Monitor site uptime

Watchful monitors your website’s availability and SSL certificate expiration, helping you identify downtime and prevent interruptions caused by expired certificates. You can review uptime history, investigate downtime events, and manage monitoring settings from your Watchful dashboard.

Watchful uses its own privacy-friendly, custom-built monitoring service rather than a third-party monitoring platform. This gives Watchful direct control over how uptime checks are performed and how monitoring data is managed.

Uptime monitoring is available with Watchful Premium for both WordPress and Joomla! websites.

How uptime monitoring works

Watchful automatically creates an uptime monitor when you add a website to your Premium account. By default, the monitor checks your website every 10 minutes.

Uptime monitoring works independently of Watchful’s regular site validation process. As a result, your website can remain available to visitors even if Watchful cannot connect to its management client.

Watchful records uptime and downtime events so you can track website availability over time. You can also receive email notifications when your website goes offline or comes back online.

Each uptime monitor includes the following features:

• Configurable monitoring intervals
• Optional keyword-based content checks
• Automatic Boost Mode for accurate outage tracking
• SSL certificate expiration monitoring and email notifications
• Uptime statistics and event history
• Pause and resume controls
• CSV and PDF exports
• Uptime and downtime email notifications
• Uptime and downtime events included in client reports

You can manage monitors individually or use bulk actions to manage multiple sites.

View website uptime

You can quickly check a website’s uptime status from the Sites Dashboard.

To view detailed uptime information:

1. Open the Sites Dashboard in Watchful.
2. Locate the website you want to inspect.
3. Click the site name to open the site drawer.
4. Select Uptime to open the uptime monitoring window.

The uptime window displays the monitor’s current configuration, uptime statistics, and recent events.

Review uptime statistics

The History section provides uptime percentages for four periods:

• Today
• Last 7 days
• Last 30 days
• All time

These statistics help you assess your website’s availability and identify recurring downtime.

Review recent uptime events

The Last 10 events table displays recent uptime and downtime events.

Each event includes its start time, duration, and status. Status icons help distinguish periods when your website was online from periods when it was unavailable.

You can also hover over an event to view additional details.

Review these events when investigating a reported outage or comparing Watchful’s monitoring results with your hosting provider’s logs.

Create an uptime monitor

Watchful automatically creates uptime monitors for eligible Premium websites. However, you can also create a monitor manually if one is missing.

To create an uptime monitor:

1. Open the Sites Dashboard.
2. Click the website name to open the site drawer.
3. Select Create uptime monitor.

Watchful creates a new monitor using its default configuration.

You can then adjust the monitoring interval or enable keyword-based checks.

Configure uptime monitoring

Each uptime monitor has settings that control how Watchful checks your website.

To change these settings:

1. Open the website’s site drawer.
2. Select Uptime.
3. Locate the monitor configuration settings.
4. Adjust the monitoring interval or enter a Word to check.

Watchful saves your changes automatically and displays a confirmation message.

Change the monitoring interval

The Interval setting controls how often Watchful checks your website.

By default, monitors check websites every 10 minutes.

Use the Interval slider to increase or decrease the time between checks.

For example, changing the interval from 10 to 20 minutes reduces the frequency of monitoring requests.

More frequent checks can help identify problems sooner. However, less frequent checks may be suitable for websites that do not require close monitoring.

Boost Mode: Automatically increase monitoring frequency

Boost Mode helps Watchful detect website recovery faster and track outages more accurately by automatically increasing the frequency of uptime checks when your website’s status changes.

Under normal conditions, Watchful checks your website according to your configured monitoring interval. However, when Watchful detects a change in availability, Boost Mode temporarily increases the monitoring frequency to once per minute for up to 15 minutes.

These additional checks help Watchful identify when your website recovers and calculate outage durations more accurately.

After Boost Mode ends, Watchful resumes checking your website at its configured monitoring interval.

Boost Mode is enabled automatically and works with any monitoring interval. No additional configuration is required.

Check website content with Word to check

A successful HTTP response does not always mean your website is displaying the expected content.

For example, a web server might respond successfully while displaying an incomplete page or unexpected content.

The optional Word to check setting allows Watchful to verify that specific text appears in your website’s response.

To enable a keyword check:

1. Open your website’s uptime monitoring window.
2. Locate the Word to check field.
3. Enter a word or phrase that consistently appears on your website’s homepage.
4. Watchful saves the change automatically.

Choose text that is unlikely to change. For example, a distinctive word in your website’s footer can be a good choice.

Watchful checks for this text when monitoring your website. If the expected text is missing, the check can identify a problem even when the server responds.

A keyword check verifies that the expected text appears in the response. It does not confirm that every image, script, or other page element loads correctly.

Pause and resume uptime monitoring

You can temporarily pause uptime monitoring without deleting the monitor or losing its existing history.

