A monitor says down but the site works for me

Your site loads fine on your own computer, but OffAlerts says it’s down. There’s nearly always a real reason: we visit from elsewhere on the internet, the way a new customer would, and that can go differently. Work through these in order.

1. Is it still failing?

Open the monitor in the dashboard and look at the latest checks. A single failed check followed by passes was a brief blip. The page also shows what went wrong on the failing check: an error code, no answer in time, or no connection at all.

2. Is something blocking automated visitors?

Security tools on your site, such as a firewall or bot protection, often let a person through while blocking automatic visitors like ours. If the failing check shows the code 403 or 429, or an “are you human?” page, that’s the cause. The fix is to allow monitoring in that security tool’s settings; whoever set it up can do this.

3. Is it only slow?

A page that takes too long to load counts as down. If the failing checks say “timeout” and your site feels slow at busy times, the monitor is telling you something true: some of your visitors are giving up too.

4. Is the expected result still right?

If you told the monitor to look for a keyword on the page, check the word is still there. A redesign that removes it makes a healthy site look down. The same goes for a page that has moved and now forwards somewhere else.

5. Is the address exactly right?

http:// versus https://, with or without www, or a page that moved. Open the monitor’s exact address in a private browser window.

6. Is it a certificate problem?

Your browser can keep showing a site whose security certificate is set up incompletely or is about to expire. Stricter visitors, including ours, won’t accept it. See Getting warned before a domain or SSL certificate expires.

Still stuck?

Email [email protected] with the monitor’s name and roughly when it failed. We can look at what happened on our side.