Your website can go down at 2 a.m., and the first person to notice should not be a customer. Free uptime monitoring solves that: an outside service checks your site every few minutes and messages you the moment it stops responding. For a small website, three monitors and one alert channel are enough, and the whole setup takes about fifteen minutes.

This guide uses free tiers only, and it avoids the common mistake of monitoring only the homepage. A homepage can load while the login page or checkout is broken, so you need to watch the paths real users actually depend on.