Why Uptime Monitoring Is Not Enough

Christoffer Aspelund — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 10:46:25 +0000

A website can return a 200 OK response and still be broken.

That sounds obvious, but a surprising amount of website monitoring still focuses almost entirely on one question:

Is the server responding?

The problem is that users experience much more than HTTP status codes.

A website can technically be online while:

navigation links are broken
JavaScript errors prevent features from working
a page looks broken on mobile
SSL or DNS changes cause problems
important SEO elements disappear
content changes unexpectedly
forms or interactive elements stop working

From a traditional uptime monitor's perspective, everything may still look perfectly healthy.

Uptime isn't the same as website health

Uptime monitoring is still valuable.

If your server goes down, you absolutely want to know.

But uptime is only one layer.

A more useful question is:

Is the website actually working the way a visitor expects it to?

That requires looking beyond the server response.

What should website monitoring include?

1. HTTP monitoring

The basics still matter:

response status
response time
availability

2. Browser checks

A real browser can catch problems that a simple HTTP request cannot.

For example:

JavaScript errors
rendering issues
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
indexing-related changes
broken internal links

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 additional checks for things such as:

broken links
JavaScript errors
browser issues
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 it more useful by looking at the website from the user's perspective as well.

You can try it here:

https://didanythingbreak.tech

There is a free website check available, so you can test a site without setting up monitoring first.

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.

DEV Community: Christoffer Aspelund