Description
A plugin that watches your site from inside your site cannot tell you when your site is gone. PingView checks your WordPress site from servers outside your hosting, so an outage, an expired certificate, or a lapsed domain reaches you by email instead of reaching your customers first.
Setup is one field. Enter the address alerts should go to, and PingView creates the monitor for you. There is no account to create first, no API key to copy, and no code running on your visitors’ page loads.
What you get in the WordPress admin
- Current status, uptime for the last 24 hours and 7 days, and response time
- A 24 hour availability chart, one block per time bucket, so a short outage is visible instead of averaged away
- Per-location results, so you can tell “the site is down” apart from “the site is slow from one region”
- SSL certificate and domain registration expiry, with days remaining
- A quality report with the daily Lighthouse scores for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, and the Core Web Vitals behind them: LCP, CLS and TBT
- A security header grade from Mozilla HTTP Observatory, with the score out of 100, so a missing Content-Security-Policy or HSTS header shows up before an audit finds it
- Recent incidents: what broke, when, and how long it lasted
- A status indicator in the admin bar on every screen
What PingView does outside WordPress
- Checks your site from external locations on the interval in your plan
- Sends downtime alerts to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, webhooks, or SMS
- Warns before an SSL certificate or domain registration expires
- Runs daily Google Lighthouse scans for performance and Core Web Vitals, plus a Mozilla HTTP Observatory scan of your security headers, on paid plans
- Publishes a status page you can share with clients
Who it is for
Agencies and freelancers who maintain sites for other people, shop owners whose downtime costs orders, and anyone who has found out about an outage from a customer email.
How it works
- Install and activate the plugin
- Enter the address alerts should go to
- PingView creates an external monitor and starts checking your site
The monitoring runs on PingView’s servers. Nothing is added to your site’s frontend, and nothing runs during a visitor’s request.
External Services
This plugin depends on the PingView external monitoring service (https://pingview.app). The service creates or connects a monitor, checks the configured website from external locations, sends downtime alerts, and returns monitoring information for the WordPress admin dashboard. The plugin cannot provide monitoring functionality without this service.
What the service is and what it is used for:
PingView is an external website monitoring service provided by PingView. It checks website availability, performance, certificates, and incidents from external locations and provides the results shown by this plugin.
What data is sent and when:
– During new account setup: the administrator’s email address, WordPress site URL, site name, plugin version, and a source identifier stating that the request came from the WordPress plugin.
– When connecting an existing account: the API token entered by the administrator. The token is sent in an authorization header so PingView can validate the account and list or create its monitors.
– When a monitor is created: the site URL, generated monitor name, monitor type, check interval, response-time threshold, and selected monitoring locations.
– When loading or refreshing the dashboard: the stored monitor identifier and API token, used to retrieve current monitoring status.
– After setup, PingView’s external servers request the monitored site URL at the configured interval to measure availability and related monitoring signals.
When data is transmitted:
– When the administrator submits either setup form.
– When the PingView admin dashboard is opened or manually refreshed.
– Continuously after setup, when PingView performs external checks of the configured site according to the monitor’s settings.
Service provider:
PingView
Terms of Service:
https://pingview.app/en/terms-of-service
Privacy Policy:
https://pingview.app/en/privacy-policy
Screenshots
Installation
- Upload the plugin files to
/wp-content/plugins/pingview-external-uptime-monitoring - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress
- Navigate to PingView in the admin menu
- Enter your email and click “Start Monitoring”
- Review the newly created monitor in PingView
FAQ
-
Do I need a PingView account?
-
No! The plugin automatically creates a monitoring account for you during setup.
-
How often is my site checked?
-
The check interval and locations depend on the monitor configuration and the PingView plan connected to the plugin.
-
What happens when PingView detects an outage?
-
PingView sends an email alert according to the monitor and notification settings. The plugin dashboard also shows the current status.
-
Does it monitor Core Web Vitals?
-
Yes, on paid plans. PingView runs a daily Google Lighthouse scan from outside your hosting and shows the performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO scores in your WordPress admin, together with the lab Core Web Vitals behind the performance score: LCP, CLS and TBT. It is a monitor, not an optimizer, so it reports where you stand and when a deploy makes it worse. It does not cache, minify or defer anything on your site.
-
Does it check my security headers?
