How do I stop missing website problems?
Updated 2026-10-16
Short answer: most website problems aren't missed because they're hard to fix. They're missed because nothing tells you. A site rarely goes fully down; it breaks quietly, one part at a time, and the first person to notice is a customer. The fix is to have something check it for you, regularly, and tell you in plain words what changed.
How to check it yourself
- List the things that would hurt if they broke: the homepage, the contact or booking page, checkout, email from the site, the domain itself.
- Set up an alert for the site going down, so you're not relying on customers.
- Once a week, check the quieter things: email records, domain expiry, pages in the sitemap, anything new that's public.
- After every change (an update, a new plugin, a DNS edit), check again. Most breaks follow a change.
What Preventionlabs shows
Each report shows what changed since the last one, so a new problem stands out against the report where it wasn't there; the last 14 reports per site are kept. Uptime is checked every 5 minutes, with an email when the site goes down and when it's back. With a read-only Cloudflare token, the report also lines up the errors visitors got with the deploys, DNS changes and account changes just before them. See what changed right before my website broke.
Price
First report free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains.