How Often Should You Monitor Your Website?

Monitoring frequency is one of the most important decisions you make. Check too rarely and you miss outages. Check too often and you burn time or budget. For most small businesses, a 5-minute interval is the sweet spot, but it depends on your traffic, revenue, and risk.

This analysis breaks down the tradeoffs so you can choose a monitoring interval that matches your business.

Why frequency matters

If your site goes down for 20 minutes, a 30-minute check might never notice it. That is lost revenue with no alert. A faster interval reduces the time customers experience downtime without you knowing.

Typical monitoring intervals

• 1 minute: Best for high revenue websites or high stakes businesses.
• 5 minutes: Best balance for most small businesses.
• 10 to 30 minutes: Acceptable for low traffic or informational sites.

How to calculate your ideal interval

Use this simple approach:

1. Estimate the revenue impact of 30 minutes of downtime.
2. Decide how quickly you need to know to prevent that loss.
3. Choose the shortest interval you can afford.

Why 5-minute checks are a practical standard

Most small businesses cannot respond instantly anyway, but they can respond within 5 to 10 minutes. A 5-minute monitoring interval gives you enough time to catch outages early without creating noise.

It also matches how customers behave. If they try your site and it fails, they often leave immediately. A 5-minute alert gives you a chance to fix it before too many customers notice.

When you should use faster checks

Consider 1-minute checks if:

• Your website drives most of your revenue.
• You run promotions or paid ads that depend on the site.
• You offer time-sensitive services like booking or ordering.

When slower checks are ok

A 10 to 30 minute check can be acceptable if:

• Your site is mostly informational.
• You have low traffic outside business hours.
• Downtime does not immediately affect revenue.

Do not forget multi-location checks

Frequency is not enough. You should also check from more than one location. This avoids false alarms caused by a local ISP issue.