Website monitoring for small companies: the five checks that matter
Availability, SSL, DNS, key elements and links. What each check catches, how often to run it and how to avoid false alarms.
A small company's website rarely fails dramatically. It fails quietly: a certificate expires on a Saturday, a plugin update removes the contact form, a domain renewal bounces. Nobody notices until a customer does.
1. Availability
Does the page answer with a normal status? This catches hosting outages and server errors. Check every 15 to 60 minutes. Confirm every failure with a second check a few minutes later before you alert anyone; single failed requests happen on healthy sites too.
2. SSL certificate
When a certificate expires, browsers show a full-page warning and most visitors leave. Read the certificate's expiry date on every check and warn well ahead: 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 day before. Automatic renewal fails more often than people think.
3. DNS
If the domain stops resolving, the site is gone for everyone. This usually means an expired domain or a misconfigured record after a provider change.
4. Key elements
Your website exists to make people call, book or write. Check that the main heading, the contact or booking form and the phone link are still on the page. An update that removes the form is an outage for your business, even if the page loads fine.
5. Broken internal links
Once a day is enough. Test a sample of your internal links and report new broken ones. Visitors who hit a 404 page on your own site rarely try a second time.
What not to do
Do not alert on every slow response. Measure, and warn only after several slow checks in a row. Do not invent a "health score" from a few measurements either. A timeline of what actually happened is more honest and more useful.
Try it
Run a real check on your website. It takes a few seconds and needs no account.