How to Monitor WordPress Downtime

So your WordPress website offers good content to your visitors. And it offers an amazing user-experience. And it’s safe and secure!

But it all will be in vain if your site keeps suffering from downtime.

In this blog post, I will discuss possible reasons for WordPress downtime and ways to monitor incidents.

A survey sampled from 400 mid-to-large-sized companies showed that these firms faced an average of 5 downtime events per month. What could be the factors causing these downtimes so frequently?

Possible reasons for downtime

1. A hacked website where the intruders have modified your WordPress site’s core files.
2. Traffic spikes that can cause your server to go down.
3. Faulty web hosting issues. Depending on the kind of hosting plan you choose, issues such as exceeded bandwidth, server-wide attacks, hardware and software issues, etc. can cause your WordPress website to go down.

Some additional factors that lead to a website’s downtime could be the following:

• DNS issues. These can be figured with a DNS Server Monitor.
• Nameserver errors. If you switched your hosting provider, then make sure that you mapped your nameservers to this new host.
• Domain renewals. Make sure you renew your domain and its security certificates on time.

The outcome of downtime

You WordPress site downtime can lead to the following consequences:

1. Loss of business/revenue.
2. Loss of credibility.
3. SEO problems
4. Site’s integrity and security become questionable.
5. The audience is unable to access your website.

Diagnosis

With all the bad news, I have a good one too. You can actually determine your website’s downtime and similar events. Keep an eye on them and handle future mishaps well.

There are some tests that can help you monitor the backend events and avoid or counter such network issues.

You can simply opt to run a Ping test to determine if your site is down.

You can also go ahead with an HTTP Test to better understand the exchange of data between the computer and the internet.

The Transmission Control Protocol Port Monitor will help you test the data transmission over devices.

JetPack’s Downtime Monitoring Module will keep your WordPress site monitored and will alert you if your website is facing a Downtime.

DownNotifier is yet another tool that sends a free alert when your website is down.

You can opt for either of the Free, Premium or the Enterprise monitoring plan, depending on the size of your business/website.

Five corrective measures

The biggest question out of this context is how to tackle your WordPress site’s Downtime.

Here are a few things that can help you manage the Downtime and even ensure that such occurrences are minimized in the time to come.

Measure #1 – Move to a better Web host

FYI, if you are just setting up a blog/website, make sure that you choose the right platform as WordPress.org or WordPress.com and best web hosting service, no compromises made.

However, if your WordPress site has been repeatedly facing downtimes, chances of it happening due to a faulty web host are quite high.

If your website experiences a generic amount of traffic, a shared hosting plan might not be able to cope up with it.

So, make the right choice and upgrade to a better Web host provider, even if you have to shell out some extra dollars on account of a 100% uptime guarantee provided by certain web hosting services.

Measure #2 – Secure your website

In a lot of instances, websites go down as and when their security is compromised.

To stop the hackers from getting to your core files, make sure that you have added extra layers of security.

Deploy a hidden WordPress login page, Two-factor authentication, Email notifications for login etc.

However, these should not deter you from an attempt to start blogging or setting up a website as you can simply let the plugins do the work.

Some of the best WordPress security plugins that can help you are:

• All In One WP Security & Firewall plugin.
• WordFence.
• Sucuri Security: Auditing, Malware Scanner and Security Hardening.

Measure #3 – Regularly update your WordPress site’s files

To keep website downtime issues at bay, make sure that you regularly update all your WordPress themes, plugins, and other core files.

Updating the WordPress version is just as important.

You can also auto-update these components by installing plugins such as the Easy Updates Manager.

Measure #4 – Backup your WordPress site

Your website can go down any moment due to certain events that can’t be monitored.

Hence, always keep backing up your website so that you don’t have to deal with lost data if your website goes haywire after an unfortunate Downtime.

Measure #5 – Scan your WordPress site for any corrupted themes/plugins

Corruptive/incompatible themes and plugins can also spark a site downtime.

Beginning with reliable downloads of these, we would recommend you to regularly declutter your site’s database and uninstall and delete any such components that might no longer be required.

External Help

If you are looking to have a robust one-time solution to tackle your site’s downtime, the Uptime Robot can help you keep your websites up and running, always.

This tool is touted to run 50 Monitors every 5 Minutes, for free!

It features:

• Multiple test types.
• Advanced notifications.
• Downtime verification from multiple locations.
• Maintenance windows.
• Reports on uptime, downtime and response times.

These features will immensely help you keep your Downtime woes at bay.

The user-friendly dashboard and instant alerts via e-mail, SMS, Twitter, Slack, HipChat, Telegram, push, web-hooks etc. will keep you alerted 24*7.

Conclusion

The kind of damage a website downtime can cause can sometimes be irreparable.

Apart from the revenue and traffic lost in such an event, downtime affects the credibility and trust score of your website as well as the business associated with it.

Facing such events can lower your morale as a website/blog owner.

But, with all the online help and resources available, we are sure that you will be able to tackle such outage issues in a jiffy.

Through this blog post, I hope that I have been able to help you better understand website downtimes.

You should now be aware of their causes and outcomes. You should now be also better equipped to minimize these unfortunate outage occurrences.