An unreliable, broken, and unresponsive website. Even if it looks great and is well designed, is also a great opportunity to lose leads and visitors.

As the online community grows and more and more people embrace online shopping, it’s more important than ever to ensure the reliability of your website.

One way to achieve this is through uptime and downtime monitoring tools.

Why is it important to monitor website uptime?

Sometimes there is downtime. Still, the goal is to minimize it. The longer the downtime, the more traffic and potential customers you lose. A non-functional website can also damage your credibility and reputation. People may associate your website’s unreliability with your actual product or service.

Web Developer charge between $75 to $200+ per hour. So building and maintaining a website can be expensive. Still, the investment is often worth it. However, an unreliable website can backfire. Instead of attracting more customers, it may keep customers away. This could result in lost revenue

An uptime monitoring solution can help avoid or reduce these losses. Checks that your website is up and notifies you if it’s not. That way, you can fix the problem and get your site back up and running as soon as you’re notified.

Some of the most common issues behind website downtime are:

• Spike in Traffic
• Network outages
• DNS Issues
• Cyberattacks
• Power outages
• Increase server loads
• Good old Human error.

Therefore, you should find a reliable tools that can detect any downtime or disruption related to your website as soon as it occurs. They are essential tools for web designers, developers, and network administrators. However, not all are created equal. So how do you identify the best uptime monitoring tool?

Basic Uptime Monitoring Tool Features

Uptime monitoring tools typically detect disruptions by performing network tests such as ping and trace route. By constantly running these tests yourself, you can actually monitor your site’s uptime.

However, this is not an efficient way to monitor website uptime. Comprehensive uptime monitoring tools automatically monitor website uptime in the background. When we detect that your site may be down, we will notify you through various channels.

Additionally, a quality uptime monitoring solution will usually provide additional information about your website’s uptime/downtime and its performance. These tools usually come with dashboards, status pages, badges, exportable records, etc. to help you monitor the overall health of your site.

Features of uptime monitoring tool should feature:

• Security features that notify of and fight off potential cyber attacks
• Uninterrupted background website monitoring 24/7
• Alerts such as email, SMS, push notifications, instant messages, social media, etc.
• Report generation
• 24/7 customer support available
• Monitoring multiple websites at the same time
• Provide insights and suggestions to improve your performance of your website
• Be affordable
• Allowing you to choose which features to enable and disable.

Another optional feature to look out for is a public status page that customers can visit to see if all services are up and running. So let’s now explore 8 website uptime monitoring tools.

1. UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot provides an uptime monitoring solution that combines website, SSL, ping and port, cron jobs, and keyword monitoring in one place.

Advanced features include emailed incident updates to status page subscribers, partially customisable status pages, response time monitoring, maintenance windows, and custom HTTP requests .

UptimeRobot allows you to monitor endpoints from multiple locations every 60 seconds for premium plans and every 5 minutes for free subscriptions.

UptimeRobot is available free of charge. However, there are no SMS or voice call notifications, only one status page monitor, and three months of log retention. Their Pro plan offers full service starting at $8 for 50 monitors. Receive 20 SMS or call notifications, SSL authentication failures, and background job monitoring. A business plan is requested via a custom quote.

2. Checkly

Checkly is an API and E2E monitoring platform for modern stacks. It’s flexible and allows you to easily monitor service uptime at 10 second intervals from 20 locations around the world. If something goes wrong, Checkly will automatically notify you via mass SMS messages or unlimited emails, Pagerduty, Opsgenie, Slack, and web-hook integrations. It also has a double check option to prevent false positives from occurring.

There has been a slight price change recently. At this time, you can use Checkly for free and get 50,000 PAI checks and 5,000 browser checks per month. Their paid plans are pay-as-you-go, starting at $1.20 for every 10,000 API checks and $3.60 for every 1,000 browser checks performed.

3. Site24x7

Site24x7 Monitor allows you to monitor site availability from 110+ sites worldwide at intervals as short as 60 seconds. You can also monitor APIs and web applications. By analysing historical data, you can easily identify performance trends over time.

Regular expression patterns or strings can be used to check if a value exists in the returned response body. You can also add response headers to check your web server configuration.

Use the browser extension to record important business transactions, simulate traffic and review them from multiple locations. You can record typical user paths or import Selenium IDE test scripts for regular use in real browsers such as Chrome and Firefox.

