server-uptime-monitoring-plugins-for-avoiding-wordpress-woesCan you imagine how damaging it could be to your business if your website went down during the middle of the night? Or while you are out for the day and away from your computer?

People all over the world might be attempting to access your site. You could be missing out on sales, and your reputation could be taking a hit without you even knowing. If your site goes down regularly, this could be really bad news for your business.

Monitoring your server uptime should be considered an essential activity no matter which platform you use. If you have a WordPress website, here’s a guide to what’s involved, along with some useful WordPress plugins that can make the job easier.

What Is Server Uptime Monitoring?

At its most basic, monitoring your server uptime could simply involve checking your website on a regular basis to see that it is working. Of course, that is not practical. You cannot stare at your website all hours of the day and night waiting for it to go down.

But you can still monitor your server uptime very easily by using specific tools. These will inform you when your site is down by notifying you instantly.

Why does downtime happen? Your site could go down for a number of reasons. It could be that you haven’t optimized the site properly, or that the PHP memory limit becomes exhausted because you are running too many scripts. It could be a problem with your hosting company, or you could even receive more traffic than your server can handle. In the worst case scenario, it could even be due to a DDoS attack.

There is a useful guide to surviving downtime at Kissmetrics that you may want to read through.

Why Bother Monitoring Server Uptime?

If you operate a WordPress site, monitoring server uptime should be considered essential. If you experience a lot of downtime:

  • you could lose money though missed sales
  • it could affect your reputation
  • visitors may be put off from visiting again

It could even affect your SEO because search engines may penalize your site. If the spiders crawl your site when it is down, they may not index it. For that reason, you could consider server uptime monitoring tools as similar to SEO tools.

How it Works

Uptime monitoring tools are simple tools that check whether your website is running properly and notify you if it is not.

With WordPress, this is really easy because there are a number of plugins you can use. You simply download a specific WordPress plugin that monitors your server uptime for you. It will then check your uptime regularly, which could be anything from once a minute to once an hour.

Having an automated solution in place is an efficient way to find out when your site is down. Using a tool like a WordPress plugin is especially useful if you have a number of websites that you want to track.

Once you know how much your site is going down, you can react more quickly and resolve the problem sooner.

Top Plugins to Monitor Uptime

There are a number of plugins that you can download to use with your WordPress website. Some are free and simple, some cost money and are more complex. Here are some of the main ones that you may want to try out yourself:

ManageWP Worker – this has lots of features and as well as monitoring, some of which are free. However, you have to pay for the monitoring by upgrading your account. It sends emails and SMS messages to notify you of downtime.

Jetpack – this free plugin has a number of excellent features including monitoring. It is very easy to use, and it will send you an email if your site is down.

Sitestillup – this plugin is free for one website if you only need it to check the status of your site every 60 minutes, but you can upgrade to get it checked every minute.

Uptime Robot – this will check your site every five minutes, and can check up to 50 sites for free. If you have over 50 sites or you want to receive an SMS message, you need to upgrade to the paid version.

Super Monitoring – you need a subscription to use this, but it comes with many features including integration with Google Analytics. It alerts you to downtime via email and SMS notifications.

Keep Your Website Up and Running

Downtime can be incredibly frustrating, and you will want to do everything you can to minimize it. Monitor the uptime of your WordPress site using one of these plugins so that you will be in a better position to take action when something goes wrong.

Your website is too important to your business to simply assume that nothing will go wrong with it. It can happen to anyone, so make sure you take all the steps you can to deal with any downtime problems you experience.

Author

Jonathan Leger has been practicing search engine optimization since the web was born. He is the creator of a number of popular tools and services in the SEO and Internet Marketing sectors and is the author of “Geek-Free SEO”, a well-received and easy to understand guide to understanding how to rank in Google.