Uptime monitoring answers one simple question many times a day: does my site respond the way it should? That alone catches the outages that cost the most: a crashed server, an expired certificate, a broken deploy.

What it misses

A page can return 200 and still be broken. That is why keyword checks matter: look for the text that proves the page really works, such as your product name or a price.

Start small

Watch your home page, your login and your checkout. Add a heartbeat for your nightly jobs. That covers most of the ways a small business finds out about problems from its customers instead of its tools.