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How to Monitor a Website: Free & Awesome Website Monitoring Tools

You can invest ton of time and money into marketing your website but all your effort will be wasted if your site is down. Uptime is the biggest usability and conversion hurdle…

The biggest, yet often most overlooked.

How to Monitor a Website: Tools

Don’t let yourself fall prey to the same mistake. Here are some easy to use monitoring tools that will tell you the second your users lose site access.

Pingdom

Pingdom is a great option that lets you monitor your site uptime and provides some awesome analytics! I miss the times when it was free!

You can test your site performance in multiple countries (this is especially useful if you are using a CDN solution), diagnose your page load time and identify what is slowing it down, get alerted whenever anything has gone wrong, etc.

  • Invite colleagues or customers to view reports and edit settings
  • Customize how you are alerted depending on the severity of an outage
  • Integrate and receive alerts direct to all of the apps you use every day (Slack, VictorOps, OpsGenie, PagerDuty and many more)

 

pingdom dashboard

Here are quite a few website monitoring best practices for you to follow.

Google Docs

Google Docs has a number of scripts that you can use to do anything from sync up your calendar to creating extended forms. One of the lesser known uses is integrating a website monitor that will alert you any time your server encounters an error or downtime, even if it is only momentary.

You can get these alerts through your phone and email, based on your preference, or both if you want to make double sure that you are covered. Digital Inspiration has a super simple to follow tutorial on how to use this script.

Google Docs monitoring tools

Zabbix

Zabbix is an enterprise level open source software, and so it is totally free. Unfortunately, like a lot of OS platforms, it is not especially user friendly or easy to use for those who don’t have more extensive technical experience.

Zabbix

If you do know what your doing, it is amazing. It will gather data of all kinds from the network, and monitors your site, thousands of servers, network devices and virtual machines in real time, all at once. Possible uses for the platform include:

  • Monitoring of data and statistics coming from multiple users and clients;
  • Monitoring of activity, customer feedback and campaign effectiveness on multiple social networks at once;
  • Automated messages, emails, newsletters on occurrence of some predefined event;
  • Monitoring of online homepage most important real-time data e.g. traffic rankings, on page statistics, number of unique visitors, etc.

 

HostTracker

You can start using Host-Tracker.com for free, but eventually you will need to get a paid plan if you want their more advanced features. The good news is that they provide more than most, including public and email reports.

The personal plan is only $3.25 a month, and the business plan is only $18.25/ Even their enterprise option is surprisingly cost efficient, which is why its no shock that brands like Colgate use it.

HostTracker

The tool will:

  • Check your sites or servers from locations around the globe with specific interval
  • Send alerts about problem to you. You may have as many contacts as you wish. Mostly, alerts are free.
  • Send Uptime reports to you for you to collect uptime statistics. Also you can expose Uptime data to your customers and partners.

Bonus tools:

Google PageSpeed Insights will help you diagnose and fix page load time issues. It’s very easy to use and requires no registration. You can even compare two pages to better understand your page speed issues.

At the top of the report, the tool provides a score which summarizes the page’s performance. This score is determined by running Lighthouse to collect and analyze lab data about the page.

  • A score of 90 or above is considered fast,
  • 50 to 90 is considered average
  • Below 50 is considered to be slow.

There are dozens of site monitoring tools out there, and we would love to hear about more of them. Have any tools to add to this list? Let us know in the comments!

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