For small businesses
Website monitoring for small businesses that take orders, bookings or enquiries
Find out your site stopped taking orders before your customers do. Check the one or two tasks that earn money, from outside, and get an email naming the step that broke.
Why it matters at your size
No operations team, and plenty of other people's code
Nobody is watching the site at the weekend
There is no operations team or on-call rota. A broken checkout found on Monday is a lost weekend of orders. A check runs whether or not anyone is at a desk, and emails you when the task stops working.
Most breakage is not your code
A small site is built from other people's services: a payment provider, a booking widget, a shop app, a theme or plugin update. Any of them can stop customers finishing while the page still loads, which is why a simple uptime check says everything is fine.
Renewals and expiry take sites down
Domain discovery is included. It reports certificates and domain registrations nearing expiry, DNS changes and new third-party scripts on your pages, so you hear about them before customers do.
Something concrete to send your developer or supplier
The alert names the step that failed and keeps screenshots and timings, so you can pass the evidence to whoever built the site, or to the provider that caused it.
What to check
Start with the task that earns money
One or two checks cover most small businesses. These are the tasks we see break most often.
| Task | Typical business | How it breaks without an error page |
|---|---|---|
| Pay for an order | Online shops | A payment provider update, a discount-code plugin or a shop app that stops the order completing. |
| Book an appointment | Salons, clinics, trades, studios | A booking widget that loads no free times, or a confirmation step that never sends. |
| Send an enquiry | Agencies, consultants, local services | A contact form whose spam filter or email setting quietly drops every message. |
| Reserve a table or a place | Restaurants, venues, courses | A third-party reservations page that changes and no longer accepts a booking. |
What you receive
An email that says what broke and who to call
Not "your site is down", but which step failed, what still works and the evidence to forward. Results that could not be checked are marked unknown, so you are not chased about our problems.
The Starter plan includes
- 5 checks, run as often as every 15 minutes
- Website and API checks
- 30 days of evidence
Book an appointment: no free times shown from every location
Where it breaks: step 3, choosing a time. The booking widget loads but returns no slots. Steps 1 and 2 pass.
Still works: the homepage, prices and the contact form.
Evidence: screenshots of each step and the widget's response, kept with the result.
Is it a fit?
When it is worth it, and when it is not
It is worth it when your website takes orders, bookings or enquiries and a day of silence would cost you. It is less useful if nothing on your site can be completed: for a brochure site, a simple uptime check may be all you need. Board and regulator reports, impact tolerances and the evidence ledger are built for regulated firms, and voice, email and single sign-on are on higher plans; you will not need them to start.
Questions
Website monitoring for small businesses: common questions
Do I need website monitoring if my site is on a hosted platform?
Yes, if the site takes orders, bookings or enquiries. Hosted platforms keep the pages up, but the task can still fail because of an app, theme, payment setting or third-party widget, and the platform's status page will not show that.
How is this different from an uptime checker?
An uptime checker asks whether a page responds. ScoutSentinel completes the task the page exists for, such as paying or booking, and tells you which step failed when it cannot.
Do I need a developer to set it up?
No. You describe the task in plain language, such as "book a haircut for next Tuesday", review the proposed steps and approve them. A developer is useful when the alert says your own site needs a fix.
Will a check place real orders or bookings?
Only if you let it. Steps that would buy, book or send something are flagged and need an administrator's approval. You can end a check before the final submit, or point it at a test mode your provider offers.
What happens when a check cannot run?
The result is recorded as unknown, never as a failure, so you are not told your site is broken because of a problem on our side.
Looking after sites on your own? See ScoutSentinel for individuals. For the wider picture, read why monitor customer journeys.
Check the task that earns you money
Pick the customer task that matters most, set up its check, run it and see the evidence, then test your alert. Free 14-day pilot by invitation. No card required. Starter limits apply unless we agree a scoped one-service evaluation.