Best Website Monitoring Services

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After thoroughly researching, testing, and digging into more than 10 of the best website monitoring tools out there, we identified Freshping as the top choice for most businesses. Whether you want to keep an eye on downtime, share public status pages, create custom alerts, or monitor accessibility from numerous global locations, Freshping does it all at a fraction of the cost of other options on the market—or you can start for free.

The Best Website Monitoring Service for Most

Whether you’re interested in tracking vital business KPIs or you just want to keep an eye on accessibility issues, downtime, or unexpected traffic changes, Freshping is our top recommendation.

If you have fewer than 10 users and 50 URLs, you can use it without paying a penny. Plus, it’s incredibly easy to use without sacrificing control or essential functionality to keep you and everyone on your team in the loop. If you need to upgrade, Freshping offers one of the most affordable entry-level plans on the market.

The Best Website Monitoring Service Options to Consider:

1. Freshping – Best website monitoring service for most
2. Pingdom – Best for comprehensive site & application monitoring
3. UptimeRobot – Best for uptime monitoring
4. SmartBear – Best for enterprise performance monitoring
5. Dynatrace – Best for user experience optimization

When It Makes Sense to Invest Into Website Monitoring Services

If you rely on your website to generate revenue, investing in website monitoring services is a smart move.

It’s crucial to keep an eye on your website’s performance over time because you could be missing out on sales, ad impressions, and new clients any time your website is inaccessible. Knowing when and why your site is down can help you, your developer, and your host troubleshoot the issue as fast as possible.

Even if you have no budget for website monitoring, there are free resources on our list that give you powerful site performance insights.

These insights can help you identify when it’s time to up your hosting services—or switch hosts altogether to deliver better experiences and reduce lost opportunities as a result of poor performance or inaccessibility.

Website monitoring tools are incredibly easy to use. They usually run in the background and only hit you up when something goes wrong. So, you don’t need to hire anyone to run or manage the software, or spend hours of time learning what to do.

Depending on the complexity and the number of sites or applications you have, it may take you no time at all to get things up and running.

#1 – Freshping – The Best Website Monitoring Service For Most

Freshping is the perfect choice for anyone looking to keep an eye on vital website metrics. Not only is it incredibly simple to use, but it’s also affordable and comes with a generous free plan for basic needs. In fact, it’s what we use here at Crazy Egg to rigorously test web hosts. So, we can personally vouch for its ease of use.

If your website is small, you may be fine sticking with the free plan forever—it’s what we use and we find it more than sufficient for our needs.

The free plan lets you monitor up to 50 URLs in impressive 1-minute intervals so you know what’s going on literally up to the minute. You can easily monitor uptime, average server response time, and more.

Not only that, when there’s trouble with loading your site, you can monitor accessibility issues from 10 global locations. You also get instant downtime alerts through its multi-channel feature, so you can mitigate things like site downtime as soon as possible. 

If you have a small team that needs access to the monitoring dashboard, Freshping’s free plan generously allows up to 10 users at no extra cost.

Even if your business grows to have needs that aren’t covered by their free plan, FreshPing’s paid plans are very affordable, and of course, come with added monitoring perks if you need advanced capabilities, like trigger-based alerts, response string or status code checks, custom HTTP headers, request timeouts, and more.

Some of the best features with FreshPing’s free monitoring service are:

• Fake downtime alert protection
• A custom Apdex score that shows user satisfaction with your site’s response time
• Option of one or five-minute interval alerts 
• In-depth incident explanations
• Customizable date ranges

If you need more than that, the lowest tier starts at $11 per month for 60+ site checks per month, advanced alerting, up to 12 users, and it lets you keep a year’s worth of site health logs and checkups history. For a more robust package, the third tier starts at $36 per month billed annually. 

Try Freshping for free and start monitoring your site without paying a dime.

#2 – Pingdom – The Best For Comprehensive Site & Application Monitoring

Pingdom is our top pick comprehensive site and application monitoring. With more than 800,000 businesses, including Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, and Spotify, on its roster, you can bet it doesn’t take effective site monitoring lightly.

