How Agencies & Freelancers Should Monitor Client Websites

A practical system for staying ahead of downtime on the sites you manage.

If you build or maintain websites for clients, you already know the worst way to learn a site is down: a furious message from the client, hours after it happened. By then the damage is done — lost sales, lost trust, and a conversation that starts with you on the back foot.

The fix is simple and cheap: monitoring that tells you first, so you can quietly fix the problem (or already be fixing it) before the client notices. Here's how to set that up properly.

1. Monitor every client site, not just the big ones

It's tempting to only watch your largest client. But it's usually the small, forgotten sites — the ones nobody logs into for months — where a lapsed SSL certificate or an expired plugin quietly takes things down. Add every site you touch. Good monitoring is inexpensive enough that there's no reason not to.

2. Watch two things: uptime and SSL expiry

There are two failures that make you look bad, and both are completely preventable:

• Downtime — the server stops responding, or starts returning errors. You want an alert within a minute, not a day.
• SSL certificate expiry — certificates silently expire, and when they do, every visitor gets a full-page "Your connection is not private" warning. This is 100% avoidable with an alert a couple of weeks ahead. (More on this in our SSL expiry guide.)

3. Route alerts where you'll actually see them

Email is fine, but if your team lives in Slack, send alerts there too. The goal is that a 3am outage on any client site reaches whoever is on call — without you having to remember to check a dashboard.

4. Give clients a status page

A public status page does two things at once: it reassures clients their site is up, and it quietly reminds them that you're the one keeping it that way. When something does go wrong, a status page also cuts down on "is it just me?" emails. It's one of the easiest ways to look more professional at no extra effort.

The agencies that keep clients longest aren't the ones that never have an outage — they're the ones the client never has to tell about the outage.

5. Make it a repeatable checklist

Bake monitoring into your onboarding so it's never skipped:

1. Site goes live → add it to monitoring the same day.
2. Turn on uptime + SSL checks.
3. Add the site to the client's status page.
4. Point alerts at your team's Slack and inbox.