Jimmy ParkerIt’s not enough to create an attractive website design. It is essential to maintain a close eye on it too. However, manual monitoring tasks such as server status and uptime can be time-consuming. It’s better to make use of tools to monitor websites instead.
Monitoring websites can be a broad term used to describe any online service that monitors the availability of a website, its function, speed, and performance. Typically the monitoring services are created and then operate on their own, and only notify users when a problem occurs.
Website monitoring services allow you to keep track of uptime, page loading speed, as well as other important website performance metrics. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been running your website for 10 years, it was launched in the past year, or if you’re creating an entirely new site from scratch. You have to track its performance.
Table of Contents
1. Pingdom – Best Overall Page Speed and Monitoring of Performance
Pingdom offers an online monitoring system that sends detailed alerts each time websites or applications go down. With an easy-to-use interface and cost-effective pricing in comparison to more costly tools available Pingdom is a great choice. Pingdom has made it onto the list of best monitoring tools by providing an array of features such as SSL certificate monitoring (a feature that you can learn more about by reading our analysis of the top SSL certificate monitors) and performance monitoring for websites.
Pingdom offers real-time monitoring tools that track real-time traffic to your website and allow you to improve your site’s performance by analyzing the data from real people. Performance across the globe is monitored in order to make sure that the website is running at its best performance no matter where users access it from.
While you’re able to check a variety of devices, performance tends to slow down, especially when looking at particular items.
Pingdom will notify you every when a service or a third-party service goes down. However, there can be issues with the alerting, since users have complained about the service not sending alerts at all, or not sending alerts at all, or sending fake positives.
The plans start at just $10 per month and include 10 uptime monitors and one advanced monitor that includes tests from the 100 + check locations spread throughout the globe. While they don’t offer any free plans but they do provide the opportunity to try a 14-day trial which will show you the features they provide.
Key Features:
- Notifications via SMS or email are also available.
- The mobile application is responsible for the somewhat complex setup
- Monitoring of real users and monitoring using synthetic technology
- Alerting system that is instantaneous
- Elegant interfaces and user-friendly features
2. Host Tracker – Comes With the Most Distinctive Features
Simple in its design, Host Tracker is designed for admins of sites who want to keep track of their server’s availability and also the transactions between client and server. Its primary focus is on crucial indicators like page error, connection problems with databases as well as problems with networks.
The pricing structure is straightforward enough to be composed of three different tiers each one having its distinctive list of features and capabilities. It’s worth noting that, at first glance, the cost for their base price seems expensive when compared with other similar products but I believe the features packed into the higher-priced tiers will make up for the difference.
One thing that Host-tracker does not have in comparison to other solutions included in this listing is its capability to track real-time users. It’s not an issue when all you want to do is to focus on the server’s resources. However, for sites that have large numbers of users such as websites that publish online or even e-commerce sites, RUM is going to make a difference in providing the best possible experience for your customers.
There’s not a free tier, however, each signup is a free trial, with a credit card not required for a 30-day trial, in which you are able to try out all the features of the software, without risk.
Key Features:
- SMS, email, Skype, Hangouts, and voice call notifications are available
- 60 test sites across the globe
- The old design is compensated for by a clear and easy-to-understand dashboard
3. Uptrends – Best for Real User Monitoring Add-ons
With over 150 monitoring sites around the world, Uptrends checks your apps between one and 60-minute intervals. It also offers a broad selection of tools to make sure that you’re always running at top performance.
In addition to the monitoring of their website they also provide monitoring of web performance monitoring of APIs, monitoring servers, SSL certificate monitoring, and real-time monitoring of users, which includes features such as third-party content monitoring mobile website monitoring waterfall report, and mobile site monitoring, and screenshots of transactions.
Although the basic plan isn’t equipped with many of the more well-known options like custom dashboards, maintenance mode, or monitoring of multiple browsers, Uptrends does offer minimal features to ensure that their customers can keep track of their websites efficiently. Additionally, they offer a range of free tools accessible to everyone. Since they do not have the option of a free account and offer a 30- day trial for their users, which does not require a credit card, and grants access to every feature that is available.