Pausing is particularly useful during planned website maintenance, hosting migrations, or other activities that may temporarily make your website unavailable.

To pause monitoring:

1. Open the Sites Dashboard.
2. Select your website to open the site drawer.
3. Click Uptime.
4. Select Pause monitor.

Watchful stops checking the website until you resume monitoring.

To resume monitoring, return to the same window and select Resume monitor.

Pausing a monitor preserves its configuration and historical data. It also prevents planned maintenance from generating new downtime events and related notifications while the monitor remains paused.

Export uptime history

Watchful allows you to export uptime monitoring data for further analysis or recordkeeping.

To export uptime history:

1. Open the website’s uptime monitoring window.
2. Locate the Export menu.
3. Select Download CSV or Download PDF.

Watchful downloads the monitoring records as a CSV or PDF file.

You can open this file to review events, investigate outages, or share monitoring data with your hosting provider.

Delete an uptime monitor

You can delete an uptime monitor when you no longer need to track a website’s availability, or if you want to clear the site history for any reason.

To delete a monitor:

1. Open the Sites Dashboard.
2. Select the website to open the site drawer.
3. Click Uptime.
4. Select Delete.
5. Confirm that you want to delete the monitor.

Important: Deleting an uptime monitor permanently removes its monitoring history. This data cannot be recovered through the Watchful interface.

If you only need to stop monitoring temporarily, use Pause monitor instead.

You can create a new uptime monitor later, but its monitoring history will start again.

Manage uptime monitors in bulk

Watchful’s bulk actions allow you to create or remove uptime monitors across multiple websites.

This is particularly useful when managing a large number of client websites.

To manage uptime monitors in bulk:

1. Open the Sites Dashboard.
2. Select the websites you want to manage using the checkboxes.
3. Open the Bulk actions menu.
4. Choose Create uptime monitor or Delete uptime monitor, as needed.
5. Follow any confirmation prompts.

Watchful applies the selected action to the chosen websites.

Be careful when deleting monitors in bulk because removing a monitor also removes its historical data.

Configure uptime notifications

Watchful can send email notifications when uptime monitoring detects that your website has gone offline or has recovered.

You can control which uptime notifications you receive in your account settings:

To configure these notifications:

1. Open Settings in Watchful.
2. Select the Notifications tab.
3. Locate the Connectivity, Uptime & Performance section.
4. Enable or disable the notifications you want to receive:
   1. Uptime monitor is down — when a monitored website becomes unavailable.
   2. Uptime monitor is up — when a monitored website becomes available again.
   3. SSL Certificate expiration — when an SSL certificate is approaching its expiration date.
   4. Word on home page not found — when the expected website content is missing.
5. Make sure Disable all notifications is set to No if you want to receive alerts.
6. Click Save notifications settings.

Notification preferences apply to your account, allowing you to control the alerts you receive across your monitored websites.

For additional information, see Customize email notifications.

Troubleshoot uptime monitoring

If Watchful reports that your website is offline when it appears to be working normally, or if you receive unexpected downtime notifications, review the following settings.

Check your website URL

Confirm that the website address configured in Watchful is correct.

Pay particular attention to the domain name, the use of www, and whether the website uses HTTP or HTTPS.

Review Word to check

If keyword monitoring is enabled, confirm that the specified text appears in your website’s returned HTML.

If you are unsure whether the keyword is causing a problem, temporarily remove it and review the next monitoring results.

Choose a short, distinctive word that appears consistently on the homepage.

Check firewalls and security software

Firewalls, security plugins, and bot-protection services can block uptime monitoring requests even when your website is available to regular visitors.

Check your firewall logs for blocked requests from Watchful’s website uptime monitoring service.

Watchful uses the WebsiteOps user-agent identifier for uptime monitoring. You may also need to allowlist Watchful’s monitoring IP addresses.

See Allowlist Watchful IP addresses and user agents for the current IP address list and configuration instructions.

Verify DNS settings

If you recently changed hosting providers or updated DNS records, confirm that your domain resolves to the correct server.

DNS changes may take time to propagate, and different locations may temporarily resolve your domain to different addresses.

Review HTTP errors

HTTP status codes can provide clues about why a website is unavailable. These are displayed when you hover over an uptime/downtime event in the Uptime modal.

Common examples include:

Status code	Meaning
200	The server returned a successful response.
301 or 302	The requested URL redirects to another location.
401	Authentication is required.
403	Access is forbidden, possibly because of a firewall or security rule.
404	The requested page was not found.
500	The server encountered an internal error.
502, 503, or 504	The server or an upstream service is unavailable or experiencing problems.

If uptime problems continue, contact Watchful support. Include the affected website URL, the approximate time of the problem, and any relevant error messages.

Avoid deleting and recreating a monitor as a routine troubleshooting step because doing so permanently removes its uptime history.