Websites break quietly, and you find out from a customer
The failure nobody notices
A website does not usually break loudly. It breaks like this:
- An SSL certificate expires at 2am on a Sunday. By Monday every visitor sees a full-page browser warning.
- A plugin updates itself and adds 1.8 seconds to every page load.
- A redesign ships and the sitemap disappears, so new pages stop being indexed.
- A supplier link rots and 17 pages now point at a 404.
None of these throw an error at you. The site still loads for you, because your browser cached it, or you are on the office wifi, or you only ever open the homepage.
How most people find out
Someone tells them. A customer, a friend, or nobody at all — the enquiries just quietly stop and it takes three weeks to notice the pattern.
What we do about it
We check the sites people ask us to watch on a rota, and compare each result with the last one. When something moves, we say so:
- Site down — one email, immediately.
- HTTPS stopped working — the certificate expired or was replaced badly.
- Score dropped — the audit fell by more than a grade band, with the before and after.
- New problem appeared — something is on the list now that was not there last week.
Two rules that matter more than the checks themselves:
We stay quiet when nothing changed. A three-point score wobble is measurement noise. If we emailed about that, you would learn to ignore us, and then the one email that mattered would go unread too.
One event, one email. When a site goes down, the HTTPS check fails and the score collapses — but that is one problem, not three. You get one alert.
It is free for three sites
Add a domain, confirm your email, and that is it. Alerts only ever go to a confirmed address, and one click on your dashboard turns them off for good.