Key Features:
- Over 150 test locations across the globe
- Real user monitoring solution
- Multi-step transaction monitoring
- Beautiful, clear UI
4. Monitive – Best for Rapid Downtime Alerts
Many teams have personnel who are responsible for monitoring the performance of their websites, but they may not be the IT specialists to fix any issues. Monitive is an uptime monitor software that is ideal for any coach such as this, and who has to be aware of any problems immediately when they occur.
It’s an easy system. Join Monitive and integrate your websites into their online portal. Monitive will monitor for downtime on a regular basis. If your website isn’t accessible to users, Monitive will persistently let you know by:
- If the site isn’t working after 10 minutes, you will receive an automated phone call
- If there is no action taken and the site remains down after 3 minutes, you’ll be notified via text message warning
- A notification email will be sent when the outage is found
It ensures that you’re not aware of any downtime if it occurs. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a web store, a customer service page, or some other website that must be to be operational 24/7 Monitive’s proactive notification system will help you or your team members work on a solution as soon as possible.
It’s not only about maintaining important sites accessible for visitors or customers anytime. Making sure you’re nipping downtime early helps keep your Google ranking from dropping, and even your blog or marketing pages will benefit from the constantly-reliable Monitive platform.
It doesn’t stop at the monitoring of downtime, either. Monitive also has other useful features, such as:
Monitive begins with a no-cost forever plan, which permits users to check one page, with health checks every 10 minutes. Your logs will be stored for a year, and you receive both monthly and weekly reports on your website’s performance. But, you will only receive emails, not texts or calls.
Do you need to add more? Five monitors will be checked every minute with the Pro plan of Monitive. This unlocks text, phone, and app alerts as well as multi-user accounts, keyword checks, and more.
Pricing varies based on the number of monitors you require. Starting at 5 for 7 per month to get five monitors. You can pay monthly or annually and then cancel at any time you’d like.
The monthly price increases for every five additional monitors to 200. As an example, you could buy 50 monitors at $42 per month, or 420 for the year.
If you are looking for easy, clean, and reliable software for monitoring your uptime that can help you react to problems with speed and agility, start with Monitive today.
Key Features
- Slack, PagerDuty, Telegram, and Pushover notifications
- Establish maintenance times for each period
- Access to Team members (multiple users)
- Ping monitoring
- Timeout monitoring with custom lengths
5. StatusCake – Fastest URL Testing Intervals
More than 100,000 people have a faith in StatusCake for monitoring websites such as Microsoft, Netflix, FanDuel, and JetBrains.
StatusCake is home to over 200 monitoring servers in 43 countries. Actually, they have a monitoring service on all continents, but only one.
The reason that this tool is ranked so high on my list is due to the fact that it comes with among the fastest test intervals available at the present. We’ve seen tools that check the status of websites each minute, or once every 5 minutes. However, StatusCake offers a choice of 30-second intervals.
In order to have the most efficient monitoring time, you’ll have to join the Business plan. It starts at $66.66 per month.
StatusCake also offers a superior plan that starts at $20.41 monthly. At that price, the testing interval increases to a minute.
If you would like a service to monitor websites with the latest capabilities, StatusCake is a great option to begin. Based upon the package you pick you’ll get benefits such as:
Another major benefit of the business plan the access to team tools, including multi-user logins as well as audit logs.
Similar to other top monitoring services for websites available, StatusCake offers a free plan that comes with basic features. In the event you choose to sign-up for a free account your website will be inspected at five-minute intervals. You’ll also have access to an analysis of the root cause to determine any time that your site is down.
The free plan offers speed tests on pages every day. Beyond this, you’ll have to upgrade to get one of the more advanced features.
Key Features
- Test intervals range between five minutes and 30 seconds
- Many alert options such as SMS Slack, email, and Twitter
- Server, domain, uptime site speed, SSL monitoring
6. Uptime Robot – Best Free Monitoring of Websites
The Uptime Robot is considered to be the newest child on the block for quite a time and is probably one of the top options for value particularly if you’re seeking a basic tool that can inform you that your service is not working.
The free account provides 50 monitors that are enough for the majority of small websites or web-based apps. You also get five-minute intervals of monitoring from 12 different locations around the world and three months’ storage of your logs.
