How Often Should a Website Be Checked?
A
Every 5 minutes is a solid default for most websites — it catches an outage within a bounded, predictable window without over-engineering the setup. Faster intervals make sense once downtime has a direct, measurable cost; slower intervals are fine for internal tools where a short gap doesn't matter.
Why 5 minutes is a reasonable default
A 5-minute check interval means the worst case between a real outage starting and a check catching it is 5 minutes — fast enough that most incidents get caught and addressed before they turn into a wave of customer complaints, and it's a schedule that doesn't require any special infrastructure to run. It's also the interval Holter's free plan checks on, precisely because it's a genuinely useful default rather than a crippled one.
When to check faster
Checking more often than every 5 minutes — down to every minute — is worth it once downtime has a direct cost per minute: a checkout flow, a paid API, or any service other businesses depend on. The tighter the interval, the sooner an alert fires, but the marginal benefit shrinks fast past a certain point — going from 5 minutes to 1 minute meaningfully tightens your detection window; going from 1 minute to 10 seconds rarely changes the outcome of an incident.
When less frequent is fine
Internal tools, staging environments, and anything without a real user waiting on it don't need the same urgency. A 15–30 minute interval is plenty for a service where a short gap in detection has no real consequence — the goal is knowing it broke before you happen to notice yourself, not shaving every possible second off detection time.
Checking too often isn't automatically better
An aggressive interval doesn't help if the alerting behind it is noisy or ignored — a check every 10 seconds that pages someone on the first transient blip creates alert fatigue faster than it prevents downtime. Match the interval to what the site actually needs, then spend the rest of your effort making sure the alert reaches someone who can act on it.
Is checking a website every 5 minutes enough?
For most websites, yes. It bounds detection to a 5-minute worst case, which is fast enough to catch and respond to the large majority of real outages.
Should I check my website every minute?
Only if downtime has a direct, measurable cost — a checkout flow, a paid API, or a service other companies depend on. For most sites, the jump from 5 minutes to 1 minute isn't worth the added noise.
Does checking more often use more resources or cost more?
Generally yes — faster check intervals are typically a feature of paid monitoring tiers, since more frequent checks mean more requests against your site and more infrastructure on the monitoring side.
What check interval does Holter's free plan use?
Every 5 minutes, with no credit card required — a genuinely usable default, not a crippled trial interval.
Holter watches this for you: outside-in monitors plus dead-man heartbeats for silent failures. Free plan: 5 monitors, 5-minute checks, no credit card.
Start checking every 5 minutes — free