Website down alerts for client sites

Paste a URL above to check it right now. GlitchCatch requests the page, follows public redirects, and records the status code and response time, along with the rest of the free check: SSL, domain expiry, noindex, broken links, forms, and spam signs. That tells you about this moment. It will not tell you when the site goes down tonight.

For that, add the site to a GlitchCatch account. It requests the homepage on a schedule. If the site does not answer or returns a server error (a 5xx), it asks a second time right away, and only emails you if that second request fails too. That keeps one failed request from turning into a false alarm. When the site answers again, you get a recovery email. A 4xx, such as a 404 on the homepage, is shown as a problem in the dashboard but does not count as the site being down.

How often it checks depends on the plan: every 6 hours on Starter, every hour on Pro, and every 15 minutes on Agency. Every plan also runs the full health check once a day, so an expiring certificate, a dead form, or a stray noindex tag gets an email too, not only a full outage. Alerts are limited to 10 per site per day, so a flapping server cannot flood your inbox.

Alerts go to you, not to your client. They go to your account email, or to a separate alert address you set in Settings, such as a shared support inbox. That way you can look at the problem before anyone else does. When you want to show the client what is being watched, each site has a report you can forward, and on Pro and Agency the report carries your name, logo, and color instead of ours.

When an alert arrives, start with the basics. Open the site from a phone on mobile data to rule out your own network. Check the host's status page and the hosting control panel for a suspended account or a full disk. Confirm the domain has not expired and that its DNS still points at the host. If the error started right after an update, roll back the last plugin, theme, or deploy first.