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
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
The Incident Checklist: Reducing Cognitive Load When It Matters Most
4 min read In the previous post, we looked at what happens after detection; when incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones, with cognitive load as the real constraint. This post assumes that context. The question here is simpler and more practical. What actually helps teams think clearly and act well once things are already
James Barnes
January 28, 2026
When Things Go Wrong, Systems Should Help Humans — Not Fight Them
3 min read In the previous post, we explored how AI accelerates delivery and compresses the time between change and user impact. As velocity increases, knowing that something has gone wrong before users do becomes a critical capability. But detection is only the beginning. Once alerts fire and dashboards light up, humans still have to interpret what’s happening,
James Barnes
January 21, 2026
When AI Speeds Up Change, Knowing First Becomes the Constraint
5 min read In a recent post, I argued that AI doesn’t fix weak engineering processes; rather it amplifies them. Strong review practices, clear ownership, and solid fundamentals still matter just as much when code is AI-assisted as when it’s not. That post sparked a follow-up question in the comments that’s worth sitting with: With AI speeding things
James Barnes
January 14, 2026