How to Get Website Down Alerts in Realtime

Website ToolsSam Norton • September 02, 2023 • 8 minutes READ

To ensure the smooth operation of your website, it’s essential to be aware of any downtime as soon as it occurs. By receiving website down alerts, you can take immediate action to resolve the issue and minimize its impact. In this article, we will explore various methods and tools that can help you stay informed and protect the uptime of your website.

There are various ways to set up website down alerts, including using specialized monitoring services, website monitoring software, or even configuring server-side scripts or plugins. These tools can be customized to send alerts through various channels such as email, SMS, or push notifications, ensuring that website owners are promptly informed of any issues.

Technology is moving faster than ever. Modern companies leverage third-party services to gain and maintain a competitive advantage over competitors while rethinking online business operation processes to become more efficient, innovative, and customer-centered.

Website availability is critical for every online business to survive and thrive. A website’s accessibility, reliability, and credibility can make or break your business. According to statistics, 9% of website visitors never return to a website that is down or unavailable. If downtime goes unnoticed, you will not only lose potential customers or website visitors and revenue but you might also be inundated with several support emails about the same subject.

It’s no longer enough to have a beautiful and functional website. Suppose you want to keep up with the accelerating pace of online businesses. You need to have a website uptime monitoring solution to make sure your website is always up and running and provides you with alerts when outages or downtimes occur.

Thankfully, various online tools and services can monitor your website uptime/downtime and operational performance. However, choosing the best service for your online business is critical.

Why do You Need Website Down Alerts?

The cost of a website going offline to your business can be huge if not detected early. Every online business must be alerted whenever outages or downtimes occur so they can be fixed as soon as possible. With an uptime monitoring service, you can monitor your website 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and receive website down alerts instantly.

Website monitoring is almost mandatory if you want to stay competitive. A website uptime monitoring service can serve as a communication tool with your customers or website visitors as they provide a transparent way of communicating real-time incidents, website status, and downtime to a certain level. Through modern communication features, they build trust between the business owner and the users while preventing unnecessary incident-related emails, chat support, and tickets.

Here are some more reasons why you’d use a website monitoring tool:

• 24/7 automated website performance monitoring.
• Identify website performance issues as quickly as possible.
• Build trust, reliability, and credibility with customers and end-users.
• Communicate downtime and outage statuses in a timely and professional manner.
• Avoid potential cyber-attacks.
• Learn from the website’s historic uptime/downtime metrics to optimize website efficiency.
• Solve ongoing incidents faster.
• Receive real-time website down alert.
• Monitor from different geographical locations across the world.
• Test your website and server performance.
• Quickly schedule planned maintenance and service status updates manually.

A website monitoring service can help you maintain a high level of traffic. A well-performing website can lead to increased customer retention and website visitors. Receiving a website down alert immediately during downtime or performance issues can help you fix your website before it reaches critical status.

How Does a Website Uptime Monitoring Solution Work?

An uptime monitoring tool or service that checks the availability of your website in an automated manner. When your website goes down, you will receive a website down alert immediately via multiple channels, allowing you to fix the ongoing issues with your website fast.

On the other hand, website monitoring extends far beyond the uptime and downtime metrics. Your website can be up and running while still performing inadequately. It could be a geographical issue, slow loading times, hosting/system failure, or human errors. Some of the best website monitoring services offer additional excellent features such as status pages, status badges, and various monitoring metrics to quickly identify your website’s performance problems in real-time.

Typically, uptime monitoring services ensure that your website is working in the background through the following checkpoints:

• Establishes a connection to the website.
• Check for the status code of the website response.
• Record each webpage load time as it loads in the browser.
• Generate reports about the website’s performance such as response time, geographical uptime, SSL certificate, etc.
• Notifies the website owner immediately about the detected website performance issues such as downtimes and the like.

Website uptime monitoring services regularly ensure that your website is running perfectly in the background through various features and monitoring reports that are highly recommended to be utilized.

Benefits of Website Down Alerts

One of the biggest reasons to use website uptime monitoring is the feature to receive a website down alert when your website is offline or is not performing correctly. Receiving instant website down alert on multiple channels like SMS/Call, email, Slack, and similar programs can resolve the issue before your customers or website visitors experience it. Thus, you will be preventing any loss of revenue and credibility among your end-users.

Sudden outages or downtime on your website can be expensive, and as your website, visitors grow and the more customers you have, the higher that cost is likely to become. Each downtime should be appropriately registered, evaluated, and communicated about where the website down alert feature comes in.

When choosing the best uptime monitor solution (learn how to monitor WordPress website), choosing a service with website down alerts and other helpful features is essential as it will benefit your online business in the long run.

