How Do You Know If Your Business Website Goes Down?

By Bill Stilwell · Last reviewed October 16, 2026

The short answer

Set up an uptime monitor that checks your website every few minutes and sends an alert to at least two people when it’s down or slow. Some monitoring services offer free plans. Check your home page and your most important page, like your contact form, and write down what to do when an alert comes in.

What this means

An uptime monitor is a service that visits your website on a schedule, the way a customer would. If the site doesn’t load, loads an error, or takes too long, it sends you an email, text, or app alert.

“Uptime” means the time your site is working. “Response time” means how long the server takes to answer. A site can be up but so slow that people leave.

Some hosts include basic monitoring. Separate monitoring services are also common, and they have one big advantage. They check from outside your host, so they still work when your host has a problem.

Say a roofer’s site goes down on a Friday night after a hosting problem. Without monitoring, nobody notices until Monday, when the owner wonders why no quote requests came in. With monitoring, the owner gets a text within minutes and calls the host that night.

Why it matters

You lose leads you never knew about. People who hit an error page rarely call to tell you.
Search engines notice. Google says server errors make its crawlers slow down. Pages that keep returning server errors are eventually dropped from its index.
Small problems become big ones. An expired certificate or a lapsed domain is easier to fix in the first hour (see 13.1.3 Domain Renewal).
You get proof for your host. Monitoring records show how often and how long the site was down, which helps if you need a refund or a new host.

Who this applies to

Every business with a live website. It matters most if your website brings in calls, forms, bookings, or sales.

How to do it

Pick a monitoring service. Look for one that checks from outside your host, sends alerts by text or app, and checks at least every few minutes.
Add your key pages. Start with your home page and your contact or booking page. If a page has a form, monitor that page too.
Set a response time alert. Ask to be told when the site gets slow, not only when it’s down (see 19.5.3 Page Speed).
Watch your certificate and domain. Many monitors can warn you before the certificate for your secure connection expires (see 13.2.2 HTTPS). Some also warn about domain expiration.
Send alerts to two people. Use a shared business inbox or two phones. One person on vacation shouldn’t mean nobody knows.
Write a short “site is down” plan. For example: check the site on your phone using cellular data, not your office Wi-Fi. Check your host’s status page and contact its support. Check that your domain hasn’t expired and your Domain Name System (DNS) settings haven’t changed (see 13.1.4 DNS Access). If the site was hacked or broken, restore from a backup (see 11.8 Business Backups).
Test the alert. Many services let you send a test alert. Make sure both people get it.
Review the monthly report. Look for repeat outages or slow periods. Repeated problems are a reason to talk to your host.

What proof to keep

A screenshot of the monitor settings: pages, interval, and who gets alerts
Monthly uptime and response time reports
Notes on each outage: when it started, the cause, and when it was fixed

Store these in your website records folder.

Common mistakes

Relying on the host’s own monitoring only. If the host’s systems are down, its alerts may be too.
Sending alerts to one person’s email. If that email runs on the same domain and the domain is down, the alert may never arrive.
Only watching the home page. The home page can load fine while the contact form page is broken.
Ignoring “slow” alerts. A site that takes a long time to load loses visitors even when it’s technically up.
Never testing the alert. People find out the alert goes to an old phone number the day the site goes down.

When to get help from a pro

Your host’s support team: when the site goes down and you can’t tell why. Ask:

Was this outage on your side or mine?
What caused it, and what are you doing so it doesn’t happen again?

A web professional: if outages keep happening or the site is often slow.

Bill’s note

[Bill: add a short story or lesson here. For example, a client who lost a weekend of leads to an outage nobody noticed, or what monitoring has caught for SiteSmarty sites.]

If you’d rather have this done for you, SiteSmarty builds and hosts websites for local businesses.

How I did this for SiteSmarty

[Date I did this:]
[What I actually did, step by step: which monitor I use, which pages it checks, and who gets the alerts]
[What it cost and how long it took:]
[What surprised me or what I’d do differently:]
[Screenshot or photo to add, with private info blurred: the monitor settings and a monthly uptime report]
[Result so far:]

Questions people ask

What is uptime monitoring? A service that checks your website on a schedule and alerts you when it’s down or slow.

How often should my site be checked? Every few minutes is common. The more your site brings in leads, the more often you’ll want it checked.

Does downtime hurt my Google rankings? Short outages usually aren’t a big problem. Google says pages that keep returning server errors are eventually dropped from its index.

Should I watch response time too? Yes. A slow site can lose visitors even when it’s technically up.

Audit check

Question: Is the website checked by an outside monitor, with tested alerts going to at least two people?
Pass looks like: Monitor checks the home page and key lead pages every few minutes. Alerts go to two people and have been tested. A written “site is down” plan exists. Outages are logged.
Fail looks like: No monitoring. Alerts go to one person or a dead email. Nobody knows what to do when the site goes down.
Evidence to collect: Monitor settings screenshot, a recent uptime report, the test alert, and the outage log.

Where this fits

Do this first: 13.2.1 Website Hosting, 13.2.2 HTTPS

Do this next: 13.2.7 Website Security Updates

Sources

Google Search Central, "How HTTP status codes, and network and DNS errors affect Google Search" (checked October 16, 2026)

This page explains general rules and Bill's own experience. It is not legal, tax, or insurance advice. Talk to a qualified professional about your situation.