Updated 25 October 2026 · By the Upcertain team
What breaks on WordPress sites
- A plugin or theme update causes a fatal error, and WordPress shows its "There has been a critical error on this website" page.
- The database connection fails and every page shows an error.
- The hosting account is suspended or out of resources.
- The certificate does not renew.
- Scheduled tasks stop running because WP-Cron only runs when someone visits.
A monitoring setup
| Monitor | Settings | Catches |
|---|---|---|
| Home page, HTTP | Expect 200, every 1 to 5 min | The site is down or erroring |
| Home page, keyword | Must not contain critical error | Fatal error pages, including copies served from a cache |
| Key page, keyword | Must contain a phrase only that page has | A broken theme or page builder |
| SSL | Comes with HTTPS monitors | Certificate expiry and errors |
| Heartbeat | From a real cron job, see below | Scheduled tasks that stopped |
Run WP-Cron from a real cron job
WP-Cron fires on page visits, so a quiet site runs its scheduled tasks late or not at all. A common fix is to disable the visit trigger with define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true); in wp-config.php and run it from the server's cron instead. Add a heartbeat so you hear if that stops:
*/5 * * * * cd /var/www/site && wp cron event run --due-now --quiet && curl -fsS -m 10 https://upcertain.com/api/heartbeat/<token>The example uses WP-CLI. Create a heartbeat monitor with a 5-minute period and a few minutes of grace.
After updates
Most WordPress outages follow an update. Keep a keyword monitor on the pages that use your most complex plugins, and look at the monitor right after updating. An agency looking after many sites can import them all at once; see uptime monitoring for agencies.
Tell visitors
For a shop or membership site, a status page on a subdomain tells customers you know about a problem, even while the site itself is down.