Pulsetic: Fully Automated Uptime Monitoring Service

Pulsetic features robust uptime monitoring that helps track websites and manages incident reports by providing downtime alerts via phone call, SMS, email, Slack, Twilio, and Webhook when a service outage occurs. It will detect any changes or issues in your website performance, response time, geolocation issues, SSL certificates, and more to provide end-to-end visibility.

Pulsetic excels at offering advanced features that are very easy and intuitive to use. It also has its customizable frequency checks from different data centers worldwide and shows which part of the world your website is down or slow. With its simple and intuitive interfaces, it’s easy to create status pages, status badges, and monitors in a couple of clicks.

G2 reviewers have awarded Pulsetic an impressive 4.8-star rating, highlighting its standout performance in comparison to its competitors.

Set up a website down alert with Pulsetic

When the status of the Pulsetic probe servers changes to up or down, an alert is sent to any of your configured contact information immediately. With Pulsetic, it’s easy to set up a website down alert notifications on multiple channels, including:

• Email
• SMS/Calls
• Slack
• Telegram
• Twilio SMS
• Twilio Voice
• Webhook
• SIGNL4

To configure the Pulsetic alerting notification, you must create your account first. Visit https://pulsetic.com/ and click the Signup button located in the upper right corner of the homepage.

Next, fill out the signup form with your information. Keep in mind that you must click on the confirmation email sent to your email address to validate your account.

After your email gets verified, you will see a dashboard similar to the image below.

Pulsetic Website Monitor

To set up the website down alert, you need to add your website URL to the Pulsetic Monitors list first. To do this, click on the Monitors link located on the left menu sidebar. On the upper right corner of the screen, enter your website URL and click on the Add Monitor, as seen in the image below.

Pulsetic will then establish a connection with your website. Once done, Pulsetic will add your website to the Monitors dashboard. This means that Pulsetic will now consistently monitor your website’s uptime and downtime and other performance website statuses such as response rate, SSL, geolocation status, etc.

To configure the Pulsetic website down alert on your website, click on the URL of your website and go to the Alerts tab.

Alternatively, you can also click on the three dots icon in the last column of your website’s URL row and click the Alerts link from the dropdown list.

Under the Alerts tab, you can configure alerts via Email, SMS/Calls, Slack, Telegram, Twilio SMS, Twilio Voice, Webhook, and SIGNL4 by entering your contact information for each channel. This will enable you to receive an instant website down alert whenever your website goes down or you are experiencing performance issues and bring it back up as soon as possible.

On the other hand, there are also other tabs that you can utilize for monitoring under the Monitors dashboard. Here as follows:

The Overview tab contains general reports such as response time, uptime/downtime, SLL certificate, performance, SEO, etc.

The Locations tab contains reports on various regions or countries where your website is unavailable or slow. Specific uptime and response time rate information are provided.

The Failed Checks tab contains reports where Pulsetic could not check on your website on specific regions or countries with a particular response code.

The Advanced Settings tab provides the options for API monitoring. In this tab, developers can utilize the request and response settings, including HTTP request and response Headers and Text.

The Delete Monitor tab provides the option to delete your website from the Monitors dashboard list.

Wrapping Up

Frequent website downtimes are painful and costly for every online business. It doesn’t only hurt your revenue but also your search engine ranking. While there are various reasons for your website to go down and not perform well, the first and most crucial step is to be alerted when the website goes down so you and your team can put it back up immediately when it happens.

Pulsetic is a fully automated website uptime monitoring service that combines response time reporting from multiple locations worldwide, incident management, status pages, status badges, and other excellent features, into a single beautifully designed product. Whether you want to notify, your website visitors or end-users and know that your team is actively working to solve problems with your website, or you simply want to communicate with them about scheduled maintenance in a proactive manner, using Pulsetic gives you the all-in-one website monitoring solution to help you and your team focus more on your business and reduce support emails while enhancing SLAs.

Pros and Cons of Website is Down Alerts

Pros:

• Website down alerts can help businesses identify and address issues quickly, minimizing downtime and potential loss of customers.
• Alerts can provide valuable insights into the performance and availability of a website, allowing businesses to improve user experience.
• Website down alerts can help businesses maintain their reputation and credibility by ensuring their website is always accessible to customers.

Cons:

• False positives can occur, leading to unnecessary panic and wasted time and resources.
• Relying solely on website down alerts may overlook other potential issues that could affect website performance, such as slow loading times or broken links.
• Depending on the alert system used, there may be a cost associated with the service, especially for more advanced features or larger websites.

As a result, it is important to carefully consider the pros and cons of website down alerts before investing in a service.

When it comes to website down alerts, understanding the potential risks and benefits can help ensure that businesses make the most of their investments. For instance, using a combination of automated alert systems and manual checks can help reduce the risk of false positives while still providing timely information about website performance. Additionally, businesses should consider features such as customizable thresholds and response times, as well as advanced reporting capabilities, when selecting a service.