Your agency never told you your site was down
If a customer told you your website was down before your agency did, your agency is not monitoring your site. Uptime monitoring is a basic service that costs almost nothing to set up and sends an automatic email or text the moment a site goes offline. If you are paying a monthly retainer and you found out about an outage from a customer, you are paying for a service you are not receiving.
What actually happened
Your site went offline. It could have been down for an hour, a day, or longer. Nobody told you.
A customer rang up, or sent a message, or mentioned it in passing. That is how you found out. Then you contacted your agency, who probably said something like "oh, must have been a blip, it is back up now".
It is not a blip. It is your agency admitting they were not watching.
What uptime monitoring is
Uptime monitoring is a small piece of software that pings your website every minute or so. If the site does not respond, it sends an alert - usually an email or a text message - to whoever is supposed to fix it.
Free tools do this. Paid tools do it with more detail. Either way, the entire job of monitoring a website costs somewhere between nothing and a few pounds a month per site.
If your agency was charging you £100 or £150 a month and could not be bothered to set up a free alert, that is the relevant number.
Why your agency didn't know
There are three possible reasons your agency missed the outage. None of them are good.
- They never set up monitoring in the first place. The site was running on hope.
- They set it up, but the alerts go to an inbox nobody checks. Common when staff have left or accounts have changed hands.
- They saw the alert and ignored it because telling you would mean having a difficult conversation.
The third one happens more often than agencies will admit. An outage that the client never noticed is, from the agency's perspective, a problem that does not exist.
What downtime actually costs you
For a local business, a website being down for a few hours during the working day is not a minor inconvenience. It is lost enquiries you will never know about.
If you run a plumbing firm in Leeds or a beauty salon in Bristol, your site going down on a Wednesday afternoon means the customer who was about to ring you instead rings the next firm on Google. They do not come back later to check if you are up. You just lost the job.
Worse, if Google's crawler hits your site while it is offline, your rankings can dip. Repeated outages tell Google your site is unreliable, and Google reacts accordingly.
What to ask your agency now
Send them this, in writing:
- Do you have uptime monitoring set up on my site? If yes, which tool and where do the alerts go?
- How many outages has my site had in the last 12 months, and how long did each one last?
- What is your policy on telling me when my site goes down?
If they cannot answer the first question with a specific tool name and a specific email address, they are not monitoring your site. If they can answer but the alerts go somewhere you never see, that is functionally the same as no monitoring at all.
The polite excuse you will get is that the outage was "too short to be worth alerting you about". Decide for yourself whether you want to be the one making that call.
What to do next
You have two options. The first is to keep paying your current agency and ask them to set up proper monitoring with alerts to you directly. That should be free. If they try to charge you, you have your answer.
The second is to move to someone who treats monitoring as the bare minimum, not a premium feature. SkipTheAgency's Hosted plan is £40/month and includes uptime monitoring with alerts as standard - if your site goes down, you hear about it from me, not from your customer. The Maintained plan at £65/month adds same-day fixes when something does go wrong.
Either way, the question to settle is simple. Are you paying for someone to watch your site, or are you paying for someone to send you an invoice every month while your customers do the watching for free?
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my website is being monitored?
Ask your agency for the name of the monitoring tool and the email address that receives the alerts. If they cannot give you both, your site is not being monitored. A real monitoring setup has a specific tool and a specific inbox - vague answers mean nothing is in place.
Should my agency tell me every time my site goes down?
Yes. Even short outages matter because they cost you enquiries and can affect your Google ranking. A good provider tells you the moment it happens and follows up with what caused it. Anything less and you are guessing about the reliability of your own business.
How long can a website be down before it hurts my Google ranking?
Short outages of a few minutes usually have no lasting effect. Repeated outages, or any outage lasting several hours, can cause Google to lower your ranking because it sees the site as unreliable. The fix is not just getting back online, but making sure it does not keep happening.
Is uptime monitoring expensive to set up?
No. Free tools do it perfectly well for a single site, and paid tools cost a few pounds a month. If your agency is charging a monthly retainer and has not set up monitoring, they are skipping a job that costs them nothing.
What should I do if my website keeps going offline?
First, get it in writing from your agency how many outages there have been in the last 12 months and what caused each one. If they cannot tell you, the underlying problem is not being investigated. Repeated outages usually mean the hosting is unsuitable for the site, or the site itself has a fault nobody has fixed.
Can I monitor my own website without involving my agency?
Yes. Free services like UptimeRobot let you add your website and get email or text alerts when it goes offline, with no technical setup beyond entering your domain. Doing this yourself is sensible regardless of who manages your site, because it gives you an independent record of outages.
Find out before your customers do
If your site goes down, you should hear about it from your developer, not from a customer. SkipTheAgency's Hosted plan at £40/month includes uptime monitoring with alerts to you as standard.
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