Website monitoring for freelancers who look after client sites
What to watch on every client site. Updated 2026-10-16
Short answer: Check every client site from the outside, on a schedule, for more than "is it up". Most client sites don't break by going down. They break quietly: a certificate or domain lapses, someone changes the DNS, email starts landing in spam, a plugin update breaks a page, a file that should be private is left public. An uptime ping misses all of those.
What to watch on each client site
| What breaks | What the client notices | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| The site is down | "Your site's not loading" | Uptime every few minutes, with an alert after two failed checks in a row, so one blip doesn't wake you |
| Domain expires | Site and email both stop | Domain expiry date from the registry, weeks ahead |
| HTTPS breaks | Browser security warning | HTTPS works on every address (http, https, www, no www) and redirects to one secure address |
| DNS changed | Site or email gone after "someone set up a new tool" | Records pointing at services that no longer exist, and (with Cloudflare connected) every DNS record compared hourly |
| Email records wrong | Their emails go to spam, or someone fakes their address | SPF (including its 10-lookup limit), DKIM and DMARC |
| A page breaks after an update | "The contact page is blank" | Up to 50 pages from the sitemap, broken links, and JavaScript errors on the homepage and 3 more pages in a real browser |
| Private files left public | Nothing, until it's a breach | .env files, git folders, config backups and open database tools |
| Accidentally hidden from Google | Enquiries quietly drop | noindex tags and robots.txt blocks left on after a launch |
How Preventionlabs covers it
Preventionlabs is a read-only website check built for this job. Add each client domain, prove you look after it with one DNS TXT record or the client's Cloudflare account, and click once. About 15 seconds later there's one report per site, problems first, each with the evidence and what to do. It checks uptime every 5 minutes and emails you when a site goes down and when it's back. The last 14 reports per site are kept, so you can see what changed since last time. Nothing in it can change a client's site, DNS or settings.
If the client's site is on Cloudflare, a read-only token adds what Cloudflare saw: server errors by address, what its firewall blocked and why, deploys and account changes, so you can match a break to the change before it.
What it doesn't do
- No status pages for clients.
- No scripted user journeys (logging in, adding to cart, submitting a form).
- Uptime is checked every 5 minutes, not every minute.
If you need those, pair it with a dedicated uptime or synthetic-monitoring tool.
Price
First report free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains.