How Often Should You Check Your Website? Choosing a Check Interval

Detection Speed Is Everything

Every monitoring setting matters, but one matters most: how often the monitor checks your site. This single number — your check interval — decides whether you find out about an outage in seconds, minutes, or hours. (If you're new to the concept, start with what website uptime monitoring is.)

The Detection Gap

When your site goes down, there's a window before anyone notices. The length of that window is roughly your check interval:

Check interval	Worst-case detection delay
12 hours	up to 12 hours
1 hour	up to 1 hour
5 minutes	up to 5 minutes
1 minute	up to 1 minute
30 seconds	up to 30 seconds

A site checked every 12 hours could be down all night before the monitor even looks. A site checked every 30 seconds is watched almost continuously.

Why Minutes (and Seconds) Beat Your Customers

The goal of monitoring is simple: you should know before your customers do. With short check intervals, the typical flow becomes:

1. Your site goes down
2. At the next check, the monitor detects it
3. The first alert goes out immediately — on WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, or email
4. You start fixing it — often before most customers hit the error

Compare that to discovering an outage from an angry support email hours later, and the value is obvious.

Choosing the Right Interval

ismysiteup checks every 5 minutes on Free, every minute on Pro, and every 30 seconds on Business, and you can set longer intervals — up to every 12 hours — for pages that matter less. A good rule of thumb:

• Revenue-critical pages (checkout, login, API) → as short as your plan allows: 30 seconds or 1 minute
• Main marketing site → 1–5 minutes
• Low-priority / staging → 15 minutes to 1 hour

You don't have to use the fastest interval everywhere. Put your shortest intervals where downtime costs the most — and the cost of downtime is exactly how you decide that.

More Than Just Up or Down

Frequent checks also sharpen your response time data. Catching a slowdown early — before it becomes a full outage — lets you act while it's still a small problem. Slow pages cost conversions too: many users abandon a page that takes more than a few seconds to load.

Set It and Forget It

Pick your critical URL, set the tightest interval your plan allows, and connect an alert channel. Five-minute checks are free forever; if every minute counts, Pro and Business take you down to 1 minute and 30 seconds.

Start monitoring free and close the detection gap for good.

Related reading: How ismysiteup Works Under the Hood · Which Downtime Alert Is Right for You?