Proactive Website Health for Small Businesses
Do not find out your site is down from a customer. A few simple checks help you catch issues first and handle them like a professional.
Proactive Website Health: Uptime, /health Routes, and a Lightweight Status Page
Do not find out your site is down from a customer. A few simple checks ensure you hear about issues first and handle them like a professional.
TL;DR
- Monitor uptime and your core flows
- Add a /health check that returns “all good”
- Keep a simple status page for transparency
What to Monitor (Owner Lens)
- Homepage availability. Is the site up?
- Contact or booking flow. Can someone book a call?
- Checkout or payment flow for e-commerce sites
- Forms and email. Submissions are delivered successfully
The /health Concept (Plain English)
A hidden page that simply says, “I’m okay.” Your monitoring service checks it every few minutes. If it does not respond, you get an alert. Think of it as a smoke detector, not a fire department.
Alerts That Actually Help
- Routing: Send alerts to the person who can fix the issue, whether that is you or your developer, plus a backup contact
- Escalation: If the site is still down after 10 minutes, notify a secondary channel
- Noise control: Avoid alert fatigue by monitoring only core flows first
Lightweight Status Page
- Current status: Up, degraded, or down
- Recent incidents: One-line summaries with timestamps
- Next update time: Set expectations such as “Next update at 2:30 PM”
- Trust signal: Shows customers you are actively handling the issue
Owner’s Corner: A One-Hour Setup
- Pick a simple uptime monitoring tool
- Add checks for the homepage, contact or booking page, and /health
- Define who receives alerts and how they are notified
- Draft your status page copy now so it is ready when needed, not written in panic mode
What to Practice Quarterly
- Test your contact form end to end
- Test a booking and a refund or void if applicable
- Review incident logs and fix the root cause of repeat issues
FAQ
Do small sites really need this?
Yes. One missed week of form submissions can cost more than the monitoring service.
Yes. One missed week of form submissions can cost more than the monitoring service.
Will monitoring slow my site?
No. These checks are lightweight.
No. These checks are lightweight.
What if I cannot fix issues myself?
Send alerts to your developer and share the status page link with customers to keep them informed.
Send alerts to your developer and share the status page link with customers to keep them informed.