If you’re looking for a program that will offer both real-time monitoring and real-time monitoring of your users, Uptime Robot is not going to be your best choice. As the name implies, it is focused on performing automated inspections of your website and APIs every 5 minutes. It also provides alerts with numerous connections to tools such as Slack, Pagerduty, OpsGnie, Telegram, and VictorOps.
While it lacks certain features such as speed analysis but the 24 months of log storage as well as the one-minute intervals of checking for Premium plan subscribers are a huge extra.
Key Features:
- Notifications via SMS or email are also available.
- Heartbeat monitoring for intranets and cron jobs
- A simple process of setting up
- Advanced notifications let you define certain conditions for the alerts you receive. Example: x errors in the time of y minutes
7. TeamViewer – Best Choice for Monitoring Plans That Can Be Customized and eCommerce Websites
The product is described as a cloud-based all-in-one IT monitoring tool The team Viewer Web Monitoring will check your website on a regular basis for up to one minute and will report back to you through a custom alerting system any deviation from regular.
The Team Viewer Web Monitoring tool is best used in combination with their Uptime Monitoring and Transaction Monitoring as well as their Full Page Load Monitoring tools. However, by itself, the real-time monitoring solution can provide specific information about the users’ performance on their browsers and platforms as well as page load times as well as breakdowns of the user’s location, and more.
This product is different from other solutions because it has a completely customizable pricing plan that allows its customers to choose and choose which features they’d like to avail. The basic plan is priced at $10.90 each month. They provide the option of a customized plan, meaning that the monthly cost will depend on the number of options you select.
Although it’s true that Team Viewer Web Monitoring doesn’t offer the option of a free trial but you can try it to test it out by joining their trial, which is free and will give you an insider’s glimpse of what it has to provide.
Key Features:
- Instant Alerts
- Webpage Content Check
- Multiple Protocols
- Check Frequency up to 1 minute
- 5 Check Locations
- 25 Basic Monitors
8. Sematext
Sematext Cloud is an all-in-one log management and monitoring system that gives you complete transparency and visibility. For monitoring of websites, Sematext Cloud offers an actual user monitoring (RUM) solution Sematext Experience as well as the ability to monitor synthetically, Synthetics.
After the introduction of Sematext Experience and Synthetics, Sematext became the preferred tool for developers who want to gain insight into their systems while monitoring the metrics of user experience.
With Sematext Experience, you’ll receive an assessment of the real user experience as well as the satisfaction levels of customers as well as providing important pieces of information about how your application or website performs in various settings or devices, as well as different connections speeds.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can install Synthetic Monitoring to build an elaborate monitoring system for your entire resource with just a couple of clicks. The monitors will be able to ping your servers from a variety of places around the world and provide statistics such as site speed, time, error rate 3rd APIs responses SSL certificate expiry, and a host of other metrics that are vital to your business. It is also possible to make use of it to measure your site against other websites and determine areas that you need to optimize for better performance on your website.
Starting using Sematext is simple and easy because of the easy set-up wizard that each new user is able to view.
Each plan comes with the option of a 14-day, risk-free trial period that doesn’t need a credit card to be added. We also provide granular control of what you pay for since each item is priced separately. So, you pay only for the items and features you require.
Key Features:
- Highly documented features
- Support for all the major frameworks
- Debugging and alerting solutions that are real-time, as well as in the form
- Find resources and requests that have the greatest negative impact on the performance of your website
- A unified place to store all your logs, measurements, and events
9. Datadog Synthetics
Datadog Synthetics lets you proactively keep track of your API endpoints, and then send out alerts based on parameters you have defined. You’ll be able to identify the network’s timings, which could eventually allow you to get to the root of the issue quicker.
Sign Up with Datadog Synthetics
It is possible to incorporate Datadog Synthetics tests straight into your CI pipeline in order to ensure prompt detection of problems, which allows you to assess the status in your environment following each deployment. You can also minimize the time it takes to fix errors before your users are aware of them.
All of your important transactions can be monitored by Datadog Synthetics without writing a single line of code through this web-based recorder. User screenshots and step-by-step waterfall visualizations are coupled using an algorithm that detects elements even after making modifications to the UI, which results in less damaged tests.
