Downtime Monitoring

Downtime Monitoring on WordPress.com continuously watches your website and alerts you the moment that downtime is detected. This guide explains how Downtime Monitoring works on your WordPress.com website.

About Downtime

Downtime refers to when a website becomes inaccessible to the public. With 99.999% uptime on WordPress.com, downtime due to your hosting, servers, security breaches, or traffic spikes is unlikely compared to other hosts. The most common reasons why a site may go offline on WordPress.com are:

1. Plugin or Theme Conflicts: Sometimes, incompatible plugins or themes can conflict with each other or with WordPress core files, causing the website to crash.
2. DNS Issues: Problems with your domain’s settings or configuration errors can prevent visitors from accessing the website.
3. Expired Plan: If your WordPress.com plan expires, the website may become inaccessible. Turn on automatic renewal to ensure your website stays online.

How Our Downtime Monitoring Works

The Jetpack plugin on WordPress.com provides your site with state-of-the-art security tools, including Downtime Monitoring. Our Downtime Monitoring is automatically enabled on your website.

From the moment you launch your website, our servers begin checking your website every five minutes via a HTTP HEAD request. We tentatively mark your site as “down” if the HTTP response code is 400 or greater, which indicates either a permissions error or a fatal code error prohibiting your site from appearing to visitors. We will also mark a site as down if we detect more than three 300-series redirects, suggesting a redirect loop, or if your site fails to respond within 20 seconds.

Once the website is tentatively marked down, we then spin up three separate servers in geographically different locations to ensure the problem is not isolated to our network or the location of our primary data center. If all three checks fail, we notify you.

How We Notify You of Downtime

If your website is not reachable, we send notifications to the following places to let you know that your site may be offline:

• Your WordPress.com account email address.
• Your WordPress.com account’s notification bar.
• Push notifications via the Jetpack mobile app, if enabled.

The content of the email will give you more information about the nature of the downtime. Notifications will include the time downtime was detected, based on the timezone selected in Settings > General in your WordPress dashboard.

Turn Downtime Monitoring On or Off

Sites hosted on WordPress.com cannot deactivate the Jetpack plugin, since doing so would break your access to your site and remove the essential features it provides. Jetpack is automatically managed so we can continue to ensure your site’s ultimate security and performance. 

However, you can deactivate specific features of Jetpack if required.

 You can deactivate and reactivate Downtime Monitoring with the following steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Jetpack → Settings.
3. Scroll down to the “Downtime monitoring” section and toggle the feature on or off: