What we check
Ten checks on every website, from the address alone. Nothing to install, and nothing to ask your client's developer for.
The website itself
That the site loads for visitors, and how quickly.
Domain name
That the domain is not about to expire and take the site down.
The padlock in the address bar
That the certificate keeps working. When it runs out, every visitor is shown a full-page warning that the site is unsafe — and renewal is meant to be automatic, so this warns while there is still time to do it by hand.
Search engine access
That nothing is telling Google to stay away, and that the sitemap works.
Email records
That the domain still receives email, and that its records keep messages out of spam folders.
Speed for real visitors
How the site actually feels to the people who visit it — measured by Google from real Chrome users over 28 days, not from a test run here.
Links that lead nowhere
A page removed or renamed leaves every link to it as a dead end. Nothing on the site looks wrong; the visitor just hits an error and leaves.
Forwarding before the page loads
How many times a visitor is bounced between addresses before the page appears. Each hop is a delay everybody pays, and search engines pass less credit along a chain.
WordPress weaknesses
That the usual ways into a WordPress site are shut — the username list, xmlrpc, and browsable folders.
The page in a real browser
That analytics tags run, images load, and nothing is blocked as insecure — the things only a real browser can see.
And twelve things read from the page itself
These are the ones no uptime monitor will ever catch, because the page loads perfectly while every one of them is true.
How we decide to tell you
A failure has to happen three times in a row before anyone is told, and the site has to be clean twice in a row before we call it fixed. That costs a few minutes of detection time and buys something worth more: an alert you can forward to a client without checking it first.
Of the twenty things we look for on a page, six are allowed to interrupt somebody. The rest are shown to you and sent nowhere.
And when we cannot check something, we say so. A check that could not run is never reported as healthy and never counted towards an uptime figure. “We do not know” is a real answer here, and most monitoring will not give it to you.