Pricing is based on Datadog Synthetics and starts at $5 for every ten thousand tests that are run each month. It is specifically designed to monitor SLAs and SLs from all over the globe. Browser tests start at just $12 for every thousand tests. It lets you test without code as well as self-maintaining intelligent tests.
Key Features:
- AI-driven Self-Maintaining Tests
- Web-Recorder allows for test creation without code
- Display of latency of DNS, SSL, TTFB, and many more
- Site uptime and latency tracking
10. New Relic Browser
The brand new Relic Browser offers information on the most resource-intensive queries in terms of volume, response time, and callback times along with throughput and data transmission. It provides a robust ecosystem for monitoring your website as well as applications, which is typically best suitable for large companies as well as organizations that have a lot of critical business services.
Sign Up with New Relic Browser
As part of the company’s commitment to helping their customers improve protection, New Relic Browser offers two data regions: two in the US and the other located in the EU. They’re also SOC2 conforming, which means that the customer’s data is secure and safe.
The New Relic Browser, you will see more modern metrics that focus on the user’s needs instead of simply loading times. It can help you comprehend how changes to code impact your end users by observing contentful paint times, and interactivity metrics, as well as giving different information about what is slowing down your site along with any other errors that you may face.
Key Features:
- Integration with your preferred ticketing system
- Advanced alerting systems for advanced alerting
- Custom dashboards
- Full Support for Google’s Core Web Vitals
11. Checkly
Checkly utilizes Puppeteer as well as Playwright frameworks to mimic the user’s interactions with your site or application inside the Chrome browser. While you’re able to write your test scripts on your own, Checkly does offer a Headless Recorder browser extension to help you. After you’ve completed the code, you can run it for 10 minutes every day.
Alerting systems are flexible, and you can receive an alert when any of the parameters are satisfied. Alerts can be sent via Email, Slack, Pagerduty, or even SMS.
Tests are conducted from six locations in America and eight locations in Europe as well as Africa and six more locations in Asia. The feedback received from various locations around the world will provide a more precise picture of how visitors experience your site and help you make crucial decisions to increase the efficiency of your site.
Pricing starts at $7/month and can go up to $499/month depending on the number of SMS credits and team members, dashboards for public API checks, browser checks, as well as other integrations.
Key Features:
- No code required
- Tests are conducted using real browsers
- Screenshots for each transaction
- Integration of CI/CD
12. Dynatrace
Dynatrace is a monitoring tool that monitors the performance and availability of your resources within your organization using the use of private elocution to monitor your internal resources, which allow you to know the user experience of your apps and websites by recording and measuring important metrics.
Dynatrace provides three kinds of artificial monitors. The first is a single-URL monitor which acts as a virtual user who visits your site or application and is able to operate from any of the available places with the frequency of 5 to more than five minutes. The second is Browser click paths, which are similar to the single-URL, acting like a user, however, they follow an exact path through your app. The third variant can be described as the HTTP monitor which is a basic HTTP request that is personalized and executed at various times.
The pricing of Dynatrace is straightforward starting at $11 per month per 10000 monitoring units. They can be monitoring by real users, session replay, or synthetic monitoring. Dynatrace also provides a free trial that is without commitment.
Key Features:
- Monitoring the real-time usage of mobile, hybrid, and single-page applications using common analytics
- Created with security and privacy in mind, to help you meet the GDPR regulations.
- The ability to use real-time monitoring as well as synthetic monitoring, session replay
13. Site24x7
Site24x7 offers a thorough and precise alert each time your site or application is unable to start a service, is experiencing connectivity issues with your network and problems with performance, server CPU utilization, timeouts, and many others.
Alongside other fantastic tools, a quick and accommodating support staff, as well as an alerting service that sends alerts via SMS or email Site24x7 is rapidly becoming the most popular option for monitoring resource usage.
Their monitoring of users lets you see the way that users interact with your website, giving you a complete understanding of the actual issues impacting their experience in real-time. You can also track and analyze the various factors that affect their experiences, such as location, browser, and platforms.
Site24x7 supports a wide range of protocols, like HTTP, HTTPS, REST DNS TCP, POP, IMAP, SMTP, and FTP. Additionally, they have numerous integrations with popular services such as PagerDuty and Zapier for notification. Additionally, you’ll get 120 monitoring sites with one-minute intervals for checking.
