8 reasons, Why your website can be up but broken for real visitors
Eight reasons why a website can appear up but be broken for real visitors, including DNS issues, caching, CDN problems, JavaScript errors, broken APIs, failing server-side rendering, poor mobile responsiveness, and authentication bugs.
Background
- **URLwatch** is an open-source tool (Python) that monitors web pages for changes and sends notifications. The blog post from its project site compiles common failure modes that automated uptime checks miss.
- **"Up but broken"** scenarios: a server returns a 200 OK status (so basic monitoring thinks it's fine) while the actual user experience is broken — e.g., site loads but CSS/images fail, login flow silently errors, database connection drops, JavaScript crashes, or CDN/third-party services go down.
- The key insight: simple HTTP status checks (pingdom, UptimeRobot, etc.) only verify the web server is alive, not that the application works end-to-end. Real user monitoring (RUM) or synthetic transaction tests are needed to catch these failures.
- This matters for anyone running a website: relying on "is it up?" alerts gives false confidence. The post is a practical guide for developers/ops people to think beyond basic uptime.
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