WordPress Uptime Monitoring: What Five Free Plans Give You in 2026

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For one WordPress site, the best free uptime monitor is the one that checks most often and still alerts you somewhere you will see it. On 10 November 2026 that meant UptimeRobot’s free plan (50 monitors, checks every 5 minutes) or Better Stack’s free plan (10 monitors, checks every 3 minutes). StatusCake’s free plan now checks every 15 minutes and covers only 3 monitors, which is the number most people get wrong, because older comparison articles still describe something better. If you already run Jetpack, its built-in Downtime Monitor costs nothing extra and checks every 5 minutes, but you cannot change that.

I wanted real numbers instead of a vendor listicle, so I read the pricing page of each service directly and then worked out what each check interval means for an outage that lasts a few minutes. Everything in the table below comes from the provider’s own page, read on 10 November 2026. Plans change, so the date matters.

Five free plans, read from their own pricing pages

Service	Free monitors	Check interval	What else the free plan says
UptimeRobot	50	5 minutes	Described as good for personal and commercial projects. Basic status pages and 5 integrations. SSL and DNS monitoring start on the paid Solo plan.
Better Stack	10 monitors and heartbeats	3 minutes	1 status page, Slack and e-mail alerts. The pricing page labels the free tier “for personal projects”.
Jetpack Monitor	Your own site	5 minutes	Free to every site running Jetpack. On or off, no interval setting. E-mail alerts.
Uptimia	1 website and 1 API monitor	As often as 5 minutes	No transaction, page-speed or real-user monitoring on the free plan.
StatusCake	3	15 minutes	Single login, for personal use. Includes domain, page-speed, SSL and server monitoring features.

Two details in that table decide more than the headline numbers. Better Stack’s free plan is meant for personal projects, so a client site or a store is better placed on UptimeRobot, whose own page says commercial use is fine. And StatusCake’s free plan was the one I found described wrongly: comparison articles in the search results still list 10 monitors at 5-minute checks, while StatusCake’s own pricing page shows 3 monitors at 15-minute checks. When a number decides a purchase, open the vendor page, not an article from last year.

Why the check interval matters more than the monitor count

A WordPress site rarely needs 50 monitors. It needs one or two that notice a problem quickly. A monitor only sees your site at the moment it checks, so an outage shorter than the interval can fall entirely between two checks.

Assume checks run at a fixed interval and an outage starts at a random moment. The chance that at least one check lands inside an outage of a given length is that length divided by the interval, capped at 100 percent:

Outage length	3-minute checks	5-minute checks	15-minute checks
2 minutes	67%	40%	13%
5 minutes	100%	100%	33%
10 minutes	100%	100%	67%
15 minutes	100%	100%	100%

This is arithmetic, not a measurement of any one service, and it ignores the extra confirmation step many services add before they alert you. It still makes the point. Under a 15-minute interval, a 5-minute outage goes unseen two times out of three. The average wait before the first check after an outage begins is half the interval: about 1.5 minutes at 3, 2.5 minutes at 5 and 7.5 minutes at 15, before any confirmation delay.

Short outages are common on WordPress. A plugin update that fails halfway, a PHP worker pool that runs out during a traffic spike, a restart on a shared server: each can take a site down for a few minutes and then fix itself. A 3 or 5 minute interval catches most of those. A 15-minute interval mostly catches the long ones, which are the ones you would have noticed anyway.

What a check on your homepage can miss

Most free monitors request one URL and decide from the HTTP status. Jetpack’s support page says its monitor treats a site as inaccessible when it takes longer than 20 seconds to load, and it lists three known causes of false alerts: slow shared hosting, too many redirects, and hosts that block its monitoring agent. The agent identifies itself as jetmon/1.0 (Jetpack Site Uptime Monitor by WordPress.com), so that is the string to allow if your host or firewall filters requests by user agent. Jetpack also lists Cloudflare’s “Under Attack” mode as a cause of false offline alerts.

There is also a quieter miss. A page cache or CDN can keep serving a saved copy of your homepage with a 200 status while the part of the site that runs PHP is broken. A monitor that only checks the homepage then reports green. Add a second monitor on a URL that always reaches WordPress itself, such as /wp-login.php, which a page cache does not normally store. If the homepage is up and the login page is down, you have found the exact failure the first monitor cannot see.

A ten-minute setup that covers both

1. Create a free UptimeRobot account and add an HTTP monitor for your homepage with the 5-minute interval.
2. Add a second HTTP monitor for /wp-login.php on the same site.
3. Set the alert contact to an e-mail address you read on your phone, not the one on the site that might be down. If your mail runs on the same server as the site, an outage can take the alert with it.
4. Open your firewall or security plugin and confirm the monitor’s IP addresses or user agent are not blocked. A blocked monitor produces false alarms that teach you to ignore real ones.
5. If you also run Jetpack, leave its monitor on as a second opinion. Two services that disagree tell you the problem is between the monitor and your site, not necessarily your site.

When alerts turn out to be frequent, the monitor is doing its job and the hosting is the problem. Repeated short outages on a shared plan point at an overloaded server, and moving to a plan with dedicated resources fixes the cause instead of the symptom. Hostinger’s hosting plans are the ones I run my own sites on, and it is worth comparing a plan’s resource limits against what your outage history shows. Who hosts you matters as much as how you monitor, and the post on finding who hosts a website shows how to confirm what you are running on.

When the free plans stop being enough

Free plans top out at 3 to 5 minute checks. If a store loses real money in two minutes, you want 60-second checks. As shown on 10 November 2026, UptimeRobot’s Solo plan lists EUR 9 a month on annual billing for 10 monitors at 60 seconds, plus SSL and DNS monitoring and a status page on your own domain. StatusCake’s Superior plan lists EUR 16.66 a month on annual billing (EUR 19.99 monthly) for 100 monitors at 1-minute checks. Both prices are on the vendors’ pages and can change, so check before you commit.

Two more checks belong next to an uptime monitor and no free plan covers them in the same way. An expired SSL certificate takes a site down for every visitor with a browser warning, and UptimeRobot only offers SSL monitoring on paid plans. A compromised site often stays “up” while serving spam, which is why uptime monitoring and a malware check are separate jobs. The guides on scanning a website for malware and checking security headers cover the parts a status check cannot see.

What I would pick

For a personal or small business WordPress site: UptimeRobot, two monitors, 5-minute checks, alerts to a separate mailbox. For a personal project where a 3-minute interval is worth the smaller monitor count: Better Stack. For a site you already run Jetpack on: leave Jetpack’s monitor on and add UptimeRobot for the /wp-login.php check it cannot do. Skip StatusCake’s free plan unless 15-minute checks are acceptable to you, and treat any comparison that does not show a date as out of date.

Sources read on 10 November 2026: the pricing pages of UptimeRobot, Better Stack, StatusCake and Uptimia, and Jetpack’s feature page and downtime monitoring support page.