Her Wix site had just gone down. But she didn't realise this until she tried to log in to fix the Facebook problem and came face to face with Wix' error page.
"These Facebook posts look so unprofessional!", she cried. "Why didn't Wix tell me my site had gone down??".
As the owner of a small business, she didn't want to be the last one to know that her marketing site and shop were offline.
During my last full-time gig, the network guys had implemented Pingdom Website & Server Uptime Monitoring. We got used to hearing their smartphones beep, telling them that one of the sites they supported had just gone down.
This would be followed by a rapid response, disaster recovery would swing into action, and when they got on the horn to the client, they could tell them that there was a problem but they were already working on it.
It was a lot brighter scenario than the client phoning them up in a panic, demanding answers to a problem that they didn't know existed.
It sounded like my client needed some Uptime Monitoring.
With no real budget to speak of, finding a good solution was always going to be hard.
Most options seemed like dodgy knock-offs, with only Pingdom and Uptime Robot looking genuine.
But Pingdom was pricey - USD 14.95 month-by-month for 10 individual checks or 'monitors', 50 SMS messages, and advanced transaction tests.
That left Uptime Robot.
Uptime Robot offers a free plan for up to 50 individual 'monitors', with a 5 minute gap between checks. Email notification is free, and 50 SMS messages can be purchased for USD 15.00.
There are four monitor types, these two being the most relevant:
- HTTP(s): A problem is detected if certain HTTP status codes are returned from the website (200-success = ok, 404-not found = bad, etc.)
- keywords: A problem is detected if certain keywords are found, or not found on the page.
I implemented both types of monitors, with varying results.
I quickly found that Wix was a poor match for Uptime Robot.
There were two main issues:
This meant that when Uptime Robot visited a page, there wasn't any visible page content to test. So any test for a visible keyword would fail.
With testing, I found that only title tags, meta tags, and static HTML text were searched.
As I hadn't actually seen the error page in action, I was hesitant to use the title tag, in case this was referenced in the error page somehow.
This made it difficult to differentiate between pages.
As Wix themselves admitted that their SEO 'keywords' field was redundant, I decided to exploit keyword stuffing, replace the existing keywords with a testable word for each unique page:
- Home -
uptime_home_page - Services -
uptime_services_page - About -
uptime_about_page - Shop -
uptime_shop_page - Remedies -
uptime_remedies_page - Contact -
uptime_contact_page
Unfortunately even the keywords were unreliable.
Viewing the page source of any page always showed <meta name="keywords" content="uptime_home_page">.
This was confusing until I inspected the DOM of every page and realised that <meta name="keywords"> had actually been relocated via JavaScript, and then repopulated with the correct page-specific content, presumably from some sort of page data object.
I'd actually noticed this before, when the same <meta name="description"..> was displayed on every page, despite only being authored once - into the home page.
Further testing showed that the <title> tag was also compromised in this way.
In the end I implemented three very simple checks:
- Server error (if the homepage returns an HTTP error code)
- Wix error page is displaying (if the page does contain the word "Stunning")
- Hidden keyword is missing (if the page does not contain the word "uptime_home_page")
I won't be able to test the Server error until it happens. I'm concerned that the page will simply redirect to Wix' error page and therefore not register a death-star type error.
The keyword tests are working, but as there is no way to differentiate between pages' content, I have to hope that if any page in the site fails, the whole site falls over.
I seem to get alerts from Uptime Robot in batches, around the end of the month. When I check the site everything is ok.
As a result, I don't really trust these alerts, and it feels more like they are 'crying wolf' to remind me that the service is beneficial.
Of course, this could also be because Wix do their maintenance at the end of the month.