Getting woken up well: the art of good alerting
Monitoring is easy; alerting is the hard part. Alert on everything and you'll start ignoring alerts. Alert on nothing and you find out from a customer. These are the levers WebWatch gives you, and when to pull each one.
The six levers
Each of these controls one thing: whether a problem interrupts you now, later, or not at all. Most sites only need two or three of them.
Confirmation windows
"Only alert me if it's down more than 5 minutes." The internet has hiccups: a routing blip, a server restart, a 30-second deploy. A confirmation window means an incident must persist before anyone is told, filtering out noise that would have resolved itself anyway.
Daily digests
Not every site deserves the power to interrupt your evening. Digest mode holds notifications and sends one morning email summarising outages, slow spells, and certificate warnings from the last 24 hours. Perfect for side projects and staging environments.
Acknowledge & escalate
Every downtime email has a one-tap Acknowledge button. Tap it and the system knows a human is handling it. Ignore it (because you're asleep, driving, or on a beach) and after a set number of minutes your backup contact gets paged automatically.
Performance budgets
Sites rarely fall over out of nowhere; they get slow first. A performance budget ("alert me if responses exceed 2 seconds") catches a struggling database, a filling disk, or a traffic spike while the site is still technically up.
Webhooks
When a site changes state, WebWatch can POST a signed JSON payload to any URL you own. Pipe alerts into Slack or Discord, trigger a server restart script, flip a maintenance page on, or feed your own dashboard. Each delivery is HMAC-signed so you can verify it's really us.
Public status pages
Turn your uptime into marketing. A public status page shows live state, 30-day uptime, and incident history for the sites you choose, at a link like web-watch.uk/status/your-name. During an outage it answers "is it just me?" so your inbox doesn't have to.
A setup that lets you sleep
Instant email alerts with a 3 to 5 minute confirmation window, SSL warnings at 30 days, a performance budget of 2 seconds, and a backup contact escalated after 10 unacknowledged minutes. For everything else (blogs, portfolios, staging) switch to the daily digest and sleep well.
Performance budgets make much more sense once you know what a normal response time looks like; the timing numbers are explained in the performance guide. And the statuses that actually trigger these alerts (DOWN, TIMEOUT, SSL_ISSUE and the rest) are decoded in the uptime guide.
Now try it on your own site
Run a one-off check or save a site to track uptime and SEO over time. The free plan covers 10 sites, no card needed.