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How to Check if Your Website is Really Online
Robert Simon
Technical Writer
Ensuring your website is consistently available is a major challenge for all online businesses. But how can you be sure your site is truly accessible to your visitors at all times? In this article, we explain how to effectively verify your site’s status and quickly detect any downtime.
Why check your website’s availability?
An inaccessible website can cause loss of customers, missed business opportunities, and damage your brand’s reputation. It is therefore essential to have tools and methods to regularly check that your site is online and functioning properly.
Methods to check if your website is online
1. Manually test your website access
Try accessing your website from multiple devices and different networks (computer, smartphone, mobile data, Wi-Fi). However, note that local accessibility does not guarantee your site is reachable everywhere.
2. Use real-time monitoring tools and online verification services
Uptime monitoring solutions like ServiceGuard perform regular checks on your site by simulating visits and measuring response times. They alert you immediately if an anomaly or downtime is detected.
Additionally, several free online services allow you to test your site’s accessibility from servers around the world. These tools detect if your site is down, slow, or partially accessible.
3. Check your hosting provider’s logs and reports
Your host often provides logs and statistics showing periods of downtime or server errors. Be sure to review these regularly.
4. Set up alerts to be notified immediately
Quick intervention is key. With alert systems via email or app notifications, you can act before the issue significantly impacts your users.
What to do if downtime is detected?
- Examine logs to identify errors.
- Restart servers if necessary.
- Analyze recent changes that might have caused the outage.
- Implement preventive measures to reduce recurrence.