EngineeringScoreBest Practices Small
Add uptime monitoring & alerting
Uptime and error monitoring is what tells a team a site is down or broken before customers have to tell them. Without it, outages and error spikes are typically discovered through complaints, support tickets, or lost revenue, all of which take far longer than an automated alert and cost more trust in the process.
Why it matters
Without uptime monitoring, outages and errors are usually discovered by customers complaining rather than by the team, which extends downtime and erodes trust.
How to fix
- 1 Set up an uptime/monitoring service (e.g. UptimeRobot, Pingdom, Better Uptime) against key URLs.
- 2 Configure alerts (email/SMS/Slack) for downtime and error spikes.
Common mistakes
- Setting up monitoring but not configuring actual alerts, so the tool collects data nobody looks at until something has already gone badly wrong.
- Monitoring only the homepage instead of the key user journeys (login, checkout, core API endpoints) that actually matter to the business.
- Routing alerts to a channel or inbox nobody reliably checks, especially outside business hours.
How to verify
- 1 Confirm an uptime/monitoring service is actively checking the site's key URLs and endpoints, not just running unconfigured.
- 2 Trigger a test alert (or review recent alert history) to confirm notifications actually reach the team through a channel someone monitors.
- 3 Confirm monitoring covers critical user flows, not just the homepage returning a 200.
Related checks
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