This is the short path. Add one site, put one monitor on the journey that costs you money when it breaks, and read the result. Everything else can wait.
Minute 1 to 2: add your site
From Sites, choose Add site and give it the address of your home page. Or skip ahead: on Monitors, guided setup asks for the address of your site if you have none yet, and you carry on from there.
You are asked what kind of site it is. Mark it as your own, a competitor, or one you are just watching. That label follows the site everywhere, so a competitor's page changing never reads like your own site breaking.
The notification email on the site is where its alerts go. It is required and starts as your own address; change it if alerts should go to someone else. If different people look after different sites, this is the field that routes them.
Minute 3 to 6: create the monitor that matters
Go to Monitors and choose Create monitor. Pick the journey that costs you money when it breaks, not the one that is easiest to set up.
For most stores that is the path into checkout:
- Choose a template that matches the journey, for example adding to cart.
- Give it the page to start from, usually a product page you know is in stock.
- Point it at the button to click.
- Choose what should be true afterwards, for example that the cart appears.
If you run a service business rather than a store, use your main enquiry form instead. A check can fill the fields, submit, and confirm the response you expect comes back.
Set the interval. How fast you can go depends on your plan, and the pricing page shows the fastest each one allows. A busy checkout is worth checking often; a contact form on a brochure site is fine a few times a day.
Minute 7 to 8: run it once and read the result
Use Check now to run it immediately rather than waiting for the schedule.
Open the check. You get the result, how long it took, the response code, the final address, and a screenshot of the page. If it failed, you also get a plain-English summary of what went wrong.
One thing worth knowing now: a check you run by hand never sends an alert, by email, Slack or webhook. That is deliberate, so trying something out does not wake anyone up. Only scheduled checks send alerts.
Minute 9 to 10: make sure the alert will reach you
Go to Account → Notifications and check that Failure alerts is on. Failure alerts go to the site's notification email, so confirm that address is one you actually read.
If you want alerts somewhere other than email, add a webhook under Account → Webhooks. Copy the signing secret when it is shown; it is shown once and cannot be recovered afterwards.
What to do next, not now
Once the first monitor has been running for a day and you trust it:
- Add a second monitor on the other journey that matters, usually sign-in or a form.
- Add a change monitor on a page you want to be told about, like a pricing page.
- Add the rest of your sites.
Two to four monitors per site catches the breakages that generate support tickets. Thirty monitors generate noise that nobody reads.
If something is not working
The check failed the first time and you do not know why: open it and read the summary, then look at the screenshot. Nine times out of ten the page looked different from what you expected, for example a cookie banner covering the button.
The check will not start at all: confirm the address is reachable in a browser and
starts with http or https. Private and internal addresses are refused on
purpose.
See Troubleshooting for the longer list.