Websites do not usually go down. They break quietly: a hosting PHP update kills the form handler, a mail setting changes and enquiries stop arriving, a payment page keeps loading but the webhook stopped recording sales. You find out weeks later from a customer, or never. A daily self-check is the answer, and it is not complicated.
The problem with uptime monitors
They fetch the home page and report 200 OK. The enquiry form, the checkout, the confirmation email — the things that make money — are never tested. "Up" and "working" are different questions.
What a real self-check does, every morning
- Opens every page that carries a form and confirms the form and its anti-bot fields are present.
- Submits a real enquiry through the live handler, flagged as a check so it is hidden from your leads list, and confirms it was stored and both emails (to you and the auto-reply) were accepted.
- Runs the tool and capture forms the same way.
- Checks email health: SMTP configured, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records present.
- Pays for every plan with a demo card in the payment provider's test mode — one-time and monthly — then posts the signed payment event to your live webhook and opens the success page and the invoice PDF, proving the entire money path end to end. Test records stay separate from real sales.
- Emails a summary with failures first, and keeps a history in the admin panel.
What it catches in practice
- A mailbox password rotated by someone else — emails failing silently.
- Live keys pasted into test fields, or vice versa.
- A form page edited by a designer with the form removed.
- A webhook endpoint unregistered after a provider dashboard change.
- DNS records dropped during a domain move, turning every email into spam.
How it is built
A single scheduled script on your hosting with a secret token, calling your own site the way a visitor would, with a signature that lets the handlers recognise a check and route its emails to you only. It needs test-mode API keys from your payment provider and takes about a minute a day. It runs on our own site every morning — the report in your inbox is how we know a change last night did not break something this morning.
It is part of the trust layer we add to every admin panel build; run the free website audit for the one-off version, and read about the invoice side in automatic invoices after online payment.