Site monitoring for agencies
Client sites break
quietly.
Nothing goes down. No error appears. The analytics tag just stops firing after a deploy,
or a noindex comes across from staging, and six weeks later a client asks
why their traffic collapsed. Nightjar looks at every site you look after, every day,
and tells you the moment something changes.
Free, no account, about ten seconds. We look at up to eight pages.
The problem
Downtime is the easy case.
You already know when a site goes down — the client calls. What nobody calls about is the failure that leaves the page looking perfectly normal.
- 01
The measurement tag that disappeared
A theme update, a consent banner change, a rebuilt header — the GA4 or GTM snippet goes with it. The site works. The numbers quietly flatline, and it is usually found during a quarterly review, months of data later.
- 02
The noindex that came from staging
One meta tag, copied to production with everything else. Google drops the site over the following fortnight. No error, no alert, no ranking — just a slow disappearance nobody can explain.
- 03
The certificate nobody renewed
Automatic renewal failed three weeks ago and mailed a warning to an address that left the company in 2023. You find out when the whole site is behind a full-page browser warning, on a Saturday.
- 04
The domain that expired
Registered five years ago on someone's personal card. The card expired. So does the website, and every email address on it.
How it works
Setup is one field per site. There is nothing to install on the sites themselves — no script, no plugin, no access to anything.
- 01
Paste the addresses
One line per client site. Nightjar crawls a sample of pages the way a search engine would, and records what it found: titles, tags, certificates, DNS, links.
- 02
It comes back every day
Same crawl, compared against the last one. Not just “is it up” — what changed. A tag that was there yesterday and is not there today is the whole point.
- 03
You get a message in Slack
Only when something is new, and only for things that matter. Missing alt text does not wake anybody up. A site that just became invisible to Google does.
The checks
Thirty-odd things,
checked every day.
Grouped by what they cost you when they go wrong. The full list, with what each one means and why it matters, is on the checks page.
Disappearing from search
noindex tags, robots.txt blocking everything, canonical tags
pointing at another domain, sitemaps that stopped being valid XML, pages that vanished
from the site's own navigation.
Going dark on measurement
GA4, Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, Plausible, Fathom, Matomo, Hotjar, Clarity, HubSpot and others — detected on the first scan, and flagged the day they stop appearing.
Expiring quietly
TLS certificates and domain registrations, with warnings at sixty, thirty and fourteen days — long before the automated reminder that goes to nobody.
Email falling into spam
Missing or duplicated SPF, missing DMARC. The domain still sends; the mail just stops arriving, and nothing anywhere says so.
Breaking in the browser
Mixed content on secure pages, dead internal links, pages that suddenly return an error, pages whose text has been emptied by a broken template.
Failing the client's audit
Missing security headers, no HTTPS redirect, the same site answering on both www and non-www, soft 404s, images with no alt text.
Honestly
What this is not.
Three things worth saying before you spend money.
- —
It is not an uptime monitor
It checks every twelve or twenty-four hours, not every thirty seconds. If you need to know within a minute that a server fell over, use an uptime service — several good ones are free. Nightjar is for the failures those services cannot see.
- —
It does not run JavaScript
It reads what a crawler reads: the HTML your server sends. That is deliberate — it is what Google sees too — but it means a tag injected later by a consent manager may not be detected. The first scan tells you exactly what it can see.
- —
It will not fix anything
No agent, no plugin, no write access to your clients' sites. It looks from the outside, the way any visitor would, and tells you what it sees.
Pricing
Priced per site,
because that is what it costs us.
No per-seat pricing, no per-check metering. At the Agency tier a client site costs about the same as a coffee per year, which is roughly what it is worth arguing about.
Free
$0
Forever, one site
- 1 site, checked weekly
- 10 pages per crawl
- Full history in the dashboard
- No Slack alerts
Studio
$29 / month
or $290 a year
- 10 sites, checked daily
- 25 pages per crawl
- Slack, Discord and webhooks
- Change detection between scans
Agency
$89 / month
or $890 a year
- 50 sites, checked twice daily
- 40 pages per crawl
- Everything in Studio
- One invoice for the whole book
Try it on a site you already worry about.
No account, no card, about ten seconds. If it finds nothing, that is worth knowing too.