AlertKite
← AlertKite

Know your Shopify store is down before a customer tells you

Shopify's own uptime is excellent, which is exactly why store owners do not monitor. The outages that cost money are not Shopify going down — they are a theme update breaking the cart, an app timing out at checkout, or a DNS change pointing the domain nowhere.

None of those show up on Shopify's status page, and all of them look fine from the admin.

What to monitor, in the order it matters

https://yourstore.com/                 keyword: "Add to cart"
https://yourstore.com/products/best-seller   keyword: "Add to cart"
https://yourstore.com/cart                   keyword: "Checkout"
https://yourstore.com/collections/all        status: 200

Setting it up

  1. Monitor the homepage with a keyword check for text that only renders when the theme works.
  2. Monitor your best-selling product page — a broken variant script is invisible on the homepage.
  3. Monitor /cart for the checkout button. This is the page whose failure is measured in lost orders.
  4. Add recipients for whoever answers when the store is down, not just yourself.

Status codes are not enough for a storefront

A theme with a broken Liquid tag still returns 200 with a page missing its buy button. A keyword check for 'Add to cart' is the difference between knowing and not — and it is the single most valuable check a store can add.

Watch the domain, not the myshopify.com address

Checking yourstore.myshopify.com tests Shopify. Checking your real domain also tests your DNS, your SSL certificate and your redirects — which is where store outages actually originate.

Certificate expiry is a silent revenue killer

An expired certificate does not take the store down; it makes every browser warn shoppers away from it, which is worse because traffic keeps arriving. Certificate expiry checks run automatically on every monitored domain.