Creating your account

Getting started with SiteRooster is quick and easy. You can create an account in two ways:

Option 1: Start with Free Plan

1. Visit siterooster.com/register
2. Enter your email address and create a password
3. Verify your email address
4. You’re ready to add your first website!

Option 2: Subscribe to a Paid Plan

1. Visit our Pricing page
2. Select your preferred plan (Small, Medium, or Enterprise)
3. Complete checkout via Stripe
4. Your account is automatically created and you’re logged in

Adding your first website

Once you’re logged in, adding a website to monitor takes just seconds.

1. From your Dashboard, find the “Add New Site” section
2. Enter your website URL (e.g., https://example.com)
3. Click Add Site

SiteRooster will immediately begin monitoring your site for:

• Uptime — Is your site responding to requests?
• SSL Certificate — Is your certificate valid and when does it expire?
• Domain Expiration — When does your domain registration expire?

Understanding the dashboard

Your dashboard is the central hub for monitoring all your websites at a glance.

Stats Overview

At the top of your dashboard, you’ll see summary statistics:

• Total Sites — How many websites you’re monitoring
• Online — Sites currently responding normally
• Down — Sites that are unreachable or returning errors
• SSL Warnings — Sites with expiring or invalid SSL certificates

Site Cards

Each monitored site is displayed as a card showing:

• Site name and URL
• Current status (online/offline)
• Latest response time
• SSL certificate status
• Domain expiration countdown

Click any site card to view detailed monitoring data, uptime history, and configure content monitoring.

Status indicators

SiteRooster uses color-coded indicators throughout the interface to help you quickly understand the health of your sites.

How uptime monitoring works

SiteRooster performs real HTTP/HTTPS requests to your websites at regular intervals. This is different from simple ping checks — we verify that your site actually responds with content.

What we check

• HTTP Status Code — We expect a 2xx or 3xx response
• Response Time — How long it takes to receive a response
• Connection Success — Whether we can establish a connection at all

Status detection

Check frequencies

How often we check your sites depends on your subscription plan:

Response time tracking

Every uptime check records how long your site takes to respond. This data helps you identify performance issues before they become outages.

What response times mean

• Under 200ms — Excellent performance
• 200-500ms — Good performance
• 500ms-1s — Acceptable, but could be improved
• Over 1s — Slow response, may indicate server issues

View response time trends in the Uptime tab of any site’s detail page.

Downtime detection

When SiteRooster detects that your site is down, we immediately record the incident and can notify you through your configured alert channels.

Incident tracking

Each downtime incident records:

• When the site went down
• When it recovered
• Total duration of the outage
• Error details (timeout, HTTP error code, etc.)

Uptime percentages

SiteRooster calculates uptime percentages for multiple time periods:

• Last 24 hours
• Last 7 days
• Last 30 days
• Last 90 days

SSL certificate monitoring

For sites using HTTPS, SiteRooster automatically monitors your SSL certificate status during every uptime check.

What we track

• Validity — Is the certificate properly issued and trusted?
• Expiration Date — When does the certificate expire?
• Days Remaining — Countdown to expiration

SSL status indicators

Domain expiration tracking

SiteRooster monitors your domain registration expiration dates using WHOIS lookups.

How it works

1. We perform WHOIS lookups to find your domain’s expiration date
2. Checks run hourly to respect WHOIS server rate limits
3. We support most major domain registrars and TLDs

Domain status display

On your dashboard and site detail pages, you’ll see:

• The exact expiration date
• A countdown showing days remaining
• Color-coded warnings as expiration approaches

Alert thresholds

SiteRooster uses the following default thresholds for expiration warnings:

When an expiration date falls within these thresholds, you’ll see warning indicators on your dashboard and receive alerts through your configured notification channels.

Site crawling explained

SiteRooster can crawl your websites to index page content. This enables powerful features like keyword monitoring and page change detection.

How crawling works

1. Starting from your homepage, we discover and follow internal links
2. We respect your robots.txt rules
3. Each page’s content is indexed and stored
4. Subsequent crawls compare content to detect changes

Starting a crawl

1. Go to your site’s detail page
2. Click the Content tab
3. Click Start Crawl (or Configure Crawl for options)

Keyword monitors

Keyword monitors track specific words or phrases across your site and alert you when they appear or disappear.

