Monitoring uptime and errors on your WordPress site after migration

Nobody checks their own homepage daily

Ask ten site owners when they last looked at their own website and most will admit it has been weeks. That is normal; you are running a business, not staring at a homepage. But it means a broken site is usually discovered by a customer, or worse, by nobody, while enquiries quietly dry up. On AI builders the platform watched uptime for you. On your own WordPress hosting, that job is yours now.

The fix is cheap and mostly automated: external monitoring that visits your site every few minutes and alerts you when something is wrong. Setting this up in the first week after migration is one of the highest-value hours you can spend.

Uptime monitoring: the basics done right

An uptime monitor requests your homepage from the outside every one to five minutes. If it gets an error or no response, you receive an email or app notification. Free tiers of well-known monitoring services are more than enough for a small site. Configure two things carefully: monitor more than the homepage, at least one important landing page and the contact page, because a site can be 'up' while key pages are broken; and set the alert threshold to two or three consecutive failures, so a single network hiccup does not wake you at night.

Check the monthly uptime report occasionally. If you see patterns, downtime every night at 3 AM, that points at server jobs or hosting quality, and it is a concrete conversation to have with your host instead of a vague feeling that the site is 'sometimes slow'.

Watching for silent errors

The nastier category is errors on a site that still loads. The contact form that fails to send, the checkout that throws an error after a plugin update, the page that shows a PHP warning to visitors. Three habits cover most of this. First, the monthly form test I recommend to every client: submit your own contact form and check the mail arrives. Second, error logging: make sure WordPress logs errors to a file only you can read, never displays them to visitors, and skim the log after every update session. Third, uptime checks that look for content, not just status codes: a monitor that searches the page for the words 'Contact us' catches a broken theme that returns an empty 200 page.

For shops, go one step further: an automated test order every week with a test payment method. Revenue-critical flows deserve proof, not assumptions.

Alerts that reach you and only when needed

Alert fatigue is real. If every minor event emails you, you will start ignoring the emails and miss the one that matters. Send critical alerts, site down, checkout failing, to the channel you actually read, perhaps a phone notification. Send informational items, weekly uptime summary, update availability, to email. And make sure the alert goes to someone who can act: if only the developer receives downtime alerts but the developer left the project, the alerts are wallpaper.

What to do when the alert fires

Write a short incident card before you need it: hosting login, backup location, developer contact, and the three first steps, check if the server is down in the host's panel, restore the latest backup if the site is broken beyond a quick fix, and communicate. An alert plus a calm plan turns a potential disaster into a twenty-minute interruption. If your migration was done with Convert2WP, keep their contact details on that card too, so the people who know your site's history are one message away.