A website rarely breaks loudly. The page still opens for you, nothing looks wrong on your phone, and meanwhile a visitor somewhere sees a security warning, or a contact form quietly stops working. By the time someone mentions it, you may have lost days of enquiries.
So at Balay ni Bruno & Co. we built a set of checks that run day and night for the clients whose websites we look after. They feed one dashboard our team reads every shift. Along the way we found that the obvious way to check a website misses the very faults customers notice first.
What We Watch, and How Often
Not everything needs watching every minute. We matched each check to how fast that thing can go wrong.
Does it load, and is the security certificate behind the padlock still valid?
A regular look at the paid campaigns we run.
The behind the scenes settings that help a business's emails arrive instead of getting lost.
How many people arrive, and how the site shows up in Google search.
How quickly the site opens on a phone, measured the same way each time.
Drafted from the same numbers, as a starting point for the month's report.
Every one of these checks only looks. None of them edits a page, submits a form or sends anything, so watching a site can never be the thing that breaks it.
Five Traps That Make a Check Lie
1. "The page answered" is not "the site works"
The simplest check asks your website for a page and is happy if anything comes back. Many of those checks also skip the security certificate. That means an expired certificate, which puts a warning in front of every visitor, passes as healthy. It is one of the first faults a customer notices, and the easiest one for a lazy check to miss.
A basic check
- Asks whether the page answered
- Ignores the security certificate
- Raises an alarm on a single failed try
The check we run
- Asks whether the page answered
- Confirms the certificate is valid
- Waits for two failures in a row before raising an alarm
Waiting for two failures in a row matters as much as the certificate. A website can hiccup for a moment. If every hiccup sends an alert, people learn to ignore the alerts, and then the real one gets ignored too.
2. Comparing a half month with a full month
Early in a month, this month's visitors will always look small next to all of last month. We saw a traffic report that looked like a huge drop when visits had really gone up a little. The fix is simple: compare the same days. The first eight days of this month against the first eight days of last month.
3. Checking email on the wrong address
A business's email does not always live on the same web address as its website. One client's website sits on one address while their email runs on another. Checking the email settings on the website's address would have reported a fault that did not exist. We check the address the email actually uses.
4. Testing a contact form the wrong way
Opening a form's sending address directly to "test" it can return a "page not found" answer, because that address only accepts real submissions. That looks like a broken form when it is fine. Filling the form with fake entries is no better. So we check that the form is on the page and that anything built into it loads, and we never submit it.
5. Relying on a free online speed test
Google's free speed test service is shared by everyone who uses it without their own key, and it often turns requests away when it is busy. On a bad day it refused every site we asked about. We run the same mobile speed test ourselves instead, which gives the same score without the limit.
Watch the watchers: a check can stop running and say nothing, which looks exactly like "no problems". Every one of our checks reports in when it runs, and one that is not on that watch list can go quiet without anyone noticing. So every check goes on the list.
Covering a New Client From Day One
When a new client gives our reporting account read only access to their Google Analytics and Google Search Console, the checks find their site on their own and start watching it that same day. There is no separate setup to forget. The work a person still does is reading what the checks find and deciding what to do about it.
Good checks do not replace a person. They make sure the person looking after your website hears about a problem before your customers do.
Common Questions
How often should my website be checked?
For whether it loads at all, every few minutes is sensible. We check client websites every 15 minutes. Slower moving things need less: email setup once a day, visitor numbers twice a day, mobile speed once a week.
Why did my site look fine to a checker while customers saw a warning?
Many simple checks only ask whether the page answered and skip the security certificate, the thing behind the padlock in the browser. An expired certificate puts a warning in front of your visitors while that kind of check still says all is well. A good check confirms the certificate too.
Will a website check change anything on my site?
It should not. The checks we run for clients only look. They never edit pages, submit forms or send anything, so watching your site can never be the thing that breaks it.
Key Takeaways
- Match each check to how fast the thing can break: the website every 15 minutes, email setup daily, speed weekly.
- A check that ignores the security certificate will miss one of the first faults customers notice.
- Wait for two failures in a row before alerting, so real alerts are not lost among false ones.
- Compare the same days of each month, never a half month against a full one.
- Checks should only look. They should never edit, submit or send.