WordPress powers over 40% of the web. It's everywhere — from personal blogs to enterprise e-commerce stores running WooCommerce with millions in monthly revenue.
But WordPress sites have a unique set of failure points that generic monitoring advice doesn't cover. Plugin conflicts crash sites silently. Theme updates break layouts. Cheap shared hosting runs out of resources during traffic spikes. Auto-updates fail and leave sites in maintenance mode.
This guide covers what to monitor on a WordPress site, why WordPress fails differently from custom-built apps, and how to set up monitoring that catches WordPress-specific problems before your visitors do.
It's not just a blog anymore
If your WordPress site is a personal blog with 50 visitors a day, monitoring is nice to have. If it's a business site, a client project, or a WooCommerce store — monitoring is essential.
Here's why WordPress specifically needs monitoring:
WordPress sites run an average of 20–30 plugins. Each plugin is maintained by a different developer with different quality standards and update schedules. Any plugin update can break your site. Any plugin conflict can cause a white screen of death. And you might not know it happened until a customer tells you.
WordPress core, plugins, and themes can all auto-update. Most of the time it works fine. Sometimes an update breaks compatibility and your site goes down at 3 AM with no one noticing until morning.
Many WordPress sites run on shared hosting where resources are split with hundreds of other sites. A neighbor's traffic spike can slow your site down. Resource limits can kill your PHP processes mid-execution.
A fatal PHP error might show a white screen to visitors while the hosting control panel shows everything as "running." Without external monitoring, you'd never know.
As the most popular CMS, WordPress is constantly targeted by automated attacks. Brute force login attempts, plugin vulnerability exploits, and malware injections happen daily. Monitoring catches the symptoms even if you don't catch the attack.
Where WordPress actually breaks
Understanding how WordPress fails helps you know what to monitor:
A plugin updates automatically. It's incompatible with another plugin or your theme. Result: white screen of death, broken admin panel, or specific features stop working. This is the #1 cause of WordPress outages.
Your theme updates and the CSS changes. The site loads but looks broken — missing elements, broken navigation, wrong colors. A simple uptime check says "UP" but users see a broken site.
A heavy page (lots of plugins, complex queries, large images) exceeds the PHP memory limit. The page loads for some visitors but crashes for others, or works on simple pages but fails on complex ones.
The classic "Error establishing a database connection." Caused by: wrong credentials after a migration, MySQL service crashed, database server overloaded, or exceeded max connections.
Especially common when using free SSL from hosting providers. Auto-renewal fails, mixed content warnings appear, or the certificate doesn't cover all domains (www vs non-www).
WordPress creates a .maintenance file during updates. If the update fails or times out, the site gets stuck showing "Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance." Until someone manually deletes the file, the site is effectively down.
Plugin updates, logs, backups stored locally, and media uploads gradually fill disk space. When the disk is full, WordPress can't write to the database, create temp files, or store uploads — and it fails in confusing ways.
Automated bots try thousands of password combinations against wp-login.php. Even if they don't succeed, the flood of requests can overwhelm the server and slow the site for legitimate users.
WordPress uses wp-cron for scheduled tasks (publishing posts, sending emails, running backups). wp-cron depends on site traffic to trigger — on low-traffic sites, scheduled tasks may not run at all.
Here's the complete monitoring checklist for WordPress:
Set this up in 30 minutes
Add HTTP checks for your main site URL (homepage), wp-login.php (login page health), and your most important page (contact, pricing, shop). Check every 60 seconds from multiple locations. Alert via email + Slack/SMS for critical failures.
Add your domain for SSL monitoring. Set expiry alerts. If you manage client sites, add all their domains.
Add visual diff checks for your homepage and 1–2 key pages. This catches theme/plugin update breakage that uptime monitoring misses. When a plugin auto-updates at 2 AM and breaks your site's layout, visual monitoring detects the change and alerts you — even though the site technically returns a 200 OK response.
Set a threshold (e.g., 3 seconds). Alert when response times consistently exceed it. WordPress sites slow down gradually (plugin bloat, database bloat, hosting resource limits) — this catches the trend before it becomes a crisis.
