Monitor your site’s uptime and downtime

Jetpack’s downtime monitor continuously watches your website and alerts you the moment that downtime is detected.

Activate/Deactivate Downtime Monitoring

Once Jetpack’s Downtime Monitor is activated, one of our servers will start checking your site every five minutes.  If it looks like something’s gone awry, we’ll fire off a notification to the WordPress.com account that Jetpack is connected to. For more information and FAQs, please see our features page.

You or additional admin users connected to Jetpack can activate or deactivate the downtime monitoring feature from your WordPress.com dashboard:

1. Go to WordPress.com dashboard: Settings → Security
2. Toggle notifications on or off about your site going offline.
3. Choose if you want alerts via email and/or WordPress.com notifications.

Emails

When downtime monitoring is activated, downtime notification emails will be sent to the user(s) who have enabled them in their WordPress.com security settings.

The time and date used in the notification comes from the timezone set in your WordPress settings (Settings > General).

If you’d like to add something to your email filters to make sure these notification emails never get sent to spam, they’ll all be coming from support+monitor AT jetpack DOT com.

If you are still getting downtime notifications for a site you no longer manage, please contact support.

Push notifications from WordPress.com

You can now receive notifications about your site being down on the web through WordPress.com and/or push notifications on mobile (Android and iOS) for both Jetpack and WordPress apps. 

In order to enable this feature from the web:

1. Head to https://wordpress.com/settings/security/.
2. Select your site.
3. Enable “Send notifications via WordPress.com notification”.

In order to enable this feature from the apps (Android and iOS, Jetpack and WordPress), go to:

1. My Site.
2. Jetpack Settings.
3. Enable “Send push notifications”.

Types of Jetpack Monitor notifications

Downtime alert, but site is up

Is your site up and running properly, but you’re receiving ‘site down’ notifications?

This can happen for different reasons, and the content of the Notification emails should tell you more.

Your site is responding intermittently, or extremely slowly.

If your site can’t be loaded in 20 seconds, we consider it as inaccessible. This may happen if you’re on shared hosting, where your bandwidth is shared with many other websites, or if you have a lot of resources loading on your home page; this will slow your site down.

In some cases this problem may be temporary. If you get just one notification and then your site loads quickly without any problem, it may have already been resolved.

Our requests are being redirected too many times.

If this happens, make sure your site URL is properly set up and that you don’t use any redirection plugins that may cause issues.

Jetpack is blocked.

Make sure your hosting service isn’t blocking our monitoring agent. The user agent that we’re sending along with the HEAD requests should be jetmon/1.0 (Jetpack Site Uptime Monitor by WordPress.com). If it’s still not going through properly, please contact support.

The server does not respond.

If your theme or one of your plugins creates 500 errors, also known as Fatal Errors, readers won’t be able to access your site and we will send you an email to let you know.

Status Alerts

At the bottom of the Notification email we send, there is a reference number that can provide more information. It will be something like [23454191/server].

The number is our internal I.D. for your site. The second part is the status which is being returned. These are based on the HTTP response code to the HTTP HEAD request to your site’s home page:

• “server” — a 5xx response, meaning the server had some type of fatal error.
• “blocked” — a 403 response, meaning the server replied that we were forbidden from viewing the home page.
• “client” — a 4xx response (other than 403), suggesting a similar server-side setting disabling access.
• “intermittent” — the request timed out without a response after 10 seconds. This case is one that can be confusing, since the site may actually be loading, just really slow. This one is also most likely to self-resolve–if the site is on a shared host and another site on the server is using too many resources, it could cause the other sites on the server to respond slowly. Note that our primary monitor server and the multiple verifying servers would all be seeing this for us to mark the site down.
• “redirection” — a 3xx response. Monitor will follow a few redirects, but if we’re asked to follow a fourth redirect, we assume there is a problem. Realistically, the suggests a redirect loop, but could be a relatively poor setup (e.g. example.com -> http://www.example.com -> http://www.example.com/en/ -> http://www.example.com/en/blog/ would be seen as down).
• “success” — a normal response. Everything worked. This should only be seen on the follow-up “Your site is back up!” e-mail.
• “unknown” — this shouldn’t ever happen. It suggests our monitoring service didn’t send an expected response to WordPress.com.

How does this work behind the scenes?

When Jetpack checks your site, it pings your site’s homepage every five minutes, via a HTTP HEAD request.

We tentatively mark your site as down if the HTTP response code is 400 or greater, which indicates either a permissions error or a fatal code error is prohibiting your site from appearing to visitors, or we see more than three 300-series redirects, suggesting a redirect loop, or if your site fails to respond within 20 seconds.

Once it is tentatively marked down, we then spin up three separate servers in geographically different locations from a third-party vendor to ensure the problem is not isolated to our network or the location of our primary data center. If all three checks fail, we mark the site as down and notify you.

Known Issues

Missed downtime notification and Cloudflare

If you’re using Cloudflare and the site is down, Downtime Monitor may not be able to notice it. This is due to how Cloudflare works, when the origin server (web host) is down, a cached copy of the site will be served by Cloudflare; because of that, Downtime Monitor will see the cached copy and won’t detect the downtime at the origin server.

Privacy Information

Downtime Monitoring is deactivated by default. You can activate it from your WordPress.com dashboard under Settings → Security.

Data Used
Site Owners / Users Site owner’s local user ID, WordPress.com user ID, email address, WordPress.com-connected blog ID, and the date of the last downtime status change. Additionally, for activity tracking (detailed below): IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.	Site Visitors None.
Activity Tracked
Site Owners / Users We track when, and by which user, the feature is activated and deactivated. We also track when, and which, configuration settings are modified.	Site Visitors None.
Data Synced (Read More)
Site Owners / Users We sync options that identify whether or not the feature is activated and how its available settings are configured.	Site Visitors None.