One-minute checks, engineer paged
WordPress Uptime Monitoring: 1-Minute Checks, Engineer Paged
Get WordPress uptime monitoring that wakes a person instead of filling a dashboard. Checks run every minute from three regions, two consecutive failures page an on-call engineer, and the fix starts before you have noticed the site is down.
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- Checked every minute from three regions, so one bad route is not an outage
- Two consecutive failures page an engineer — not an email you read on Monday
- Checks content, not just a 200 — a white screen returns 200
- Monthly uptime figures you can show a client
What this covers
- HTTP checks every minute from three regions
- Content assertion, so a white screen or a blank 200 counts as down
- SSL certificate expiry warnings, 30 and 7 days out
- Domain expiry warnings
- Response-time trend, so degradation is visible before failure
- Escalation to an on-call engineer on the second failed check
- Status updates while an incident runs
- Monthly uptime report with every incident and its cause
Most uptime monitoring reports the wrong thing
Two failures make cheap monitoring nearly useless on WordPress specifically.
It checks the status code, not the page. A PHP fatal error — the white screen of death — very often returns HTTP 200 with an empty body. Every status-code monitor on the market records that as up. Your visitors see nothing.
It notifies instead of escalating. An email at 03:14 that is read at 09:00 has told you about six hours of downtime you could have avoided. The point of monitoring is that somebody acts.
What the interval actually decides
The check interval is the longest outage you accept not knowing about. A five-minute check cannot detect a four-minute outage, and short outages are the common ones: a PHP-FPM pool exhausting under a traffic spike, a cron job locking a table, a memory ceiling hit during an update.
We check every sixty seconds from several locations and require agreement from a second before an alert fires. That combination costs one extra check cycle of delay and removes most false alarms, which matters more than it sounds — every false alert spends trust, and after the fourth one the real alert gets swiped away at four in the morning.
Sixty-second checks run on the Professional and Business tiers; the interval each one carries is in maintenance plans and pricing. Monitoring only earns its place where somebody acts on what it finds, which is why it ships inside WordPress maintenance with hardening and scanning rather than as a standalone alert feed.
How the work runs
- The check runsEvery minute, from three regions. One region failing is a routing problem; all three is an outage.
- Content is assertedA WordPress fatal error frequently returns HTTP 200 with a blank page. Status-code-only monitoring reports that site as up.
- Second failure pages a personOne failure can be a blip. Two consecutive is real, and it goes to an on-call engineer rather than a dashboard.
- TriageHost outage, PHP fatal, database, certificate, DNS or resource limit. The cause decides whether we fix or escalate to the host.
- RestoreUsually a rollback to the last good state while the cause is worked. Service first, root cause second.
- Write-upEvery incident in the monthly report with duration and cause, so a pattern is visible.
Plans that include this
- Starter$39/monthor $390 a year — two months freeBlogs, portfolios and brochure sites
- UpdatesMonthly
- BackupsWeekly, 30-day retention
- Uptime5-minute checks
- Malware removalNot included
- Most chosenProfessional$79/monthor $790 a year — two months freeSmall businesses and lead-generation sites
- UpdatesWeekly + PHP version management
- BackupsDaily, 60-day retention
- Uptime1-minute checks
- Malware removalIncluded
- Business$149/monthor $1490 a year — two months freeStores, membership sites, anywhere downtime costs money
- UpdatesWeekly, tested on staging first
- BackupsDaily, 90-day, multi-location
- Uptime1-minute + 2-hour restore
- Malware removalIncluded
What clients say
They found malware two of our previous agencies had missed, cleaned it in an afternoon, and told us exactly how it got in.
Operations Director, professional services, 4 sitesThe staging step is the whole point. Three years and not one update has taken our booking form down.
Practice Manager, healthcareWe resell it to 31 clients under our own brand. The reports go out with our logo and our clients have never heard their name.
Agency Founder, digital agency
Related pages
Questions people ask before calling
How often should uptime be checked?
Every minute. A five-minute interval means an outage can run four minutes before the first failed check, and most cheap monitoring runs at five.
Why check from more than one region?
So a routing problem between one probe and your host is not reported as an outage, and so a regional failure is not missed.
My monitor says 100% uptime but the site was down.
Almost always status-code-only checking. A PHP fatal error can return 200 with an empty body, which passes.
Do you fix it, or just tell me?
We fix it. Monitoring that only notifies is a louder way of finding out you have a problem.
What uptime is realistic?
99.9% is a reasonable target on decent hosting — about 43 minutes a month. Anything promising 100% is describing a billing policy, not an engineering one.