You have a WordPress site, a blog or perhaps a shop with WooCommerce. So you really don’t want it to be down. To crash… This is why Jetpack offers Downtime Monitor. Si let’s discover how to be alerted if your website goes offline thanks to this great setting in the Jetpack WordPress plugin.
And i must not forget to write here that it’s free of charge !
Jetpack WordPress plugin Downtime Monitor
A lot of people already know Jetpack. Let’s tell the truth. It’s a very popular and famous plugin ! Made up of multiple options which are mostly free but some of which require payment, it offers various things, such as for example, the famous monitoring.
This completely free option has been around for years in the Jetpack plugin. I’ve been using it from the start. And no need to say that it’s super useful to me. As soon as one of my blogs or website is offline ), I am immediately notified by email. Here is an example of emails received for YesWeBlog in 2019 :
In my screenshot, emails are in french. But if your WordPress website is in english, your emails will be in english too.
There’s an other great option if you enable this option on Jetpack and if you run Jetpack’s app on your phone. Because if you site goes offline, you’ll have a notification on the app and so you’ll know if there’s a problem even if you’re not working on your WordPress site.
How to Enable Jetpack Monitor option
Of course, this option being present with the Jetpack plugin, you must first have this extension installed and activated on your WordPress site. If so, know that enabling Downtime Monitor only takes a few clicks.
To do this, go to the Jetpack settings menu. Once on this settings page, there are several tabs, including the first tab dedicated to security. This is the first choice on this page, which corresponds to this very practical option:
NB : Go to : Jetpack, then click on Settings and then, on Security (first tab on the left) :
Note that there is a way as seen in the screenshot above, to enable notification settings. In this case, it will simply be a matter of indicating whether it is your WordPress.com email address which will be the recipient of the emails sent by the monitoring system, or the one which serves you as a WordPress admin.
That’s it, that’s all!
Alerts received by email
The system works simply to warn you in the event of a problem on your WordPress site. In fact, you will receive an email when the site goes down and one when it is online and accessible again. In each email you will receive the approximate time of unavailability of your web space, which sends you an email even if the site seems frozen. The same goes for when your site loads too slowly, you will be warned.
And if you run the phone app, you’ll have notifications each time there’s a change about your website status : down, frozen or back online.
Be warned without panicking
So you can get alerted without having to check your website regularly. Personally, I am quite satisfied with this tool which allows me (free of charge) to monitor the health of my sites and at the same time, know if I need to intervene or not.
Over time, you get used to this type of alert and you also learn to let go of possible crashes on your blog or website. Often, it only involves server slowdowns or maintenance, therefore triggering outages on the web host side. And so everything falls into place by itself 🙂
Long live automation, for this type of remote monitoring!
Is Jetpack worth it ?
Jetpack is quite divisive in the WordPress ecosystem. Some people like it very much and use it every day, sometimes since years and years. Particularly because it offers one of the rare ways to access almost all the parameters of a WordPress website or blog via the mobile and tablet application of the same name. However, it is sometimes criticized for doing too much and/or being too heavy. Because it must be recognized that if we measure the resources it consumes, the plugin can be demanding in requests.
So is Jetpack a good plugin ? I think that everyone can have an experience and judge on the field if this famous plugin is “good” or not.