-
Yes, on paid plans. PingView runs a Mozilla HTTP Observatory scan and shows the grade (A+ to F) and score out of 100 next to your SSL and domain checks, so a missing Content-Security-Policy, HSTS or X-Frame-Options header is visible from the dashboard. This is an external check of what your site sends over HTTP; it is not a firewall or a malware scanner and does not replace one.
-
Does this affect my site performance?
-
No. Monitoring checks come from external servers and don’t impact your site’s performance.
-
How is this different from a plugin that monitors from inside WordPress?
-
A plugin running on your server can only report while your server is up. If PHP crashes, the host goes down, or DNS breaks, an internal check goes silent instead of alerting you. PingView checks from outside, so those are exactly the cases it catches.
-
Is it free?
-
Yes, the plugin and the monitoring it sets up are free to start. Paid plans add shorter check intervals, more locations, more alert channels, Lighthouse and security scans, and public status pages.
-
Where can alerts be sent?
-
Email works out of the box. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, webhooks and SMS are configured in your PingView account and apply to this monitor too.
-
Can I show my customers a status page?
-
Yes. PingView publishes a status page for your monitors that you can share with clients or link from your site.
-
I already use PingView. Can I connect an existing account?
-
Yes. On the setup screen choose “Connect with an API key” and paste the key from your PingView dashboard.
-
What happens after disconnecting or uninstalling the plugin?
-
The plugin removes its local connection data when you disconnect, and removes all local plugin data when you uninstall it. The remote PingView monitor and account remain active. Sign in at https://pingview.app to pause or delete the monitor and manage the account.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“PingView — External Uptime Monitoring” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “PingView — External Uptime Monitoring” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.3.0
- Added: The panel now shows which PingView account this site reports into, the team and its plan, with a way in to manage them. Until now it only said “connected”, which is no help at all when a site changes hands and you need to know whose account holds the data.
- Improved: Links into PingView now carry your account address, so signing in is one click instead of remembering which address the account uses. Sign-in stays passwordless: the link is emailed to that address and nothing signs you in from inside WordPress.
- Improved: The setup screen now says plainly that an account is created for the address you enter and that a sign-in link is emailed to it, so nothing about the account happens silently.
- Fixed: Errors coming back from PingView said only “Validation failed”, naming neither the field nor the reason. They now say what was rejected and why, in your language.
- Fixed: Connecting with an existing PingView API key, on a site that had no monitor yet, created the monitor but never finished connecting. The panel stayed empty and the only way out was to disconnect and start again.
- Improved: A new card lists the pages this site actually has, the cart, the checkout, a product and a category, and shows which ones are already watched. The ones that are not can be added with one click. A monitor pointed at the home page alone cannot tell you that your checkout is down.
- Improved: A new card watches WP-Cron. The diagnosis is free on every plan: whether the scheduler is switched off in wp-config.php, how many jobs are queued, and whether the next one is overdue. A dead WP-Cron stops your abandoned cart emails, order notifications and backups while the site keeps answering normally, so nothing checking from outside would ever notice.
- Improved: A new card gives you the copy and paste code for your public status page badge, with a live preview, when your team has a public status page.
1.1.0
- Improved: The security headers report is now included for every site, on every plan. It used to appear only with deep scans enabled, so most sites saw three greyed out placeholder rows. You now get the Mozilla HTTP Observatory grade, the checks your site fails, and the exact header line to paste, with a copy button.
- Fixed: A site served over plain HTTP had its certificate reported as “not applicable”, which read as though nothing was wrong. It now says the site is served over plain HTTP with no certificate, and that browsers mark such pages as not secure. This also appears in the list of items needing attention.
- Improved: A new card explains what a synthetic checkout journey watches, product page, add to cart and reaching payment, and where to set one up. An uptime check cannot see a broken checkout while the homepage still answers.
- Improved: The panel now states plainly that monitoring runs on PingView servers, that no plugin code runs on visitor requests, and that deactivating the plugin does not stop monitoring.
- Improved: Polish translation of the whole panel.
1.0.11
- Fixed: The coloured status dot in the admin bar was never drawn, so the item showed the label with no indicator next to it. It is now visible on every screen, including the post and site editors where WordPress 7.1 keeps the toolbar in view.
- Improved: Moving the site to a different address, for example from http to https, now repoints the monitor instead of asking you to reconnect it by hand. There is also a button to move it straight away.
- Tested: WordPress 7.1.
1.0.10
- Added: Security headers now have their own card. It shows the Mozilla HTTP Observatory grade and score, the checks your site fails, what each one protects against, and how many points fixing it wins back.
