If Your Website Is Down, You Are Losing Money Every Second.
Website monitoring continuously checks your site availability, performance, and functionality. Observability goes further — it gives you deep visibility into your system internal state so you can diagnose issues quickly. According to a 2025 study by Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute, and a single hour of downtime can cost a mid-sized business $50,000-$300,000. Yet 40% of small businesses have no formal monitoring in place.
At x13apps, we set up comprehensive monitoring for all client websites. Here is what every site owner should monitor.
Uptime Monitoring
Uptime monitoring checks your website from multiple global locations at regular intervals. If your site becomes unreachable, the monitoring service alerts you immediately via email, SMS, Slack, or phone call. Most uptime monitors also track response time — a site that is loading slowly but not down completely may indicate a developing problem.
Set up monitors for your main domain, critical pages, API endpoints, and third-party integrations. Free options include UptimeRobot and Better Uptime. Enterprise options include Pingdom, Datadog, and New Relic.
Performance Monitoring
Track page load time, Time to First Byte (TTFB), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and other Core Web Vitals over time. Performance regressions indicate underlying issues. Set performance budgets and alert when pages exceed thresholds. Real User Monitoring (RUM) collects performance data from actual visitors, giving you real-world data rather than synthetic test results.
Error and Log Monitoring
Monitor PHP errors, JavaScript errors, 404 pages, and 500 server errors. Use centralized logging (tools like Sentry, Logstash, or Papertrail) to aggregate logs from all your services. Set up alerts for error rate spikes. Review error logs regularly — a small number of recurring errors may indicate a larger underlying issue.
Alerting and Incident Response
Define alert severity levels: critical (site down, immediate response), warning (performance degraded, investigate within 1 hour), and info (minor issues, next business day). Create runbooks for responding to common incidents. Conduct post-incident reviews to prevent recurrence. At x13apps, we set up monitoring systems that keep client sites reliable and fast. For more, read our website maintenance guide.