Site Monitoring
External checks, monitors, and site-assurance signals
External Site Checks
MetricPoints can begin monitoring a website from the outside before you install a browser beacon or WordPress plugin. These checks are read-only and are designed to answer whether the site is reachable, protected, findable, delivering, and behaving as expected from a public visitor-like perspective.
Availability and routing
Uptime, expected HTTP status, TLS/SSL expiry, canonical redirects, redirect-chain limits, and important page reachability.
Domains and DNS
Domain registration expiry, DNS baseline approval, DNS drift, nameservers, A/AAAA/CNAME/MX/TXT/CAA/DS records, DNSSEC, wildcard DNS, resolver disagreement, and sensitive DNS changes.
Search and discovery
Robots.txt, noindex directives, sitemap health, stale sitemap evidence, canonical targets, AI crawler policy, and llms.txt.
Protection posture
Security-header drift, CSP and CSP-Report-Only presence, risky script evidence, mixed content, and public asset checks.
Delivery and conversion
Configured form delivery checks, synthetic flows, analytics/tracking installs, email-domain health, and important asset integrity.
Public reputation
Public reputation sources can produce review work. High-confidence malware or safety-provider findings may become critical; single DNSBL-style hits normally need review before being treated as urgent.
How external checks appear in MetricPoints
- Critical now is reserved for likely business-impacting failures such as unreachable sites, broken important journeys, confirmed severe public reputation findings, or credible customer-impacting failures.
- Needs review is used when MetricPoints found evidence an agency should inspect, such as DNS baseline approval, indexability concerns, header drift, single-source reputation hits, or setup decisions.
- Coverage gaps mean MetricPoints does not yet have enough fresh evidence to prove a monitored area is healthy.
- Resolved and archived history remains available as proof without continuing to count as a current site problem.
No-install first, deeper evidence later
External monitoring works for WordPress and non-WordPress sites. Adding the browser beacon or WordPress plugin increases confidence and adds evidence, but it is not required to start monitoring public site health.