Most uptime monitoring answers one question:
Is the server responding?
But that is not the same as asking whether the website actually works.
A site can return 200 OK while the checkout is broken, JavaScript fails, the mobile layout collapses, or important SEO signals disappear.
That gap is the reason I built Did Anything Break?
Instead of treating uptime as the whole story, I wanted to look at website health from the user’s point of view.
Uptime is only one layer
If your server goes down, you absolutely want to know.
But uptime only tells you whether the site is reachable.
It does not tell you whether the site is actually usable.
A more useful question is:
Is the website working the way a visitor expects it to?
That means looking beyond a simple HTTP response.
What should website monitoring include?
1. HTTP monitoring
The basics still matter:
- response status
- response time
- availability
This tells you whether the site can be reached.
2. Browser checks
A real browser can catch problems that a simple HTTP request cannot.
For example:
- JavaScript errors
- rendering issues
- failed requests
- broken interactions
- browser-specific failures
3. Mobile layout checks
A page may look fine on desktop and still be difficult or impossible to use on a phone.
Things like horizontal overflow, misplaced elements or broken navigation can easily go unnoticed.
4. SSL and DNS monitoring
Infrastructure changes can create problems even when the website itself has not changed.
Monitoring certificates and DNS records can help identify unexpected changes early.
5. SEO-critical checks
A website can remain online while losing important SEO elements.
Examples include:
- missing title tags
- missing meta descriptions
- canonical changes
- accidental noindex
- broken internal links
- sitemap or robots.txt problems
These issues may not create an obvious outage, but they can still have a significant impact.
Why I built Did Anything Break?
I wanted a simple way to answer a broader question than:
“Is my website online?”
The question I actually cared about was:
“Did anything break?”
That became the idea behind Did Anything Break?
It combines traditional monitoring with checks for things such as:
- broken links
- JavaScript and browser errors
- mobile layout problems
- SSL and DNS issues
- SEO-critical problems
- unexpected website changes
The goal is not to replace uptime monitoring.
The goal is to make monitoring more useful by looking at the website from the user’s point of view as well.
You can try the free website check here:
Final thought
A green uptime indicator is useful.
But it does not necessarily mean your website is healthy.
The web has become too complex for a single HTTP status code to tell the whole story.
Sometimes the site is online.
It just isn’t working.
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