With a large focus on the end-user experience and getting a leg up on your competitors, you get everything you need to learn more about how users interact with your site, keep an eye on critical money-generating site processes, and ensure your site always functions as it should.

Whether you want to monitor uptime, speed, transactions, user experiences, user behavior, servers, containerized environments, or applications, it’s our go-to all-in-one solution.

It’s an excellent choice for site owners, digital marketers, web hosting providers (including resellers!), developers, and IT departments because it comes with features for all skill levels.

Regardless of how familiar you are with website monitoring, you can easily see what’s going on at glance.

It doesn’t matter if you run an e-commerce store, a volume-heavy publishing site, or something else entirely. Pingdom offers scalable industry-specific tools you can use to keep an eye on your site 24/7. Moreover, if your business has or is developing applications, Pingdom can monitor those, too, through their RUM or synthetic monitoring capabilities.

Some of Pingdom’s best features as a comprehensive monitoring service are:

• Detailed transaction monitoring for e-commerce
• Identifying bottlenecks and prioritizing fixes
• Details about who certain issues impact
• Timely uptime monitoring alerts to your team members
• Page speed monitoring and worldwide site availability testing

Pricing starts at $10 a month and is easily personalized according to how many monthly uptime and advanced checks you’d like to run for your sites and applications.

Pingdom’s price calculator makes it easy to choose either a yearly or monthly plan. If you’re looking at higher volumes, you can contact the Pingdom team to get a custom quote. Either way, you won’t be disappointed.

Visit their site to pick a plan that works best for you. 

#3 – UptimeRobot – The Best For Uptime Monitoring

Every second your website’s down, that’s a lost sale or missed opportunity. While you can’t guarantee you’ll never have downtime, the best thing you can do is keep an eye on it so you know the second an issue arises.

If uptime is your main priority, UptimeRobot is one of our favorite website monitoring services, specifically for uptime.

Aside from its free price tag (for basic features), the fact that it only takes 30 seconds to set up, configure, and hit the ground running is worth calling out.

In other words, monitoring uptime doesn’t have to cost a lot of money or require a lot of time.

At five-minute intervals, it sends a robot to your website to ensure it’s online, accessible, and loading as it should. If something’s wrong, you’ll get a notification letting you know as well as insight into what’s going on. So not only do you know there’s an issue, but you’ll also get an idea of what’s wrong.

Regardless of the plan you’re on, you can even create status pages to keep your customers, readers, and partners in the loop if there’s an issue. The free plan includes one status page, but all of UptimeRobot’s paid plans include as many as you’d like to create at no extra cost.

To sweeten the deal, paid users can even notify interested parties of downtime and incidents via email so they always know what’s going on—all without having to manually check your status page every five minutes.

On top of uptime, you’ll also be able to test for server response time to ensure your server’s doing you favors and helping your site load as fast as possible.

All plans also include three months of log retention so you can check into previous incidents and see your site’s reliability and performance over time. Paid plans include longer log retention, as well.

Some of their best uptime monitoring features include:

• HTTPS monitoring
• Response time and ping monitoring
• Notifications through Slack, Zapier, Microsoft Teams, or SMS

You can start with them for free or jump right into their Pro plan that adjusts your price according to how many monthly 1-minute site checks you need. Looking for an enterprise deal? You’ll have to chat with them on their site. 

Sign up with UptimeRobot for free to get started. 

#4 – SmartBear — The Best For Enterprise Performance Monitoring

SmartBear is one of the best tools on the market for enterprise-grade businesses and corporations that want to keep their finger on the pulse of every aspect of their site. If scalability and advanced tools, along with in-depth analytics for monitoring your online presence, are what you’re after, SmartBear delivers.

They not only ensure your online presence through top-notch site monitoring, they also have troubleshooting capabilities for API usage, which tends to increase as your business grows. 

SmartBear is built to keep your business ready for instances of high traffic through ongoing testing. This is a key feature for any sizable business making sales at scale.  

