Do you think your WordPress site never goes down while you sleep? What would happen if it stopped responding in the middle of the night while the other side of the world wants to access your blog? This might affect your site’s reputation. Sometimes, your site may go down and come back up without you even knowing about it. In this article, we will look at how to monitor your server uptime in WordPress, so you can be aware of everything.
What Does Server Uptime Monitoring Mean?
Although you cannot sit gazing at your screen 24 hours a day to keep an eye on your websites, there are some free services available that will monitor whether or not your site goes down and even provide you with several possible reasons for the downtimes.
Why it’s Essential to Monitor Your WordPress Blog’s Uptime:
Let as look at few reasons why you should never compromise on monitoring your WordPress Blog’s uptime.
- More Downtime Means Loss in Money: If your website remains inaccessible for a long period of time you will inevitably lose revenue.
- Reader’s Reliability: Your readers are your guests so your aim is to entertain them and guide them through your content, rather than leaving them alone in a place which is new for them. Having your website down is sort of like closing your door in their face even though you’re not doing it intentionally.
- Search Engine Influence: If your websites has too much downtime, then search engines might assume that your website is insignificant or lacks consistency. Often they penalize those websites that fail to maintain 24/7 uptime.
How Does The Monitoring Work?
In this tutorial we are going to show you how to use several WordPress plugins that continuously check your WordPress website on regular intervals (seconds, minutes, and hours) and whenever your site goes down they automatically send notifications to a log file where all data is being recorded.
Plugin Status for WordPress
Our first plugin uses Pingdom. Pingdom is among the website monitoring giants with significant users like Microsoft, Amazon, Ericsson, Vodafone and Siemens. It keeps an eye on your WordPress blog 24/7, and whenever it encounters any problems it sends a warning SMS to your mobile. It also offers a separate control panel which will allows you to monitor your website from second to second. In order to use Pingdom you need to use a plugin called Pingdom Status for WordPress.
First, download and install Pingdom Status for WordPress. You should then see a tab in your WordPress admin menu called “Pingdom Status”.
Go to Pingdom Status » General Settings. If you don’t have a Pingdom account click on “get one for free”. After you do this fill out your Pingdom username, password, and API key. Pingdom will provide you with detailed information about your WordPress blog’s uptime.
TagBeep Uptime Monitor for WordPress
This is a free WordPress monitoring plugin that although it doesn’t have the countless features of Pingdom, it is more than enough for small publishers. To get started first download and install TagBeep Uptime Monitor for WordPress. Then go to Plugins » TagBeep Uptime.
Enter your email, blog url and create a password. Once you do all of that hit “start monitoring this blog!” and you are good to go.
WP Really Simple Health for WordPress
This is a WordPress plugin that not only keeps an eye on your WordPress blog’s server uptime but also allows you to track memory utilization and the CPU load. This plugin is useful if you are on a small VPS server because it is very light weight and will not affect your website speed.
First, download and install WP Really Simple Health for WordPress. Then go to Settings » WP Really Simple Health.
Here you will see several options you can either enable or disable by checking the checkboxes. If you look up in the WordPress admin bar you will be able to see all of the information for the options that you check.
Some External Providers:
While it may seem illogical when you have the same service available on WordPress to go for external website monitoring providers, but nevertheless the following are a few useful companies that may give you decent results.
If your blog either has low disk space or you are not running on reliable hosting like (BlueHost or Hostgator),then you may choose these providers because they will not extract anything from your website. Instead, they will provide your complete statistics on their website just like Google analytics.
Conclusion
Getting your hands dirty with server uptime tools is getting more necessary these days because to continue your domination in search engine rankings you have to make sure that your website remains alive 24 hours a day.
Download Pingdom Status For WordPress
Download tagBeep uptime monitor For WordPress
Download WP Really Simple Health For WordPress
Here’s another external monitoring tool: http://uptimer.at/
Fine list.
My server monitoring plugin for serverstate: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/serverstate/screenshots/
Will this work with the new Pingdom API & System?
Unfortunately, the WordPress plugin mentioned in this article requires our deprecated SOAP API. You can find all the details of our REST API here http://www.pingdom.com/services/api/.
Do you have another plugin that we can use instead?