Show the few services your customers use, under names they recognise. During an outage they want to know three things: is it you or them, which part is affected, and whether it's back. A good status page answers all three without a phone call.
Which services to show
Show what your customers touch. Leave out what only you and your team see.
| Show | Keep in the app only |
|---|---|
| Webshop, checkout, booking | Backup jobs and other heartbeats |
| Customer login or portal | Your internal mail server |
| An API your partners call | Test and staging sites |
Three to five services is plenty for most small businesses. A short page is easier to read on a phone, which is where most people will open it.
Use names your customers know
The names on the page are the names your customers have to match to their problem. Name the monitors the way a customer would.
| Instead of | Write |
|---|---|
prod-web-01 | Webshop |
api.nordshop.example/v2 | Order API |
Keyword "Pay now" | Checkout |
What customers want during an outage
- That you know. A service marked unavailable tells them it isn't their connection, and that you've seen it.
- Which part is affected. "Checkout is unavailable, the webshop is up" tells them they can still browse and come back to pay.
- Since when, and when it's back. Your status page shows when the incident was detected and when it was resolved, in Copenhagen time.
- How things usually run. Each service shows its uptime history, so one bad morning sits next to the weeks that went well.
Where to put the link
Your status page lives at monitorstatus.eu/<your-name>, hosted separately from your site. That means the link works while your site is down, as long as it's somewhere that doesn't depend on your site. On Uptime Business it can have your own address, such as status.yourcompany.com: we set it up for you.
Put the link where customers look when your site is down:
- Your e-mail signature, and the signature on support replies
- The automatic reply on your support address
- Your social media profiles and your business listing on maps
- Order confirmation e-mails
- The footer and help page of your website, for the days it's up
One page per client
If you run sites for clients, give each client their own status page. Uptime Pro has 3 status pages and Uptime Business has 10, both without the MonitorBase link. Uptime Business also adds components of your own, updated by hand or through the status-page API, and your logo and colour. The free plan for personal and hobby sites has 1, with the link. See status pages for the full comparison.