Below are some frequently asked questions about our Website Monitoring service. Make sure to also read the Features page for some basic information on how the service works.
Can you be more technical in describing how monitoring works?
Sure. We do a HEAD request, and if that doesn’t work, we do a GET. We request a popular page on your site as determined by our analytics, or we request the root page if there are no analytics. When we check for analytics, we check for visits that occurred recently (the exact timeframe for “recently” varies). To be considered “up”, your site needs to be responsive to at least one of these methods. To be marked as down, your site must be unresponsive to all of these methods.
How do you measure site responsiveness?
When our servers check your site, we track how long it takes your site to respond. We are able to compare your site’s response times with average response times, letting you know your relative performance. The Monitoring section of your Tallyopia.com Profile page will show you this information.
My site is up, but Tallyopia says it’s down!
Did your site just come back up? Give Tallyopia a few minutes to recheck it. You’d be surprised how often sites go down unnoticed by their owners, only to come back up again 10-15 minutes later.
In general, if Tallyopia says your site is down, it means two things:
- The Tallyopia servers can’t reach your site.
- You haven’t received any visitors recently.
If only the first were true, it could suggest that there’s some network outage between our servers and yours. But if you also haven’t received any visitors recently, it means we really can’t tell if your site is up, so we mark it as down. We check the sites periodically (the exact rate will vary), and some servers do become unresponsive before responding again. It’s possible that we just got your site during an unresponsive time.
If you know your site is up but we mark it as down, and this happens a lot, let us know. We will run a few tests to see if there is something preventing our servers from checking your site, and if so we’ll try to get it fixed. Email us to get this process started.
In general, if your site gets ~200 hits/day, this probably won’t happen (since we’ll see the visitors via the analytics and know you’re up). But if you have a low traffic site and we aren’t able to reach your server, you might get some of these false negatives. In these cases, you can either disable monitoring, or just disable the email notifications.
how can I make my site go a little faster?
Hi Victor,
There are some general steps you can follow to speed up your WordPress site. I’ve listed a few below, but you can find more by performing a search for “speed up my wordpress site”. Once you’ve gotten past the basics, a lot of the speedup you can achieve will depend on the specifics of your website.
Here are some basic tips for improving performance:
- Use compression on your website.
- Use a caching plugin. WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are two common caching plugins.
- Remove plugins known to be slow. Some specialized WordPress hosting providers provide lists of plugins they consider slow or otherwise detrimental to performance. For example, WP Engine’s list of CPU/MySQL thrasking plugins might be helpful – http://support.wpengine.com/disallowed-plugins/.
- Minify your CSS and Javascript. There are a few plugins that will help you do this more easily.
- Use a CDN or similar to distribute static files, such as images.
Try searching for “speed up my wordpress site” on an Internet search engine, and you’ll find even more tips to help you out.