How to Monitor Your WordPress Site with Vigilmon (Free Uptime Monitoring)

WordPress powers about 43% of the web, but uptime monitoring is often an afterthought. Your site can go down and stay down for hours before you notice — especially if you're relying on visitors to report it.

This guide shows how to set up uptime monitoring for a WordPress site in under 5 minutes using Vigilmon's free tier.

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Why WordPress Sites Go Down

Before setting up monitoring, it helps to know what you're watching for:

• PHP memory exhaustion — a bad plugin update pushes memory usage past the limit
• Database connection errors — MySQL max connections hit, or database host issues
• Plugin conflicts — an update breaks compatibility with another plugin
• Hosting outages — shared hosting is particularly susceptible
• DDoS or traffic spikes — your site gets overwhelmed by traffic
• SSL certificate expiry — the certificate expires and browsers block access
• Disk space full — uploads fail, then PHP crashes

All of these cause HTTP errors that uptime monitoring can detect immediately.

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Setting Up Uptime Monitoring

Step 1: Create a Vigilmon account

Go to vigilmon.online and sign up. The free tier gives you 5 monitors with no credit card required.

Step 2: Add your WordPress site as a monitor

Once logged in:

1. Click Add Monitor
2. Enter your site URL (e.g., https://yoursite.com)
3. Set check interval (5 minutes on the free tier)
4. Configure your alert email
5. Click Save

Vigilmon will immediately start checking your site from multiple geographic regions.

Step 3: Monitor critical endpoints beyond the homepage

Your homepage might stay up while other parts break. Consider adding monitors for:

https://yoursite.com                    # Homepage
https://yoursite.com/wp-admin/          # Admin dashboard accessibility
https://yoursite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/     # REST API (if you use headless WordPress)
https://yoursite.com/your-shop/         # WooCommerce shop page

With Vigilmon's free tier (5 monitors), you can cover your homepage plus 4 critical pages.

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What to Monitor on a WordPress Site

1. Homepage availability

The most basic check. If this fails, your entire site is down.

URL: https://yoursite.com
Expected: HTTP 200

2. WooCommerce shop page (if applicable)

If you run an online store, the shop page is critical. It's one of the first places to break during plugin conflicts.

URL: https://yoursite.com/shop/
Expected: HTTP 200

3. Checkout endpoint

Cart and checkout pages often involve multiple plugins. A broken payment gateway or session handling issue might not surface on the homepage.

URL: https://yoursite.com/checkout/

4. Custom health check endpoint

For more advanced monitoring, add a custom health check endpoint to your functions.php:

add_action('rest_route_init', function() {
    register_rest_route('vigilmon/v1', '/health', [
        'methods'  => 'GET',
        'callback' => 'vigilmon_health_check',
        'permission_callback' => '__return_true',
    ]);
});

function vigilmon_health_check() {
    global $wpdb;

    // Test database connection
    $db_check = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT 1");

    return [
        'status'   => 'ok',
        'database' => $db_check === '1' ? 'connected' : 'error',
        'version'  => get_bloginfo('version'),
    ];
}

Then monitor: https://yoursite.com/wp-json/vigilmon/v1/health

This endpoint verifies both PHP is running and the database is connected — two of the most common failure modes.

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Setting Up Alerts

When your site goes down, you want to know immediately. Vigilmon sends alerts when:

1. The site fails checks from multiple regions (eliminating false positives)
2. The site recovers (so you know the incident is over)

Configure your alert email in the Vigilmon dashboard. For team setups, you can alert multiple addresses.

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Reading the Monitoring Dashboard

Once your monitors are running, you'll see:

• Uptime percentage — calculated over rolling windows (day, week, month)
• Response time graph — latency trends help identify performance degradation before it becomes downtime
• Incident history — timestamps of past outages, useful for correlating with plugin updates or deploys

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Common WordPress-Specific Monitoring Gotchas

Monitor both www and non-www versions. If your redirects are misconfigured, one might work while the other returns an error. Add both example.com and www.example.com as separate monitors.

Check your SSL certificate separately. Vigilmon checks that your site responds with HTTP 200, but you should also watch for SSL expiry. Most hosts send email reminders, but monitoring is more reliable.

Watch response times, not just uptime. A page that takes 10 seconds to load might return HTTP 200 but deliver a terrible user experience. Response time trending helps you catch performance issues before they become availability issues.

Consider a status page. If your site goes down, users will want to know. Vigilmon's status page lets you publish a public uptime page so visitors and customers can check status themselves.

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Free Monitoring Stack for WordPress

With Vigilmon's free tier (5 monitors, no credit card):

Monitor	URL	Priority
Homepage	yoursite.com	Critical
Health check	yoursite.com/wp-json/vigilmon/v1/health	Critical
Shop page	yoursite.com/shop/	High
Checkout	yoursite.com/checkout/	High
Blog	yoursite.com/blog/	Medium

Five monitors covers the critical paths for most WordPress sites. For larger or more complex sites, upgrade to a paid plan for more monitors and 1-minute check intervals.

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Get started at vigilmon.online — free, no credit card required.