A website uptime monitoring checklist should detect failures a visitor would notice and route each alert to someone who can act. Monitor from outside the hosting environment, test meaningful paths and content, reduce noisy alerts, and connect every notification to a documented response.
Define what must remain available
List the public journeys that matter: homepage, sign-in, contact form, checkout, account area, API, downloads, and any status page. For each, record the expected status, redirect, certificate, response time range, and a small piece of content that proves the correct page was served.
A successful TCP connection or HTTP 200 response can still hide the wrong content. Google SRE treats errors as explicit failures, implicit wrong results, and responses that violate a stated policy. Its monitoring guidance highlights latency, traffic, errors, and saturation as four core signals (Google SRE).
Use external checks
Run checks from outside the website's network and account. A vendor health check can target a hostname, protocol, path, expected response codes, interval, and other conditions. Cloudflare's Health Checks documentation also describes uptime, latency, failure reasons, and event logs as useful diagnostic evidence (Cloudflare).
Choose more than one region when geography matters, but avoid declaring an outage from a single unreliable probe. Record the DNS name and final URL so a check does not silently bypass the CDN or hit an obsolete origin.
Test outcomes, not just endpoints
For a static page, verify status, certificate, redirect destination, and a stable content marker. For forms or transactions, use a safe synthetic path that cannot create real orders, messages, or charges. If a full transaction is unsafe, monitor each dependency and add a controlled manual test to the incident checklist.
Include DNS and certificate expiry checks separately. A content monitor will not always provide enough warning before an expiring certificate, and a direct origin check may miss public DNS failure.
Make alerts actionable
Assign a severity, owner, notification route, retry count, and escalation time to each monitor. Page a person only when immediate action is expected; send lower-priority evidence to a ticket or review queue. Use consecutive failures or multi-region confirmation to reduce transient noise without hiding sustained outages.
Every alert should include the failed URL, time, region, observed status or error, recent deployment reference, and first diagnostic steps. Test the notification route and the backup owner on a schedule.
Connect monitoring to response
Write a short runbook for DNS failure, certificate failure, server error, slow response, wrong content, and third-party dependency failure. Preserve a known-good rollback path. During an incident, record customer impact and evidence before making unrelated changes.
After recovery, confirm the public journey from an independent network. Close the alert only after the success condition is sustained, then review whether the monitor detected the problem early enough and whether the message led to the right action.
Review coverage after change
Update monitors when routes, hosting, authentication, payment providers, forms, or CDNs change. Retire obsolete checks so the alert list remains credible. Compare monitoring history with real incidents and support reports to find blind spots.
Quick completion test
The monitoring setup is ready when critical journeys have external checks, success includes content as well as status, alerts are owned and actionable, escalation and backup routes have been tested, incident runbooks exist, and changes trigger a coverage review.
Sources
- Monitoring Distributed Systems — Google Site Reliability Engineering
- Health Checks — Cloudflare