Use cases

• Brand monitoring — Know if your brand name is removed from a partner’s site
• Error detection — Get alerted if “error”, “404”, or “maintenance” appears
• Competitor tracking — Monitor competitor sites for specific product mentions
• Compliance — Ensure required legal text remains on your pages

Creating a keyword monitor

1. Go to your site’s Content tab
2. Click Add Keyword
3. Enter the keyword or phrase to track
4. Choose alert type: Appears or Disappears
5. Select check frequency
6. Save the monitor

Keyword limits by plan

Page change monitors

Page monitors track specific URLs for any content changes. When the page content changes, you’ll be notified.

Use cases

• Competitor pricing — Monitor competitor pricing pages
• Legal documents — Track changes to terms of service or privacy policies
• News/updates — Know when a page is updated
• Availability — Monitor product pages for stock changes

Content filters

Page monitors support CSS selectors to focus on specific parts of a page:

This helps reduce false positives from dynamic elements like ads, timestamps, or random content.

Page monitor limits by plan

Crawl frequencies & limits

Different plans have different crawling capabilities:

Email alerts

Email is the primary notification channel, available on all paid plans.

Alert types

• Uptime alerts — Site goes down or comes back up
• SSL alerts — Certificate expiring or expired
• Domain alerts — Domain registration expiring
• Content alerts — Keyword found/lost or page changed

Setting up email alerts

1. Go to Notification Settings
2. Find the site you want to configure
3. Toggle on Email for the alert types you want

Alerts are sent to your account email address.

SMS alerts

Get instant text message alerts for critical issues. SMS is available on Medium and Enterprise plans.

Setting up SMS

1. Go to Notification Settings
2. Enter your phone number (with country code)
3. Click Verify
4. Enter the verification code sent to your phone
5. Toggle on SMS alerts for your sites

SMS limits

To prevent abuse, SMS alerts are limited to 10 messages per month per account. Your usage is shown on the Notifications page.

Webhook integrations

Send alerts to any URL endpoint — perfect for integrating with Slack, Discord, PagerDuty, or custom systems.

Setting up webhooks

1. Go to Notification Settings
2. Enter your webhook URL
3. Test the webhook to verify it’s working
4. Toggle on Webhook alerts for your sites

Webhook payload

Webhooks receive a JSON payload with alert details:

{
  "type": "uptime",
  "site": {
    "id": 123,
    "name": "My Website",
    "url": "https://example.com"
  },
  "status": "down",
  "message": "Site is not responding",
  "timestamp": "2026-01-08T12:00:00Z"
}

Slack integration example

To send alerts to Slack, create an Incoming Webhook in your Slack workspace and use that URL.

Per-site configuration

Each monitored site has independent notification settings. This lets you:

• Enable different alert types for different sites
• Use different channels (email vs SMS) based on site importance
• Disable alerts for test/development sites

Creating a status page

Public status pages let you share your site’s uptime data with anyone — perfect for customer transparency and building trust.

Enabling your status page

1. Go to your site’s detail page
2. Click the Settings tab
3. Toggle on Public Status Page
4. Copy the shareable link

Sharing your status page

Once enabled, your status page is accessible at a unique URL that you can share:

Common uses

• Add a “Status” link in your website footer
• Share during incidents to keep customers informed
• Include in SLA documentation
• Embed link in support responses

Features & display

Public status pages include:

• Current status — Live indicator showing if the site is up or down
• Uptime percentage — 30-day uptime calculation
• Response time — Latest response time in milliseconds
• Uptime history — Visual 30-day uptime blocks
• Live timer — Real-time counter showing time since last check

Plan comparison

SiteRooster offers four plans to fit different needs:

View full pricing details →

Upgrading & downgrading

Upgrading your plan

1. Visit the Pricing page
2. Select your new plan
3. Complete checkout
4. Your account is upgraded immediately

When upgrading, you’ll be charged the prorated difference for the remainder of your billing period.

Downgrading your plan

1. Go to your Account page
2. Click Manage Subscription
3. Select a different plan in the Stripe portal

Managing your subscription

All subscription management is handled through Stripe’s secure customer portal.

What you can do

• Update payment method
• View billing history
• Download invoices
• Change plans
• Cancel subscription

Accessing the portal

1. Go to your Account page
2. Click Manage Subscription
3. You’ll be redirected to Stripe’s secure portal

Annual billing savings

Save 20% by switching to annual billing. You can change from monthly to annual (or vice versa) in the Stripe portal.