There are several great options for monitoring site speed and uptime. Which you choose will depend on what you need to monitor.
This article aims to help customers with Performance Foundry's Managed WordPress Hosting answer those questions in a way that's specific to our environment.
If you're seeing an issue, then check it isn't your local connection with https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
If you'd like proactive monitoring, Performance Foundry already subscribes to 60-second checks on your homepage through updown.io. We strongly recommend against adding another service that does the same thing.
On request, we can make your status page public, so you can monitor it. We can also add an email address to alert with downtime. To enable this, please request it from support. Your status page will be public for all internet users. Here's Performance Foundry's own status page, if you'd like to see how that looks.
The updown alerting system is plugged into our monitoring tools (which also monitor a bunch of other things on the back end), so it isn't possible to 'swap' this system out for one of your choosing. Adding more bot checks will impact your site's resource usage and could slow it down for other users.
On request, we can make a back-end monitoring point available that will check the app's availability, bypassing cache, without using many resources. This is a more technical check around availability, not checking page load.
The Updown status page will show a score for response time based on location, and also an "Apdex" score of between 0 and 1. By default, we set Apdex at 0.5 seconds. To enable this, please request it from support. Your status page will be public for all internet users.
We highly recommend the highly unflattering Dareboost.com for front end performance tests. With Dareboost, you can not only test any page on your site, you can also sign up for tracking. Dareboost will not only give you a page speed, but also a technical score that will change over time.
You probably already have Google Analytics running on your site. While their page speed measurements aren't likely to reflect real users' experiences, monitoring changes in the system over time can be helpful. You can set up custom analytics alerts if your page speed varies by a certain threshold (say 10%) day by day.
Performance Foundry maintains a New Relic APM account and Grafana monitoring nodes to check code in run-time, error logs and response codes, and average response times to various resources on every site.
Due to the shared nature of these resources, we can't give access to them, but as APIs develop we may be able to expose more information through the Foundry Anvil plugin or your Performance Foundry account page.
Every tool is going to give really different numbers, because each measures a different thing. There are many, many ways to measure site speed! If you're interested in tracking a certain aspect of page speed, choose the right tool for the job, and measure changes over time.