To navigate SmartBear and its offerings, think of them as an umbrella for an array of services devised to keep your online presence steadily performing. They go beyond the standard monitoring practices and offer you an exhaustive collection of monitoring options you might not find anywhere else. The likes of cross-browser testing, automated UI testing, synthetic API monitoring, and more can all be found on their list of solutions for a robust online presence.

Some of their best monitoring features include:

• Site and app test creation without needing to code
• Running load tests at scale with their cloud and debugging feature
• API load testing
• Monitoring functionality and speed from over 350 global locations

As with any monitor built for enterprise-level performance, the prices reflect that. Because what they offer is so exhaustive and can’t be reflected in simple pricing tiers, you’ll need to contact their sales department or check out individual product packages, which can range from $2-$4k and beyond. 

Get started with SmartBear here.

#5 – Dynatrace – The Best For User Experience Optimization

Dynatrace is a monitoring service for medium to large operations that want to optimize their user experience.

Dynatrace is intuitively designed and easy to use with a centralized monitoring port. It keeps you updated with all the basics of site and application performance, as well as how your customers are interacting with your brand on an impressively detailed level. 

They take it beyond the basics by giving you a window of insight on how your customers are landing on your site, where they concentrate their attention, and where they drop off and lose interest. 

This is a game-changer for brands that rely on e-commerce and delivering the best user experience for increased sales. 

With some of Dynatrace’s exclusive user experience monitoring features, you can:

• See where your customers leave your site
• Focus on and improve touchpoints and conversions
• Track adoption of new feature releases
• Use AI and end-to-end monitoring to optimize the whole customer journey

Their prices start at digital experience monitoring for $11 a month and go up to $69 monthly for full-stack monitoring. 

Get started with a free Dynatrace trial here. 

Methodology For Choosing The Best Website Monitoring Service

You don’t want to go out and sign up with the first website monitoring service that crosses your path. There’s a method to the madness.

Investing in any website monitoring service will usually include some variation of the general monitoring basics like a dashboard with relevant reporting and analytics, alerts, user monitoring, mobile and browser monitoring, and maybe even synthetic performance monitoring (a more advanced feature generally used for applications). 

When you step back to look at your site’s bigger picture and dig a little deeper, here are some key factors to weigh into your website monitoring choice outside of your business’s size and budget. 

Additional Support

Sure, your site monitor can tell you when any part of your network is down, but do they offer additional tools and support to aid you in troubleshooting and fixing the issue as quickly as possible?

Different site monitors are geared for different needs. If you foresee your site not only needing monitoring but problem-solving solutions, too, or if you don’t have an in-house IT support team, this can be a great feature to invest in for long-term sustenance. If you’re an SMB, this is definitely an important criterion when choosing a monitoring service. 

Type of Software Solutions

No two businesses are the same. By extension, no two site monitoring services are built the same either. 

You don’t want to purchase a monitoring service specializing in e-commerce or online applications when you’re a large publisher that primarily needs robust server monitoring on a global scale with additional comprehensive features. 

Is user experience a big part of your value proposition as a business? Will you run online applications in the future as part of your site’s growth strategy? These are all critical questions to consider when deciding which website monitoring service has the capabilities to deliver results. 

Real-Time Alerts

The cornerstone of any site monitoring service is alerting you when anything on your site goes haywire. 

Does your website monitoring service immediately alert you when something goes wrong—or can even detect something potential upcoming issues? Or do you have to jump through unnecessary tech jargon and complex hoops to find and solve the issue?

The key to solving site issues isn’t about ensuring they never happen. Instead, it’s about solving any given site performance problem as fast as possible once you’re aware of the issue. 

Timely and customizable alerts can help you do that better. 

Summary

The world of site monitoring offers you an exhaustive pool of choices. Beyond putting standard monitoring fail-safes in place, the trick is finding the one that delivers on the KPIs your business is concerned with optimizing the most. 

Thankfully, there are free website monitoring tools like Freshping to help you start monitoring your site’s underperforming areas, if nothing else, and top choices for comprehensive coverage like Pingdom. 

This guide is designed to help you find the best monitoring solution for your business, no matter its size. Now it’s time to find your best provider and start strengthening your online presence today.