Adding your first monitor takes about five minutes and needs no technical knowledge. You do not need access to your server, you install no plugins and you paste no extra code into your site. All it takes is the address of your website - the one you type into a browser.

This guide walks you through the whole form, field by field. For every option we say what to pick at the start and what can safely wait - the form has plenty of settings and it is easy to get lost in them on the first go.

Before you start: tell us how to reach you

This is the one thing worth doing before you add a monitor. Monitoring with no notification channel will collect data, but it will not tell you that something is happening.

Go to My profile, the Notifications tab, and turn on at least one option:

  • E-mail notifications - the simplest, they work straight away. If you are not sure what to pick, pick this.
  • Browser push notifications - a pop-up on your computer. The browser will ask for permission; you have to grant it.
  • Phone notifications - through the free ntfy app (Android and iOS). In your profile you click "Generate topic", install the app, choose "Subscribe to topic" in it and paste the same topic. There is a "Send test" button so you can check it works right away.

You can turn on all three. E-mail plus phone works best in practice: the mail stays as a record for later, and the phone wakes you when it matters.

While you are there, set your time zone (same tab). That way your e-mails will say "Down since 02:14" by your own clock, not in universal time.

Step 1: click "Add monitor"

Once logged in, go to the monitors tab and click the add button. A form opens, split into five sections. We will go through them in order.

At the top of the form you will see a counter along the lines of "Using 0 of 5 monitors". That tells you how many monitors you may have - there is no way to accidentally go over the limit and be charged for it.

Step 2: choose the monitor type

There are four. For your first monitor, choose the first one:

  • HTTP(s) status - this is the one for a website. It fetches your page the way a visitor's browser would and checks whether it answered correctly.
  • Port (TCP) - for devices and services that are not a website: an office server, a NAS holding your backups.
  • DNS - domain records - watches whether your domain points where it should and whether your mail goes where it is meant to. Very useful, but naturally your second or third monitor, not your first.
  • API (JSON) - response structure - for technical users, to watch the shape of an API response. If that means nothing to you, you simply do not need it.

One note: the monitor type cannot be changed after saving. It is not a problem, because you can always add a second monitor, but it is worth knowing.

Step 3: what we monitor

This is where you fill in the specifics.

Name. This is how the monitor is labelled in the list and, more importantly, in alerts. "My website" is enough if you have one. If you plan to have more, be specific from the start: "Company site", "Shop - cart", "Blog". At three in the morning, the name tells you more than the address does.

URL. Type the address exactly as you see it in your browser, including the https:// at the front. The easiest way: open your site, copy the address from the browser bar and paste it in.

Two things worth watching:

  • If your site runs on an address with www, enter the www version. If it runs without - without. The monitor checks exactly the address you give it.
  • Enter your home page. Subpages can be added later as separate monitors.

Project (optional). This is a folder for monitors. Leave it empty for your first one. It becomes useful once you have a dozen or so - agencies and companies maintaining sites keep everything belonging to one client in a single project.

Expected state. Leave "Must be available". The other option ("Must be unavailable") is for watching addresses that are meant to stay blocked, and has no use for an ordinary company website.

Step 4: how often we check

Check interval. Anything from one minute to twelve hours.

  • An online shop, or a site your enquiries and orders come through: 1 minute.
  • An ordinary company site, a landing page, a blog: 5 minutes. That is entirely enough, and it is what we would suggest to start with.
  • Something you watch mostly for good order: 15 minutes or less often.

A shorter interval is not "better monitoring", it is a shorter time to the alert. At five minutes you learn about an outage within five minutes at the latest, rather than when a customer calls.

Timeout. It sounds severe, but it means something simple: from how many seconds do we consider the site slow. This is not the moment the monitor gives up - it is the threshold above which we record a "slow response", so you can see something starting to go wrong.

To begin with you can leave "None" or set 10 seconds. A healthy company website answers in a fraction of a second, so ten seconds is already a clear warning sign.

Reduce event detection sensitivity. Leave this off. It is an escape hatch for later, in case you find you are getting outage alerts even though the site is working - for instance because something sits on a slow connection. The monitor then waits longer before calling an address unavailable.

