Among the most famous and liked website hosting platforms is WordPress. All because of its adaptability and ease of use. Likewise, it is among the most liked targets for cybercriminals. Indeed, WordPress websites receive thousands of tried attacks each day from hackers whose aim is bringing down your site.
In some cases, your website can be brought down by some natural causes — for example, a sudden increase of traffic on your site. Or problems at your hosting company.
Because of these reasons, you must get alerted when your server or website goes down, making it unavailable to visitors. If you want to get alerted when your site goes down, then you can go for WordPress Management services through which wp experts will perform server monitoring of your website.
What is the meaning of downtime?
Downtime is the opposite of uptime. When your website is working well and is accessible to visitors, then all the time is known as uptime. On the other hand, downtime is whenever your website visitors cannot access some or all areas they would like to tour on-site.
Nobody can access your website when it is down. For this reason, you might be losing readers who get frustrated for not obtaining the content of your website. And, you might be losing money from the sales which you cannot make.
Furthermore, search engines such as Google penalizes sites which experience loads of downtime. This costs you important SEO points. Worse of it all is that your online reputation and money are at risk.
Why Should You Observe Your WordPress Downtime and Uptime?
Reasons that can lead to your website or its part going down are so many. For example, someone might hack your website to publish unverified content or even a DDoS attack. Checking your site manually is impossible, due to the multiple web pages and possible causes for your website to go down.
In any case, your website goes down, and you will remain unaware until you receive complaints from frustrated visitors. Or, if by any chance you will visit your site. The more time you take fixing your website when it’s down, the higher the chances of losing your SEO points. And, the more visitors will decide on not revisiting your website.
You always get informed about the status of your website by website monitoring tools or site health tracker. Besides that, the checker notifies you about the occurrence of any of these events on your site. Thus, you are capable of fixing them before anyone notices it.
7 Methods to Check Your WordPress Website
There are two options which you can be used to check your WordPress website:
External Tracking Tools
The external examiners have been developed to fit many varying hosts. These examiners do not utilize any memory space of your website. Further, you can use a single tracking tool for many websites. This comprises of sites that are not hosted on WordPress.
Here are the best external testers to use on your WordPress account:
An adaptable monitoring service that is capable of tracing all kinds of servers, mobile websites, WordPress hosted website, and mobile apps. Similar to Pingdom, it utilizes servers in dozens of global areas for monitoring actual-time end-user experience worldwide. However, it has extra monitoring on FTP download and upload, DNS server, server-side checking, internal networks, and some other services.
The free version does not include all of these extra checks. Indeed, the free version covers just 5 websites. For more website checks, you should upgrade to the premium service. Also, you can get notifications via RSS, SMS, Twitter, or SMS. Or, see the uptime outcomes on the dashboard.
One of the most famous website monitoring services is Pingdom. This service uses servers located all over the world to always examine the status of your website. And, to track the status of your site from many locations.
Furthermore, Pingdom comes with attractive premium features. For example, tracing load time based on page-by-page. Root cause analysis for helping in revealing what caused the problem to enable you to correct it faster. And, double-check problems prior to sending a notification.
Even so, enjoying such needs you to subscribe to their premium version. Also, you can use the app or website for your dashboard and data. Also, their SMS notifications feature is premium.
A free means of maintaining a 360-degree view about the health of your website. This service traces four elements on your website. These are keywords, transmission control protocol port monitor, ping, and HTTP & https on all your hosting, directories, sub-pages, and web pages.
In addition, you track content modification on your competitor’s or personal website. To do so, you need to run keyword tests and get notifications if a keyword like the name of your company gets mentioned.
Moreover, this tool sends alerts through email and SMS, and you can select the frequency of your checks every 5 minutes.
WordPress Monitoring Plugins
All WordPress plugins are developed precisely for WordPress websites. Here are the best and dependable WordPress plugins for monitoring the uptime of your website:
A WordPress monitoring plugin that is extremely powerful and efficient. Nonetheless, this plugin is just an interface of the external Super Monitor tool which is connected to the WordPress dashboard.
It has multiple monitor intervals to select from, which includes each minute. In addition, you can examine the downtime, performance and Google analytics in the plugin. Also, you can see the health of your website in many areas. But, it does not have a free version. Instead, you get a free trial, and getting SMS notifications requires you to pay some additional fees.
A multi-purpose WordPress management plugin which comprises of site monitoring. This plugin enables you to trace downtime and uptime and to trace the performance of your website. On top of that, it lets you examine for security and run automatic site backups.
In addition, ManageWP allows you to monitor many websites on their dashboard. However, you getting notifications via email or SMS requires you to subscribe to the premium plugin.
To use this plugin, you should start by installing it, activating it, and configuring the API to integrate on your site. After that, you will receive alerts via SMS and Twitter. And, push notifications which indicate statistics from many locations on your site. To see the metrics, visit the central dashboard, or from any widget or page.
The basic version of Uptime Robot is free. However, you should subscribe to the premium version to modify the monitoring frequency, get SMS notifications, or examine many sites.
Apart from being developed, Jetpack is backed-up by WordPress developers. On top of that, it is a free multi-purpose plugin. To enhance your WordPress website functionality and management, this plugin provides you with many components. This includes checking your website.
But, to set the configurations, you are supposed to visit the plugin’s Settings. Likewise, to get alerts on the visitor metrics, security status, speed, downtime, and uptime of your site, you should enter your email address. Sending alerts is only done through email. No other option is available.
Summary
You should always monitor the uptime of your website to avoid downtimes. The impacts of a website that experiences downtimes more often put your online presence and money at risk. We hope these plugins will help you in monitoring your site. Otherwise, you can take help of WordPress Experts that provide WordPress support services. You can also check tips on improving your uptime of your wordpress blog on CollectiveRay where you get actionable tips to work with websites.