Uptime monitoring for online stores
For an online store, downtime has a price per minute. Work it out with your own revenue in our guide to the cost of website downtime. The expensive part is rarely the outage itself. It is the time before anyone notices.
Monitor the path to the order, not just the homepage
The homepage can load while checkout returns 503. Set up separate monitors for the storefront, product search, cart, checkout and the payment callback. HTTP(S) monitors accept custom methods, headers and bodies and validate the response, so a broken payment step is caught even when the server answers.
Alerts that reach someone at 03:12
On every plan, checks run every minute, and a failed check is run again a few seconds later before an incident opens, so a single blip does not wake anyone. Alerts go out by email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Microsoft Teams or webhook.
No browser warnings, ever
An expired SSL certificate shows every shopper a full-page warning. A lapsed domain takes the store and the order emails down at once. Uptimecheck reminds you well before either happens.
Keep customers informed
Before a big sale
- Add monitors for every step of the checkout, including the payment provider callback.
- Send Telegram or Teams alerts to the people on call during the campaign.
- Check the SSL certificate and domain expiry dates.
- Prepare the status page with the components shoppers recognise: store, checkout, payments, order emails.
During the sale, keep an eye on response times. A checkout that slows from 300 ms to three seconds loses orders long before it fails completely, and the response time history shows it while there is still time to scale up or switch off a heavy feature.
After the incident
Weekly and monthly email reports show every incident with its duration, and the response time history shows slow periods that did not quite become outages. Use them to talk to your hosting provider or platform with facts, not impressions.
A status page linked from your shop tells shoppers that you know about the problem and are on it. During a sale, that is the difference between a delay and a flood of support tickets. Plans start at €9 per month billed yearly; see the pricing page.