Hey there,
Thanks for subscribing to The Watchpoint — a short weekly email for anyone who runs a website and wants it to just work.
Every week, you’ll get three things:
One practical tip you can act on in 5 minutes
One thing worth knowing about websites and uptime
One useful tool or resource that makes your life easier
No jargon. No long essays. Just the stuff that matters.
Here’s your first one.
5-minute tip
Do you know how your customers experience your site right now?
Try this: open your website on your phone using mobile data (not Wi-Fi). Load a few pages. Try the checkout or contact form. Does everything work? Is it fast?
Most site owners only ever see their site on their own computer, on their own network. Your customers are on different devices, different connections, different locations. What works for you might not work for them and you’d never know unless you check.
That’s why monitoring matters. Not the kind where you stare at dashboards, but the kind where someone taps you on the shoulder when something’s off.
Did you know?
The average small business website goes down 3-5 times per month. Most site owners don’t find out until a customer mentions it. By then, other visitors have already left.
The tricky part is that “down” doesn’t always mean your whole server crashed. It could be a broken page, a failed deploy, or a DNS hiccup. Your hosting provider might say everything is fine while your customers see an error. That’s the difference between monitoring your server and monitoring your actual site. Clearwatch checks what your visitors see and emails you if something is wrong.
Tool of the week
PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google that grades your site’s speed on mobile and desktop. It scores you out of 100 and explains what’s slowing things down in plain language. Run it on your homepage and see where you stand. A slow site loses visitors before they even see your content.
That’s it for this week. Short and useful. That’s the goal.
If someone you know runs a website, forward this along. They’ll appreciate it.
See you next week,
Myles
** P.S. Want to know the moment your site goes down? Clearwatch monitors your site and emails you when something needs attention. Free to start, takes 10 seconds.