Why uptime monitoring isn't enough for your website

I run Vigilant, an open-source website monitoring tool, so I wanted to share some insights based on what we’ve learned on monitoring websites.

The Limits of Traditional Uptime Monitoring

Most uptime tools do the bare minimum: they ping your homepage every few minutes and look for a 200 OK response. If they get it, your site’s marked as “up.”

But here’s the problem: just because the homepage loads doesn’t mean the rest of your site is working. Your login could be broken. The checkout process might fail. An API endpoint might be silently throwing errors. Uptime checks won’t catch any of that, they only confirm that something responded.

You Do Need Uptime Monitoring

Don't get me wrong, uptime monitoring is still important. You need to know if your site is reachable at all. If your server crashes or your hosting provider has issues, you want to be the first to know, not your users.

But the uptime monitoring service can also have connectivity issues, when that happens the service may give false positives. The only way to effectively combat this is if the uptime monitoring services use multiple locations to check if the site is down.

Most decent uptime tools also check latency, which gives you a sense of how responsive your site is over time. That’s useful. If response times start creeping up, it’s often an early sign something is wrong. Maybe a slow database query, maybe traffic spikes or high load on your server.

And don’t forget your SSL certificate. A broken cert blocks access and erodes trust. Monitoring tools should alert you before it expires.

Next-Level Monitoring

Once you’ve got basic uptime covered, the next step is to go deeper. Think of your site as more than just one page. It’s a system with moving parts, links, user flows, DNS, third-party services, and any of those can break without triggering a traditional uptime alert.

Broken links are a good example. They don’t take your whole site down, but they chip away at trust. Clicking into a 404 is frustrating for users, it’s a sign something in your website is broken.

Then there are key user flows. Logging in, signing up, resetting a password, placing an order, these are the things people actually come to your site to do. If one of those is broken, your site is technically up, but it’s failing its real job.

DNS is another layer most people don’t think about until it’s too late. If your nameservers go down or your domain is misconfigured, your whole site becomes unreachable, even if the server is fine. It’s like unplugging the sign from your storefront.

And finally performance, you need to know if a change on your website has a performance impact. Manually checking this with Google Lighthouse is time consuming and often forgotten.

Spotting Broken Links Before Your Users Do

Broken links can quickly frustrate users and harm your site’s reputation. Catching them early is key.

To find these you use a crawler. This is a tool that systematically clicks through your site, following every link it finds just like a user would. If the crawler hits a dead end, it flags the broken link.

Running a crawler regularly helps you catch problems before your users do. That means less frustration, better SEO, and a smoother experience overall. And because the crawler works automatically it saves you a lot of time by not having to manually check every link.

Monitoring Critical Flows, Not Just Pages

Synthetic monitoring isn’t new. It uses a real browser to simulate a user interacting with your site, logging in, checking out, filling forms to make sure those key flows actually work.

The tricky part used to be setting it up. You had to specify CSS selectors and element paths, which often broke when the UI changed. It was tedious and time-consuming to maintain.

Recently with the developments of AI, this is changing fast. Instead of wrestling with selectors, you can simply give instructions in plain English, like “click on the add to cart button” or “enter 'Vincent Bean' in the name input field”, and the AI figures out how to do it. That means less hassle setting up tests and more reliable synthetic monitoring.

Don't overlook DNS

It’s always DNS. Most people think “set it and forget it”, and for many sites, that works fine. But there are exceptions you don’t want to miss.

For example, if you’re hosting a site but your client controls the DNS because it’s their domain, changes can happen without your knowledge. A simple tweak or mistake there can take your whole site offline for hours.

Even when you make DNS changes yourself, it’s helpful to get confirmation when those changes actually propagate. That way, you know roughly when the outside world will start seeing the update.

Always Patch in Time, Never Miss a CVE

When you’re running a website, especially a public one, security isn’t optional. The software you rely on can have vulnerabilities, known as CVEs, that malicious actors will try to exploit. If you have any experience hosting a site you will know that random bots try known exploits, just look at your access log.

When a CVE pops up for any software you're using, you want to hear about it immediately so you can decide how fast to patch it. To be honest, most of the time, you should patch right away.

The tricky part is keeping track of these alerts. Relying on random news posts, Slack messages, or word of mouth is a bad idea. Critical CVEs need a reliable, automated way to find you by monitoring them.

Ensure Changes Don’t Affect Performance

Performance issues often slip in quietly, a new (improperly sized) image, a third-party script, a layout tweak, and suddenly your site is slower. The only way to catch this early is to track performance over time.

Running Google Lighthouse often is great for this. It audits your pages and gives you real metrics like First Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive, and more, all using a real web browser. When tracked over time, you get a clear picture of how changes are affecting the user experience.

Performance doesn’t just affect how fast your site feels, it impacts SEO, conversions, and user trust. So it’s worth watching closely.

Final Thoughts

Good websites don't just work, they are cared for. But you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken.
That’s exactly why I built Vigilant. It’s designed to monitor your entire website, from uptime to user flows, DNS health to security vulnerabilities. Because keeping your site healthy means watching all the moving parts, not just the homepage.

You can self-host Vigilant for free, it's open source software. Or you can try the hosted version for free.