Downtime Monitoring

Downtime Monitoring on WordPress.com keeps an eye on your site and sends an alert as soon as it detects any downtime. This guide explains how it works and how it’s set up on your WordPress.com site.

What is downtime?

Downtime occurs when a website becomes unavailable to visitors. Thanks to WordPress.com’s 99.999% uptime, issues related to hosting, servers, security, or traffic spikes are rare compared to other providers. The most common reasons a site might go offline on WordPress.com include:

1. Plugin or Theme Conflicts: Sometimes, incompatible plugins or themes can conflict with each other or with WordPress core files, causing the website to crash.
2. DNS Issues: Problems with your domain’s settings or configuration errors can prevent visitors from accessing the website.
3. Expired Plan: If your WordPress.com plan expires, the website may become inaccessible. Turn on automatic renewal to ensure your website stays online.

How downtime monitoring works

The Jetpack plugin on WordPress.com provides your site with state-of-the-art security tools, including Downtime Monitoring. The Downtime Monitoring functionality in Jetpack is automatically enabled on your website.

From the moment you launch your website, our servers begin checking your website 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 prohibiting your site from appearing to visitors. We will also mark a site as down if we detect more than three 300-series redirects, suggesting a redirect loop, or if your site fails to respond within 20 seconds.

Once the website is tentatively marked down, we then spin up three separate servers in geographically different locations to ensure the problem is not isolated to our network or the location of our primary data center. If all three confirm the site is down, we send you an alert.

How we notify you of downtime

If your website is not reachable, we send notifications to the following places to let you know that your site may be offline:

• Your WordPress.com account email address.
• Your WordPress.com account’s notification bar.
• Push notifications via the Jetpack mobile app, if enabled.

The content of the email will give you more information about the nature of the downtime. Notifications will include the time that downtime was detected, based on the timezone selected in Settings → General in your WordPress dashboard.

Turn Downtime Monitoring on or off

Sites hosted on WordPress.com cannot deactivate the Jetpack plugin, since doing so would break your access to your site and remove the essential features it provides. Jetpack is automatically managed so we can continue to ensure your site’s ultimate security and performance. However, you can deactivate specific features of Jetpack if desired.

You can deactivate and reactivate Downtime Monitoring with the following steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Jetpack → Settings (or Jetpack → Dashboard if using the default interface style).
3. Scroll down to the “Downtime monitoring” section and toggle the feature on or off:

You can also modify the notification provided by Downtime Monitoring by:

1. Visiting your site’s wp-admin dashboard and navigate to Hosting → Overview (or Settings → Hosting Configuration if using the default interface style).
2. Click the Setting tab.
3. Click Server in the sidebar.
4. Scroll down to the “Downtime monitoring” and toggling the various options: