What is uptime?

What it means

Uptime is how often your website is actually working when someone tries to visit. If your site was reachable for every minute of a month, it had 100% uptime. If it was down for an hour, uptime dropped a little below that.

The opposite is downtime: the minutes when visitors get an error page, a blank screen or nothing at all.

How it works

Uptime is measured by monitoring services that try to load your site every minute or so from several places. When the site fails to answer, the clock on downtime starts.

Hosts and builders often advertise uptime as a percentage. Here is what those numbers mean in real time:

Some companies back a figure with an uptime guarantee, sometimes written into a service level agreement (SLA). Read what the guarantee actually pays. It is usually a partial credit on your bill, not money for lost sales.

Why it matters when you build a site

Every minute your site is down, visitors cannot find your phone number, book an appointment or buy anything. Repeated outages also make it harder for search engines to crawl your pages.

Not all downtime comes from servers. Common causes include:

• Expired domains. If the domain lapses, the site and email go dark together.
• Expired or broken SSL certificates. Browsers show a warning that scares visitors off. Certificates are getting shorter-lived: the industry maximum drops to 200 days from March 15, 2026, 100 days from March 15, 2027, and 47 days from March 15, 2029. Automatic renewal matters more every year.
• DNS mistakes when changing settings at your registrar.
• Bad updates to a theme, plugin or code.
• Traffic spikes that overload a small server or hit a plan limit.

When your site does go down, work through it in order: check from another device or network to rule out your own connection, check the platform’s or host’s status page, confirm your domain and SSL certificate have not expired, then contact support.

How the big builders handle it

• Hosted builders in general. With Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Framer and Shopify, hosting is included and run by the platform. You cannot fix a server outage yourself, but you also do not manage servers.
• Wix markets “multi-cloud hosting” and 99.99% uptime in its Harmony press release.
• Framer runs sites on its own hosting with a global CDN, and lists an uptime guarantee on its Enterprise plan. Its pricing page says you can exceed your bandwidth for one month before Framer asks you to upgrade.
• Webflow includes bandwidth “surge protection,” but sites over the limit two months in a row are automatically upgraded to a higher plan.
• Bolt hosting on Pro covers up to 30 GB of bandwidth and 1 million requests a month, with optional pay-as-you-go overage up to a spending cap you set.
• Lovable runs newer apps on Cloudflare Workers. On the Free plan, newer apps are limited to 1,000 server requests per project every 10 seconds.
• WordPress (self-hosted). Uptime depends on your web host and on your upkeep. Cheap shared plans put many sites on one server; managed WordPress hosting, such as Kinsta from $30 a month billed yearly ($35 billed monthly), costs more and handles more for you.

Common mistakes

• Treating a guarantee as insurance. A bill credit will not replace lost leads.
• Having no monitoring. Free and low-cost uptime monitors can text or email you when the site goes down.
• Letting the card on file expire. Failed renewals for the domain or plan cause avoidable outages.
• Updating without a fallback. Keep backups and test big changes on a staging site.

Related terms

• Core Web Vitals: being up is step one; being fast is step two.

To see how hosting fits into the whole picture, read how a website works.