Proactive Website Health: Uptime, /health Routes, and a Lightweight Status Page

Don’t find out your site is down from a customer. A few simple checks mean you hear about issues first—and handle them like a pro.

TL;DR

Monitor uptime + 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/Booking flow (can someone book a call?).
Checkout/Payment (if e-comm).
Forms & email (submissions get delivered).

The /health concept (plain English)

A hidden page that says, “I’m okay.” Your monitor checks it every few minutes. If it doesn’t reply, you get an alert. It’s a smoke detector, not a fire department.

Alerts that actually help

Routing: Send alerts to the person who can fix it (you or your dev) and a backup.
Escalation: If it’s still down after 10 minutes, ping the secondary channel.
Noise control: Avoid alert fatigue—focus on core flows first.

Lightweight status page

Current status: Up, degraded, or down.
Recent incidents: One-line summaries and timestamps.
Next update time: Set expectations (“Next update at 2:30 PM”).
Trust signal: Shows you’re on it during an outage.

Owner’s Corner: a one-hour setup

Pick a simple uptime tool.
Add checks: homepage, /contact (or booking), and /health.
Define who gets alerts and how.
Draft your status page copy now—use it when needed, not in panic mode.

What to practice quarterly

Test your contact form end-to-end.
Test a booking and a refund/void (if applicable).
Review incident logs and fix the root cause of any repeat offenders.

FAQ

Do small sites really need this? Yes—one missed week of form submissions can cost more than the monitoring.
Will monitoring slow my site? No—checks are lightweight.
What if I can’t fix issues myself? Set alerts to your developer and share the status page link to keep customers informed.