Step 5: what else we watch

This is where it gets interesting, because these are the things a plain "does the page open" check will never see.

Monitor SSL certificate - turn it on. The certificate is that padlock next to your address. It has an expiry date and it can lapse, and when it does, browsers scare your visitors with a red warning and most of them turn back. With this on, we warn you 30, 14 and 7 days before expiry - enough of a margin to calmly write to whoever maintains your site.

Leave "Ignore SSL/TLS certificate errors" switched off. It is meant for test environments.

Monitor site health - turn it on if your plan includes it. This is a daily audit: we check several dozen things to do with security, SEO and page correctness, then compare the result with the previous day and tell you if anything got worse.

In plain terms: this is the feature that catches the fact that after an update, or after changes made by somebody outside your company, your site suddenly stopped being visible to Google, lost its description in search results, or became twice as slow. None of that is visible to the naked eye, and it can cost months of traffic. That is why SEO agencies and companies maintaining client sites use it too - but it is useful to anyone who would simply rather not find out about a problem six months later.

Monitor content (phrases on the page) - worth turning on. A server can answer perfectly well and still serve a page carrying an error message. To monitoring everything looks fine; to a visitor it very much does not.

You have two rules to choose from:

  • Every phrase must be on the page - enter a short piece of text that is always on your home page and is unlikely to change. Your company name, the headline, the label on a button. If it disappears, something did not render as it should.
  • No phrase may be on the page - this is where you enter error text: Fatal error, Error establishing a database connection, "Site under construction".

You can add several phrases, confirming each with Enter. One note: we check the text that arrives from the server, so content loaded a moment later by scripts (reviews pulled from an outside service, say) may not be found. Pick a fragment that is on the page immediately.

Step 6: when to tell you

The last section. Tick:

  • Availability alert (DOWN / UP) - a notification when the site stops working and when it comes back. This is the basic one; definitely turn it on.
  • SSL certificate expiry alert - if you turned on certificate monitoring.
  • Site health got worse - if you turned on the health audit. You get a signal when something degrades after a change.

Below you will see which channels the alerts will go to (E-mail, Push, ntfy). If you see the message "Set up notifications", it means you have no channel enabled in your profile yet - go back to the start of this guide.

Step 7: save it and check that it works

Click "Add monitor". That is it - the monitor starts immediately, and we run the first check within a minute.

What you will see right afterwards:

  • The monitor status in the list. Green means the site is answering correctly.
  • Monitor details once you click the name: response time, check history, certificate expiry date.
  • Charts and statistics fill in over the next several minutes, and the availability strip makes sense after a day of collecting data. Do not worry if it looks empty at the start.

If you want to check that alerts work, you do not need to break anything. The notification test in your profile is enough.

Four things that most often go wrong with a first monitor

1. The monitor immediately reports the site as down. The most common cause is server-side protection or a security plugin blocking our requests. In the settings you will find the IP addresses we check from - pass them to whoever looks after your site and ask for them to be allowed. The second common cause is a certificate error; the monitor details will say so outright.

2. The address entered differs slightly from the real one. An address without www when the site runs with www (or the other way round) will usually still work thanks to a redirect, but the cleanest thing is to enter exactly the address you see in the browser bar.

3. Alerts do not arrive. Nine times out of ten this is a channel not enabled in the profile, or a browser that blocked push notifications. Check your spam folder too.

4. A content-monitoring phrase "disappears" although the site works. Usually because the text you picked only appears on the page after a script loads it. Pick a different fragment, ideally from the header or the footer.

What to do after your first monitor

Once the first monitor is running and you can see everything adds up, it is worth adding more. A sensible order for an ordinary company site:

  1. The contact page or the form - the place enquiries come through is worth watching separately.
  2. A shop: the cart or a product page - these work differently from the home page and can break independently of it.
  3. A DNS monitor on your mail (the MX record) - mail disappearing shows up as nothing visible on the site, and the messages simply stop arriving.

If you have several addresses to add at once, the form has an "Add several addresses" option - you enter them in one go instead of filling in the form several times.

And finally a small thing that saves nerves: when somebody is about to make bigger changes to your site or move it to another server, you can pause the monitor for the duration of the work. The break is recorded in the history, but it will not spoil your availability statistics.