One of the main benefits of the service is its affordable pricing plans that are scalable depending on the size of your business, however, it can be a bit hampered by the outdated design, which can be confusing at times. It’s important to note that all their tiers offer 30 days of free trial that does not require a credit card.
Key Features:
- SMS, email, and voice alerting are all accessible
- Support for nearly all types of environments
- Clean and simple setup procedure
- An application for mobile devices is available.
14. Calibreapp
Calibreapp allows you to provide top-quality user experiences regardless of location, device, or speed of connection by modeling the real-world environment. It lets you understand the impact of third-party software on your system and automate testing for performance and alert you whenever your users encounter issues.
Calibreapp offers powerful performance reports that give you a complete overview of your entire system, allowing you to keep track of all issues that may be arising. The reports on insights that automatically are being distributed save many hours that could be used to build traditional reports from dashboards.
Pricing is standard and dependent on the number of test profiles and the number of tests. It starts at $85 per month for 5000 tests and three test profiles per site and can be increased the number of tests to 50000 and 50 profiles per website, which is $1500. They offer the opportunity to try a free 15-day trial period during which you are able to explore everything it has to offer.
Key Features:
- Insights Email Report
- Google Lighthouse built-in
- Test authenticated pages
- Core Web Vitals support
15. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor
Solarwinds has been at forefront of monitoring for many years, and in the past, they’ve come up with many solutions to help their customers to understand what’s happening behind the curtain. However, that experience is at a great(er) price.
Monitoring performance on the Web is one aspect of their software platform that, as of today, it is among the most comprehensive solutions for DevOps around the globe. While no one can dispute their expertise or the value their application offers to its users, their price is difficult to swallow, particularly when you compare it to smaller competitors that cost less for, what seems to be a similar product.
It is important to remember that it’s true that the features list is extensive and includes Endpoint monitoring and detection, monitoring of devices on the network, and even a mobile application that lets you monitor your website wherever you are, Solarwinds doesn’t have a RUM solution that is available. It’s important to note that they keep track of each step of transactions from the server to the user and will provide some insight into the user’s experience.
The Web Performance Monitoring tool provides specific load-time statistics from various locations around the globe that capture all transactions that occur through the browser as well as provide important information about what’s going on underneath the skin of your site.
Key Features:
- A great mobile application is free to download
- Synthetic monitoring solutions for monitoring
- Pre-configured alerts and dashboards that can speed up the setup process
Why You Should Use Website Monitoring Software
If you decide to utilize an online traffic monitor and website analytic tools or a general performance monitor there is one thing that is certain there are many advantages to using these tools to monitor your website’s operations day-to-day.
Here are a few of the reasons:
- You can also utilize these tools to assess your hosting provider to make sure they are able to keep their commitments. The majority of providers provide an”uptime” guarantee. Software for monitoring websites lets you know for yourself if this is the situation.
- Monitoring tools offer key performance indicators. After installation, you’ll have quick access to information about the way your website’s performance is being measured.
- Website monitoring software can give you the possibility of problems. You can determine if specific pages on your website are slow to load and if visitors aren’t able to scroll down to the call-to-action or if a particular part of your site isn’t working.
- Website monitoring tools notify users of any downtime with their websites to help you fix the issue fast. This means that fewer users will attempt the site’s access when it’s down, and you’re able to minimize any loss of revenue.
- Website monitoring software can give you an accurate gauge of how your website’s doing.
Once you’ve got an idea of what these tools can do and why you should be using them, let’s look at our list of the 12 most effective tools available today.
Main Types of Website Monitoring Tools
There are a handful of important types of monitoring software that you must consider. Let’s look at the definitions of each.
- Performance monitoring: This kind of monitoring is based on full-page and browser checks that provide a report of the way your website is doing all-around and piece-by-piece. It will inform you whether there’s any issue in CSS, script images, timeouts, or other elements.
- Monitoring APIs It is usually used to monitor applications. HTTPS Web Service multistep API, multistep API, as well as apps can all be tracked by this method.