Site24x7 starts at $9.00 month and includes 10 monitored websites/servers, 1 synthetic web transaction monitor, 1 minute polling frequency, and 110+ test sites.

Their Pro plan starts at $35.00 month and offers up to 40 monitored websites/servers and 3 monitored synthetic web transactions. If you’re looking for a more complex solution, an all-in-one solution is available for $35.00 month.

4. StatusCake

StatusCake provides an uptime monitoring platform and a public status page. A free subscription lets you go around the world to automatically test the availability of your website every 5 minutes.

The tool monitors HTTP, HEAD, TCP, DNS, SMTP, SSH, PING, and PUSH. Additionally, you can track page speed, domains, servers, and SSL certificates.

It provides historical uptime reports up to one month old that can be used to compare website uptime results and performance. If something goes wrong, you can be notified instantly using any of our 14 integrations including Data-dog, Discord, Pushover, Slack and more.

Furthermore with a free subscription package it includes 10 monitors and a 5 minute monitoring frequency. Page speed is measured every 24 hours and domains once a week. You can always upgrade to a higher tier that offers 1 minute or 30 second monitoring frequency from custom locations. Statuscake has three subscription models: Free, Superior, and Business. Also, it integrates with several status page tools.

5. Updown.io

Updown is a project that provides a simple but efficient monitoring solution. You can monitor your website from eight monitoring nodes located in North America, Europe, East Asia, and Australia. Also, you can monitor your website up to every 15 seconds. And also monitor SSL certificates, integrate Updown with REST and Web-hook APIs, and monitor for the presence of strings instead of normal HTTP status.

Each error is checked twice. In the event of an issue, Updown can notify you through multiple channels including SMS, Webhooks, Zapier, Telegram, Statuspage and Slack. You can also get a hosted status page that provides uptime and performance reports for one or more sites.

The tool tries to keep it simple while providing professional service. It works on a pay-as-you-go model and prices can be calculated directly on the landing page. So, for about a bit over $2.00 a month, you get to test 5 websites every minute.

6. Uptimia

With Uptimia you can monitor uptime for HTTP, DNS, UDP, TCP, email and more from over 171 control points up to every 30 seconds. You can also monitor multi-step transactions such as login and checkout forms. Also monitors website speed and alerts you when load times exceed certain thresholds. It also provides a Real User Monitoring option that collects data from visitors and monitors traffic, website performance, and JavaScript-related errors.

Team members can be assigned to specific tasks or alerts. Notifications are handled by several third party integrations. You can also prepare scheduled reports that arrive in a stakeholder’s or user’s inbox at specified intervals.

With this tool it offers a 30 day free trial. After that, you can continue with the free plan or subscribe to one of our premium packages starting at $9.00 per month.Starter and Standard subscription packages offer 1 minute monitoring frequency. To get 30 seconds, you must choose the Advanced or Enterprise bundle.

7. Better Uptime

Better Uptime monitors your website every 30 seconds and notifies you as soon as an error occurs. Alerts include detailed screenshots with all the information needed to diagnose the problem. Better Uptime has an integrated incident management system that tries to avoid false incident reports by retesting each reported issue three times.

Each error is documented with screenshots and an exact timeline in seconds. In the event of an accident, the intelligent merging of incidents will not overload the system. An on-call calendar and scheduling ensure a quick response. Notifications are handled by Slack, Phone, SMS, Push Notifications, and more.

When analysing incidents, you can use the reporting and analytics features to review historical uptime, review SLAs, and use incident root cause integration to contextually better understand incidents.

Better Uptime has basic pricing with a free tier that includes free email alerts, 3 minute checks, and 10 monitors. Their Pro plan starts at $30/month and allows 30 second checks, 50 monitors, and unlimited calls.

8. WP Umbrella

WP Umbrella is a little different than above tools. As it is intended to allow users to manage and monitor multiple WordPress sites. Therefore, the approach to website uptime monitoring is much more professional. Again, just like its main feature, the uptime monitoring tool offers a real-time alert system that communicates via email, SMS, Slack, etc.

It uses a simple and minimal user interface. The main screen consists of a dashboard where you can view all your WordPress websites. By default, this dashboard contains four columns: website, uptime, speed, and issues.

Also, this service warns you about outdated or broken plugins or themes. It doesn’t have a dedicated public status page, but it does have customer reporting capabilities. These reports can be automatically sent to various subscribers or customers when your website goes down.

WP Umbrella is the cheapest option on this list. This tool is billed $1.99 per month for each WordPress website.