Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021
Uptime monitoring. You keep hearing us talking about it and you know why it’s important, hey, you might even have a StatusCake account. But do you know what to do if you do experience website downtime?
Let’s do a little quiz.
Your website has suffered two hours of downtime. Do you:
- Pretend it didn’t happen and hope for the best
- Wait until your customers reach out to you on social media instead of bringing it to their attention
- Tell all 100,000 customers in a frenzied hurry by sending a mass email
- Update your Status Page with the issue and direct people there for further updates
If you answered a, you might be a lost cause (I’m only joking, you should just definitely read to the end of this post), and if you answered d, crack out the sales bell and start dinging!
What is a status page?
A Status Page is exactly what its name would suggest; a page where you can share your website or app’s status with continuous updates.
Take StatusCake’s Status Page as an example:
Our customers can get an instant insight into how our systems are operating and to what capacity. Furthermore, they have the option to “view historical uptime” and subscribe to updates. Subscribing to updates can be a really great way to ensure customers are always in the know of any issues that might be occurring and most importantly, why.
Talking of why…
Why should companies use Status Pages?
There are 5 key reasons why you should be using a status page for your customers:
- It is one singular place where your status can be seen
- It is easy to understand what has happened to your website or app
- It allows you to tell customers what caused the issue with notes like a post mortem update
- Transparency with your customers builds trust
- It takes the weight off of your customer success teams who might be inundated with customers wondering what’s happened to your service
Examples of companies using Status Pages
Some very well known companies like GitHub use status pages, and go a little further by getting granular with their updates. Take the below as an example; you can check the status of everything from API requests to web hooks, all in one place. One of the best parts of this page, however, is the customisation along the top – who knew a yellow hard hat could look so cool?
Slack has gone for a simple and clean status page, again showcasing all of their features and how they’re performing.
StatusCake and Status Pages
With StatusCake, you can get a Status Page that displays your last 7 days of uptime, any downtime events and graphs for your data. You can personalise the page to ensure it’s in unison with the rest of your website’s branding, and it’s quick and easy to set up! Try StatusCake today.
StatusCake Team
Share this
More from StatusCake
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 2)
6 min read The Real Cost of Owning Monitoring Isn’t Code — It’s Everything Else In Part 1, we explored how AI has dramatically reduced the cost of building monitoring tooling. That much is clear. You can scaffold uptime checks quickly, generate alert logic in minutes, and set-up dashboards faster than most teams used to schedule the kickoff
James Barnes
March 11, 2026
Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)
5 min read AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier. A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend. They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything
James Barnes
March 4, 2026
Alerting Is a Socio-Technical System
3 min read In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting
James Barnes
February 25, 2026
Designing Alerts for Action
3 min read In the first two posts of this series, we explored how alert noise emerges from design decisions, and why notification lists fail to create accountability when responsibility is unclear. There’s a deeper issue underneath both of those problems. Many alerting systems are designed without being clear about the outcome they’re meant to produce. When teams
James Barnes
February 18, 2026
A Notification List Is Not a Team
3 min read In the previous post, we looked at how alert noise is rarely accidental. It’s usually the result of sensible decisions layered over time, until responsibility becomes diffuse and response slows. One of the most persistent assumptions behind this pattern is simple. If enough people are notified, someone will take responsibility. After more than fourteen years
James Barnes
February 11, 2026
Alert Noise Isn’t an Accident — It’s a Design Decision
3 min read In a previous post, The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most, we explored how incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones. These are moments where decision-making under pressure and cognitive load matter more than perfect root cause analysis. When systems don’t support people clearly in those moments, teams compensate.
James Barnes
February 4, 2026