- Added: A copy button next to every failed check, with the exact header line to paste into your server configuration.
- Improved: The failed checks are ordered by how much they are worth, so the fix with the biggest effect is first. Smaller ones stay collapsed.
- Improved: The alerts card now points at the weekly summary, for the weeks when nothing breaks.
1.0.9
- Fixed: The speed score changed on every refresh even when nothing about the site had. It restated the response time shown next to it and could not be acted on, so it is replaced by “Needs attention”, which counts the certificate, domain and uptime issues waiting for you.
- Added: A status indicator in the admin bar, so you can see whether the site is up without opening the PingView screen.
- Added: A link to PingView on the Plugins screen, and the setup screen now opens right after activation.
- Fixed: The location list only showed locations that had already reported, so a monitor covering several locations could claim it was checked from one, or show no locations at all until the first results arrived.
- Fixed: Cancelling the “Connect with an API key” form left the key sitting in the field.
- Improved: Status and error messages are now announced by screen readers, and the API key form reports whether it is open.
1.0.8
- Added: A quality report card with the daily Google Lighthouse scores for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, plus Core Web Vitals.
- Added: The Mozilla Observatory security grade for your site, next to the SSL and domain checks.
- Added: An overview of where alerts are delivered, covering email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, webhooks and SMS.
- Fixed: The performance score changed on every refresh, because it was based on a single check. It is now based on the 95th percentile response time over 24 hours and is labelled “Speed score, 24h”.
1.0.7
- Added: The status screen now lists every monitoring location your plan checks from, with its own status and response time.
- Added: A 24 hour availability chart, one block per time bucket, so a short outage is visible at a glance instead of hidden in an average.
- Added: A recent incidents list showing what broke, when, and how long it lasted.
- Fixed: The “Where should we send alerts?” text on the setup screen was not a real form label, so clicking it did not focus the field and screen readers did not announce it.
- Fixed: The refresh button icon sat off the text baseline.
- Fixed: Refreshing only cleared part of the cached data, so some panels could keep showing older values.
- Improved: Rebuilt the setup screen around a single card, so the connection form is no longer competing with a marketing panel for attention.
- Improved: The panel is centred and uses more of the available width on wide screens.
1.0.6
- Improved: The status screen now shows which version of the plugin is installed.
1.0.5
- Fixed: The incident banner never appeared, because open incidents were read from a field that does not exist. Active incidents are now shown with their reason and start time.
- Fixed: The performance score changed on every refresh even when the underlying data had not. The same response time now always produces the same score.
- Fixed: Sites monitored over plain HTTP no longer sit on “Checking certificate…” forever. They now state that no certificate applies.
- Fixed: A domain without registration data no longer shows an endless “Checking domain registration…”.
- Fixed: The refresh button was rendered several times with the same HTML id, so only the first one worked.
- Improved: Redesigned the status panel around a header card, a four-tile metric strip, and a two-column layout.
- Improved: Response times, uptime percentages, and scores are set in a monospaced face so values line up and stay comparable.
- Improved: Every status is now conveyed by colour, icon, and text label together, never colour alone.
- Improved: The setup screen no longer promises a first check “in ~5 minutes” when the backend has not scheduled one yet.
- Improved: Honoured reduced-motion preferences and tightened the layout on small screens.
1.0.4
- Fixed: Prevent an undefined SSL expiration warning when certificate data is incomplete.
- Improved: Redesign the monitoring dashboard for clearer desktop and mobile layouts.
- Improved: Remove horizontal overflow and improve visual consistency.
1.0.3
- Security: Escape all API messages rendered in the admin dashboard.
- Security: Store new API tokens using authenticated encryption and fail safely when encryption is unavailable.
- Fixed: Render canonical PingView monitor statuses without reducing them to UP or DOWN (BR-STATUS-01 / CT-STATUS).
- Improved: Require an explicit, unchecked consent before sending setup data to PingView.
- Improved: Align feature descriptions with plan-dependent intervals and locations.
1.0.2
- Fixed: Load all admin CSS through the WordPress enqueue API.
- Fixed: Match the translation text domain to the WordPress.org plugin slug.
- Improved: Fully document the PingView external service and transmitted data.
- Tested: WordPress 7.0 with WP_DEBUG enabled.
1.0.1
- Fixed: Plugin URI updated to working URL
- Improved: Documentation for external service usage
- Updated: Contributors metadata
1.0.0
- Initial release