Create a status page showing your WordPress site's current status. If you manage client sites, create one per client.
Email for warnings (slow response, SSL expiring). Slack for non-critical issues (visual changes detected). SMS for critical (site completely down).
Verify alerts fire by temporarily changing a monitoring URL. Confirm the status page updates. Check that the right people get notified.
Many managed WordPress hosts (WP Engine, Kinsta, Flywheel, Cloudways) include some monitoring. Should you rely on it?
The verdict: managed hosting monitoring is necessary but not sufficient. It tells you the server is running. It doesn't tell you your site is working correctly from a user's perspective.
Think of it this way: your host monitors the infrastructure. You need to monitor the experience.
When your WordPress site is a store
WooCommerce sites have higher stakes than content sites. A broken checkout means lost revenue in real time.
Additional monitoring for WooCommerce:
Is the product listing working? Can users browse products?
Can users add items to the cart? Does the cart page load correctly?
This is critical. Monitor the full checkout process: cart → checkout page → payment → order confirmation. A simple uptime check on your homepage won't catch a broken checkout.
Even when your site is perfect, payment gateway issues affect your business. Monitor for payment-related errors.
If this page doesn't load, customers panic about whether their order went through.
If you use WooCommerce REST API for integrations (inventory sync, shipping, etc.), monitor these endpoints.
WooCommerce sites are often slower than content sites due to database-heavy queries (products, variations, cart calculations). Monitor response times during your peak traffic periods, not just at 3 AM.
The ideal WooCommerce monitoring setup:
PerkyDash monitors uptime, visual changes, and API flows — all in one tool. Perfect for WooCommerce stores that need more than a basic ping.
Start monitoring your storeSee our WooCommerce checkout monitoring guide for a detailed setup walkthrough.
Here's what to look for in a WordPress monitoring tool:
Quick comparison for WordPress users:
| Tool | Uptime | Visual Diff | Flow Monitoring | Status Page | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PerkyDash | Yes | Yes | API flows | Yes | €9.99/mo |
| UptimeRobot | Yes | No | No | Basic | Free / $8/mo |
| ManageWP | Basic | No | No | No | Free / $2/site |
| Jetpack | Basic | No | No | No | $10/mo |
| Better Stack | Yes | No | No | Yes | $29/mo |
Note on ManageWP and Jetpack: Both offer basic uptime monitoring as part of WordPress management suites. They're convenient but limited — no visual monitoring, no flow monitoring, no status pages. They're a starting point, not a complete solution.
WordPress sites break differently from custom apps. Plugin conflicts, theme updates, auto-update failures, and shared hosting limitations are all WordPress-specific risks that generic monitoring advice doesn't address.
The monitoring strategy is straightforward:
For WooCommerce stores, add checkout flow monitoring and payment gateway health checks.
Set it up once. Let it run. Fix problems before your users report them.
Start monitoring your WordPress site today.
PerkyDash: Uptime + visual diff + API flows + status pages from €9.99/mo
Use an external monitoring service, not a WordPress plugin. Monitor uptime with HTTP checks every 60 seconds, add SSL certificate monitoring, and use visual diff monitoring to catch theme or plugin update breakage. For WooCommerce, add checkout flow monitoring.
No. WordPress monitoring plugins run inside WordPress itself. If WordPress crashes, the plugin crashes with it and cannot alert you. Always use an external monitoring service that checks your site from outside your server.
Check every 60 seconds from multiple geographic locations. For business-critical WooCommerce stores, consider checking key pages like the checkout at the same frequency.
The most common causes are plugin conflicts after updates, theme incompatibilities, PHP memory exhaustion, database connection errors, SSL certificate expiration, and disk space filling up. WordPress auto-updates can also leave sites stuck in maintenance mode.
Yes. Managed hosts monitor server infrastructure but typically don't monitor your specific site's functionality, visual appearance, user flows like checkout, or SSL certificate expiry from the user's perspective. External monitoring complements what your host provides.
Monitor your WooCommerce checkout flow with API-based monitoring
Prevent the scariest website error with SSL monitoring
Why websites go down and how to prevent it
Proven strategies to prevent website downtime