- server availability. This kind of monitor is able to determine the availability of certain servers like websites as well as databases, external servers, and mail. This would include what is known as “uptime” monitoring. It will also determine whether more advanced services are available, like DNS FTP, DNS, and SSL.
How to Find the Best Website Monitoring Service
You can tell in the list below that these services are able to monitor different aspects of your site. There are a few things that all website monitors accomplish, but there are also advanced features only available in certain packages and services.
It isn’t a good idea to spend too much however, you must be vigilant about your online real property.
Below are the most important elements I took into account in forming my recommendations. Consider these as a starting location for your search.
There’s plenty of similarity in what each monitoring company offers- but they’re not all doing exactly the exact same thing. Take the tips below to help you narrow your search and distinguish the one that is reliable from the best.
Price
Much like everything else, the cost is likely to play a significant factor in your decision-making. There is no need to spend an enormous amount of money on web monitoring.
If you own a modest site or blog that you run You can do so with a no-cost monitoring service. The plans basically inform you when your website is down and will provide basic reports.
If you would like to pay for monitoring of your website the plans we recommend can range from $5 per month for the basic plan, up to 650 dollars per month for high-end monitoring. There are a lot of excellent alternatives available between $30 and $100 per month cost of $30 to $100 per month.
URL Monitoring Frequency
A web monitoring service is useless if it does not monitor your website’s uptime and inform users of any downtime. However, most monitoring services don’t monitor websites in real-time, which means you won’t be aware of the exact second your website is down.
URL monitoring takes place with interval checks. The fastest we’ve seen happens every 30 seconds, and the slowest we’ve seen is every 30 minutes.
If you’ve got a business site that is a lot of traffic it is recommended to choose the plan that will check your URL’s status every minute, or at least. If not, then every five minutes is enough for most people.
Integrated Log and Server Monitoring
While not every web monitoring service offers tools for monitoring servers and log monitoring software I consider it to be crucial because CPU utilization memory, memory utilization, and disk space could directly affect the user’s experience using the website or in the application.
Remember this since it can help you discern areas of strength and weakness on your site and, if you are lucky, deal with issues prior to them becoming an issue.
Server Monitoring
It’s not every service that includes an option for monitoring servers. This isn’t something you can get for free also.
A server monitoring program can keep track of things such as memory and the amount of disk space available, CPU usage, and many others. It’s a fantastic method to understand the way your server resources are used, and to determine if you should modify your web hosting plans.
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
RUM is among the most effective ways to get immediate insights into how visitors interact with your site. This monitoring system is a sophisticated system that collects data on how people actually interact with your website.
Based on this information You can identify weaknesses or strengths on your site. It also helps you diagnose and resolve any issues that may arise at the end of the line for users.
Testing Locations
Test your site locally can produce a completely different experience than when it is running in a different country around the globe. This is the reason having global testing nodes is crucial when evaluating the speed of your website because it allows you to identify which areas of your site aren’t loading as fast and thereby unable to provide the same high-quality experience to your worldwide viewers. If you’re looking to find out more about how location influence the performance of your website take a look at our blog posts that discuss the causes of latency and ways to decrease it to increase the speed of your website.
Solid Alerting Capabilities
You’ll have to create alerts for various functions and sections on your website. If they are executed correctly, they’ll serve as a valuable early warning system that can ensure you are aware when your website is about to be a disaster. Some services give false alarms, or experience problems in relaying alerts, so choosing an option that allows you to create alerts through multiple channels is an absolute requirement.
Support for Different Browsers
If you’ve ever experienced that “pleasure” of dealing with many websites, you’re likely aware of the numerous issues between the two. A program that works well on Safari may not work as well or not work on Internet Explorer or vice versa. Testing for various browsers can reveal what users experience when using your service.
Conclusion
A website monitoring tool can provide you with valuable information about your site and help you stay informed about problems, and allow you to make more informed decisions regarding improving the performance of your website in the near future.
There’s a variety of tools, which includes ones that are suitable for novices and those designed suitable for larger companies You’ll be able you’ll find something which fits your requirements.
With monitoring software for websites in the palm of your hand, you can enhance the performance of your website and keep eye attention to the way the web hosting service you choose is a factor. You can only make your site more effective. Why not take advantage of these tools?