Free Website Monitoring: How to Monitor Your Site for Free

What free website monitoring should actually cover

Plenty of tools advertise a free tier, but 'free monitoring' means very different things depending on the tool. Some only ping a URL every few minutes and tell you whether it returned a response. That catches a full outage, but it misses the more common problem: a page that responds but is broken, blank, or missing the button a visitor needs.

The essentials worth having for free are uptime, SSL certificate validity, DNS resolution, and a real check that the page rendered content rather than an error or an empty shell. Together those cover the failures that most often cost you visitors, and none of them should require a paid plan to get started.

The trade-offs on a free plan are usually about volume and depth: how many pages you can monitor, how often checks run, and whether advanced features like visual diffing and user journeys are included. Knowing those limits up front helps you pick a tool you can grow into rather than out of.

How to monitor your website for free with NorthDuty

NorthDuty has a genuine free-forever plan with no credit card required. It monitors up to 20 pages with health checks every 5 minutes, and each check does more than ping — it renders the page and reports SSL, DNS, blank-page detection, broken resources, and JavaScript errors, with email alerts when something breaks.

That means the free plan already covers the failures uptime-only tools miss: a page that loads blank after a deploy, a certificate about to expire, or a script error that breaks a button while the page still returns a healthy status.

You can also run one-off checks with NorthDuty's free tools — an SSL checker, DNS checker, response-time checker, broken-link checker, and more — without even creating an account. They are a fast way to diagnose a single issue right now, and a natural on-ramp to continuous monitoring of the same signals.

When you need more — faster checks, more pages, visual change detection, user journeys, or alerts to Slack and SMS — the paid plans add that depth, but you never have to start there.

Conclusion

Cost is no reason to leave your website unmonitored. A good free plan covers uptime, SSL, DNS, and real page health — the signals that catch most costly failures — and lets you add depth only when you need it.

NorthDuty's free plan monitors 20 pages with rendered health checks and email alerts, no card required, plus free one-off tools for quick diagnostics. It is a complete starting point that scales with you.