How to monitor website uptime (step by step).

Learning how to monitor website uptime comes down to four decisions: what to check, how often, how you get alerted, and what you do with the history. Here is each step.

1. Decide what counts as 'up'

At minimum, monitor the HTTP status code of each important URL — homepage, key landing pages, and any login or checkout endpoint. Add response time so a site that is technically up but painfully slow still surfaces as a problem.

2. Pick a check interval

More frequent checks catch outages sooner but add noise. Every 1–5 minutes is a sensible floor for most sites; treat the interval as the fastest you will be told, not a guarantee of constant watching.

3. Set up alerts that reach you

Monitoring only helps if the alert lands somewhere you will see it — email, Slack or a webhook into your incident tooling. Alert on both downtime and recovery so you know when it is over, too.

4. Keep and read the history

A full history of checks lets you prove uptime to clients and spot the slow-burn pattern behind an incident. That is the difference between reacting and actually improving reliability.