WordPress uptime monitoring that only alerts you when a site is really down

WordPress uptime monitoring is a service outside your site that loads it on a schedule, checks that a visitor would get a working page, and alerts you when they would not. WPCentrify checks every connected WordPress site from 3 locations in Malaysia, Canada and the USA, and emails you when an outage is confirmed.

As often as every 60 seconds, depending on your plan, from 3 locations: Malaysia, Canada and the USA. As soon as a check fails, the site is checked every minute on every plan until the result is certain.

On sites checked every minute, the email usually arrives 2 to 3 minutes after the site goes down. On the slowest check interval it can take up to about 7 minutes. The short wait is deliberate: by default the site has to fail three checks in a row and locations on different providers have to agree, so you hear about real outages, not network blips.

A site is down when a visitor would not get it: the server does not answer within 20 seconds, it returns a server error such as 500, 502 or 504, Cloudflare shows error 520 to 526 or 530, WordPress shows a critical error or a database connection error, the hosting account is suspended or shows a bare server page, the SSL certificate is broken, the domain no longer exists, or a maintenance page is still showing after 12 minutes.

No. Cloudflare challenges and blocks, Wordfence, Sucuri, Imunify360, ModSecurity, rate limits and password protection that turn away only the checker are not counted as down, because your visitors still get in. A plain "Forbidden" or "Not found" page with nothing else on it is not counted either.

Not at first. The "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance" page that WordPress shows while it updates is not an outage, and no alert is sent while an update or restore run from WPCentrify is in progress. If a maintenance page is still showing after 12 minutes, it counts as down.

Yes. "There has been a critical error on this website.", "Error establishing a database connection." and PHP fatal errors printed in place of the page all count as down, even when the server labels the error page as a normal 200 response, which many hosts do.

A website down email when the outage is confirmed, a few reminders while it stays down and a back up email when it works again, with at most 4 emails per outage. Sites marked as taking payments, holding customer data or under a service agreement get their reminders twice as often, with an urgent subject line.

By email, the one alert channel for now. You choose which people get each kind of alert for each site, and when several of your sites with the same host go down together you get one email listing them, once you have told WPCentrify who hosts each site.

No. A site that still loads is not down, however slow it is. Speed and Core Web Vitals are tracked separately by WPCentrify performance monitoring.

No. The checks are ordinary page requests made from outside the site, a few per check, which is less than one visitor browsing a few pages. Nothing runs inside WordPress to make them happen.

Yes. As well as the homepage, you can watch the pages that matter most, such as a checkout or booking page, and pages behind a login, such as an account area that anonymous visitors never see.

Yes. An expired, mismatched or self-signed SSL certificate counts as down, and you can switch on a warning before a certificate expires. Domain warnings come 30 days before the registration runs out and again in the final week, for most domain endings.

Most care plans promise 99.9 percent, which allows about 43 minutes of downtime in a 30-day month. Only promise what the hosting can deliver, and measure against it. WPCentrify tracks each site against the figure you set and warns you before the month is used up.

Yes. Uptime figures go into the monthly client report, and you can give each client a public or private status page.

For a single site, a general uptime service may be enough. For several WordPress sites, WPCentrify checks each one from 3 locations in Malaysia, Canada and the USA, reads the page the way a visitor would so WordPress errors count as down, ignores firewalls and maintenance pages that do not affect visitors, and keeps each site's uptime next to its updates, backups and security.

Yes. Several uptime services have free plans, and WPCentrify is free during early access. When you compare free plans, check how often they look at your site, whether they read the page or only the status code, and whether an outage is confirmed from more than one location before you are alerted.