira Uptime Monitor, WordPress.org
All sources checked on 18 October 2026.
Questions about WordPress uptime monitors
An uptime monitor is a service that loads a website on a schedule, usually every 1 to 5 minutes, and alerts you when the site cannot be reached or shows an error. It checks from outside your hosting, the way a visitor would, so it can tell you about an outage before a customer does.
Sign up for an outside monitoring service, add your site's address and the pages that matter, choose who receives alerts and send a test alert. A plugin can connect your site to the service, but the checking itself should happen outside your server, so an outage cannot silence it.
It depends on how many sites you run and how quickly you need to know. For one site, a free service such as Jetpack Monitor or UptimeRobot, which check every 5 minutes, is enough. For shops and client sites, choose one-minute checks confirmed from more than one location, as WPCentrify, our product, does.
Yes. Jetpack Monitor is free and checks every 5 minutes. MarQira Uptime Monitor, our free plugin on WordPress.org, connects one site to WPCentrify's Free plan: it is checked every 5 minutes, with an email when it goes down and when it is back. Both do the checking from outside your server.
Not by itself. A plugin runs inside WordPress, so when the server, PHP or the database fails, the plugin fails too. A plugin that schedules its own checks also depends on WP-Cron, which runs only when a page loads. Use a plugin that connects your site to an outside service instead.
Yes. Jetpack's Downtime Monitor is free and does not need a paid plan. It checks your site every five minutes and emails the WordPress.com account that connected Jetpack, with optional app notifications. One-minute checks, SMS and alerts to several people come with a paid upgrade in Jetpack Manage.
Jetpack Monitor is a free alternative for a single site. Better Stack has a free plan for personal projects, and Uptime Kuma is free if you host it yourself. For several WordPress sites, a management platform such as ManageWP, WP Umbrella or WPCentrify adds uptime checks to updates and backups.
Only if you are happy to run and update a server. Uptime Kuma is free and open source, but it has to run on a different server and network from your WordPress sites, or it goes down with them. For most site owners, a free hosted service is less work.
Every 5 minutes is fine for a brochure site, and every minute is better for a shop, a booking site or anything that brings in leads. Faster checks only help if the monitor also confirms a failure, from another location or with a few more checks, before it alerts you.
No. An outside monitor makes one ordinary request per check, about the same as one visitor loading one page, once a minute or once every five minutes. That is a tiny load next to normal traffic. A checker that runs inside WordPress uses your own server, which is one more reason to avoid one.
An outage of a few minutes is unlikely to matter: Google says pages already in its index are kept while its crawlers slow down after server errors. Pages that keep returning a server error are eventually dropped. For planned work, Google recommends a 503 status for no more than a day or two.
No. WordPress 7.1 was released on August 19, 2026, after 7.0 in May, with 14 maintenance and security releases in 2026 so far, and W3Techs says it runs 39.6% of all websites. Whether a WordPress site stays online depends on its hosting, plugins, updates and monitoring.
Related reading
WordPress uptime monitoring
Every site checked from 3 locations, with an email only when visitors really cannot reach it.
See the featureHow to monitor website uptime
What to check, how often, from where, and how to stop false downtime alerts.
Read the guideBest uptime monitoring software
Nine uptime monitoring tools compared on free plans, check speed and locations.
Read the comparisonMore on this topic: WordPress site down checklist and how to monitor a WordPress site.
Hear about an outage before your customers do
WPCentrify checks every WordPress site you manage from 3 locations and emails you only when visitors really cannot reach it.
Plans from $15 a month, or start free on one website.