If you run a website, chances are high that what happens to it matters a lot to you. There can never be enough backups or a good enough monitoring solution. Then there is the ever rotating cast of characters used to give your site a hard time: hackers, spammers and all sorts of bots out there looking for URLs to crash. Here are the top free tools available to help keep your site safe, secure and up-to-date 365 days a year! Keep reading for our picks on the Best Free Website Monitoring Tools.
Gone are the days where you need to turn to third-party solutions that are unreliable. There are several best free website monitoring tools that can be used at no cost for your WordPress sites.
Sematext [free + paid]
Pricing: $0/month. Premium plans start at $19/mo.
Sematext Cloud is an all-in-one log management and monitoring solution that provides end to end visibility and observability. When it comes to website monitoring, the suite offers a real user monitoring (RUM) solution, Sematext Experience, and a synthetic monitoring tool, Synthetics.
With the launch of Sematext Experience and Synthetics, Sematext became the go-to tool for developers looking to get insight into their infrastructure while still keeping an eye out on the user experience metrics.
With Sematext Experience, you’ll get a report on the actual experience and satisfaction of your users while providing key pieces of information as to how your website or application is performing in different locations, devices, or different connection speeds.
On the other side of the spectrum, you’ll be able to set up Synthetic Monitoring to create a complex system of monitors for all your resources in just a few clicks. The monitors will ping your resources from a number of locations all across the globe and report back stats like website speed, website uptime, error rates, third APIs responses, SSL certificate expiry, and many other mission-critical metrics. You can even use it to benchmark against competitors and identify areas you should optimize to improve website performance.
Getting started with Sematext is quite easy and intuitive thanks to the simple setup wizard that every new user gets to see.
Every plan has a risk-free, 14-day trial that does not require any credit card to be added. We also offer granular control over what you pay for as every product is individually priced. This way you can pay only for the products and features he needs.
Features:
- A unified location for all your logs, metrics, and events
- Identify resources & requests with the biggest negative impact on your website performance
- Real-time alerts and debugging solutions
- Support for all major frameworks
- Very well documented features
Pingdom [paid]
Pricing: $15/month
Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service that will send out detailed alerts whenever an application or website goes down. With a user-friendly interface and an affordable price – compared to the more expensive tools out there – Pingdom has made its way into the list of the top monitoring services by offering a wide range of capabilities, including SSL certificate monitoring (feature that you can read more about in our review of the best SSL certficate monitoring tools) and website performance monitoring.
Pingdom has a real user monitoring solutions that track real-time visits to your site and allows you to enhance your performance with the data collected from actual people. Geographical performance is being monitored as well to ensure that your site will have the best possible performance regardless of where the users are accessing it from.
While you are able to monitor a large number of endpoints, performance seems to suffer especially when viewing individual items.
Pingdom will alert you every time a service or third party resource goes down but there are sometimes inconsistencies with the alerting as users have reported the service either not sending the alert at all or sending false positives.
Their plans start at $15/mo and you get 10 uptime monitors and 1 advanced monitor with tests from their 100 + check locations scattered across the world. While they don’t have a free tier, they do offer a 14 days test trial that can show you everything they have to offer.
Features:
- Detailed interfaces with user-friendly features
- Instantaneous alerting system
- Real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring
- The mobile application makes up for the somewhat complicated setup
- SMS and email notifications are available
Datadog Synthetic Monitoring (FREE TRIAL)
Datadog provides cloud-based infrastructure and application monitoring services. Its Synthetic Monitoring package specifically focuses on web monitoring and performance testing features. Datadog Synthetic Monitoring tests are run from servers around the world.
Key features:
- Performs uptime and response time monitoring from several locations around the world.
- Enables user-journey modeling to check for load errors, programming mistakes, and poor website design.
- Enables website tests to be compiled through browser recording.
- Uses AI methods to vary user journeys during test runs.
- Tests are run through actual browsers for real-life user experience modeling.
Datadog’s tests emulate user access rather than recording events during real user visits. This is a useful tool for checking important performance metrics on a new web page, such as response times, load error rates, and programming issues. Constant availability and latency tests highlight potential delivery problems such as load balancing or queuing problems. The tool will also log whenever the site becomes available. Uptime record-keeping is particularly important for those who need to prove compliance with SLAs.
The screens of the performance monitor include some great visualizations. An example is the waterfall root cause analysis view, which displays how one problem impacts many performance metrics. The service can pinpoint whether the performance deterioration is due to network issues, coding errors, or server problems.
Although the Datadog Synthetic Monitoring service performs its own check, you can design customized tests by recording walk-throughs. These simulations will then be implemented on the many Datadog testing servers to record the response-times of your webserver to those specific actions that you want to test. This is a great feature that will help you trial new features on a website to ensure that adding a button or a graphic won’t slow down the loading or navigation performance of that page.
The standard tests aren’t just repetitions of the same access runs. Datadog includes AI-based machine learning techniques that proactively seek out features in a page and attempt every combination of execution. Over time, tests establish what should be considered a typical performance of your site. This enables you to see a log of expected response times and it also adjusts alert thresholds so that you aren’t pestered by an overactive alerting system.
Pros:
- Allows for monitoring at different locations around the world
- Can monitor both internally and externally giving network admins a holistic view of network performance and accessibility
- Supports auto-discovery that builds network topology maps on the fly
- Changes made to the network are reflected in near real-time
- Allows businesses to scale their monitoring efforts reliably through flexible pricing options
Cons:
- Would like to see a longer trial period for testing
Datadog Synthetic Monitoring is a subscription service and you can access it on a 14-day free trial.
Conclusion
We all want our business or personal website to be working 24/7/365. However, in today’s digital environment it is necessary to constantly monitor your site for uptime, downtime, and potential threats. Although there are a number of paid solutions that allow you to check the status of your website from anywhere in the world, there are also a large number of free solutions that will meet a variety of needs.