Best Website Monitoring Services

Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.

A lot can happen to your website behind your back. 

So many things can stop working at a moment’s notice you might not be aware of. This can mean site downtime, excessive bandwidth usage, or traffic changes for one reason or another. This is a huge problem if you’re trying to grow your online brand presence consistently. 

But what is the solution? A website monitoring service that keeps you in the know.

If you’re trying to create a reliable presence online and protect your business, a website monitoring service is a vital part of your backend toolbox.

This detailed guide walks you through the process of choosing the best website monitoring service for your business, whether you’re a big business trying to hit your quarterly KPIs or you’re just getting started. 

The Best Website Monitoring Service Options to Consider:

1. Freshping – The best for basic free website monitoring
2. Pingdom – The best for comprehensive site & application monitoring
3. UptimeRobot – The best for uptime monitoring
4. SmartBear – The best for enterprise performance monitoring
5. Dynatrace – The best for user experience optimization

When it Makes Sense to Invest In A Website Monitoring Service

You know there are website monitoring services out there that can help keep an eye on all aspects of your website. But when exactly should you invest in one?

To put it simply, if you’re an enterprise, have a lot of moving parts to your growing site, or you’re working with some sort of network setup, you’ll want to invest in a website monitoring system that’ll keep you up to speed. 

It’s not enough to only know the basic metrics of your site’s performance with the complexity of today’s websites, especially when many different parts of a network need attention. 

The million-dollar question is: Will your decision to invest in a site monitoring service cost you more than the revenue you’ll generate by solving recurring network issues?

Investing in a website monitoring solution is ultimately up to your discretion. If you’re a small or medium-sized business (SMB), you may decide that because of a limited budget, you can temporarily ignore a few outages, traffic loss, customer complaints, brand image devaluation, or even short-term revenue loss. 

Ideally, you’ll need to invest in comprehensive site monitoring as a long-term growth strategy. 

#1 – Freshping – The Best For Basic Free Website Monitoring

Freshping is for businesses that don’t want to pay for heftier website monitoring services but still want to be aware of their site’s general health and performance. 

Freshping is a website monitoring service that lets you monitor up to 50 URLs in impressive 1-minute intervals so you stay updated literally up to the minute. 

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

If your business has a small team that needs access to the monitoring dashboard, Freshping’s free plan generously allows up to 10 users. 

Even if your business grows to have needs that aren’t covered by their free plan, their paid plans are still very affordable, and of course, come with added monitoring perks. 

Some of the best features with their free monitoring service are:

• Fake downtime alert protection
• A custom Apdex score that shows user satisfaction with your site’s response time
• One-minute interval alerts 

If you’re interested in their paid tiers, the next 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 checkup history. For a more robust package, their third tier starts at $36 per month billed annually. 

Try Freshping for free and start monitoring your site even if you’re on a budget. 

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

Pingdom is our choice for the best comprehensive site and application monitoring tool, and is used by more than 800,000 businesses. With Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, and Spotify on their roster, you can bet they don’t take effective site monitoring lightly.

Pingdom is designed as a complete website monitoring platform for growing businesses to cover all their bases. It doesn’t matter if you’re in e-commerce, publishing, or entertainment, they have scalable tools designed for your industry. Moreover, if your business has or is developing applications, Pingdom can monitor those, too, through their RUM or synthetic monitoring capabilities.

This means you can stay in the know of exactly how well your new site applications are running and when to troubleshoot bottlenecks that might be costing you sales with real user monitoring. 

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

• Detailed transaction monitoring for e-commerce
• Timely uptime monitoring alerts to your team members
• Page speed monitoring and worldwide site availability testing

Their prices start at $10 a month and can be personalized according to how many monthly uptime and advanced checks your site or applications might need. Their price calculator makes it easy to choose either a yearly or monthly plan. If you’re an enterprise, you can contact them to get a quote on a customizable plan. 

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

#3 – UptimeRobot – The Best For Uptime Monitoring

Maybe you are invested in your site’s uptime more than anything else. UptimeRobot is a website monitoring service that does precisely that for more than 800,000 companies, including GoDaddy and IBM.

It is perfect for monitoring a site’s uptime in 5-minute intervals. 

UptimeRobot offers a status page even on their free tier that helps you communicate clearly with your customers if they happen to come across your site during downtime or maintenance issues. 

They not only warn you as soon as your site experiences downtime, but they also send you precautionary warnings when your site shows signs of potential upcoming trouble. 

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.