Slow pages lose visitors and rankings. Check any URL's response time below for free — then let DeskUptime keep measuring on a schedule and alert you the moment it degrades.
Check a URL now See DeskUptime →Enter any URL. You get the measured response time, HTTP status, redirect info and SSL expiry — the same signals paid monitors use.
Prefer the terminal? Do the same yourself:
curl -sL -o /dev/null -w 'Total: %{time_total}s · TTFB: %{time_starttransfer}s\n' https://example.com
# or let DeskUptime watch it continuously:
deskuptime watch https://example.com --interval 60
Measured at the server edge, before rendering. These are the thresholds worth knowing.
| Server response | Verdict | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| < 200 ms | Excellent | Google Core Web Vitals “good”. Users perceive it as instant. |
| 200–500 ms | Fine | Normal for dynamic sites. Watch for trends, not single values. |
| 500 ms–1 s | Sluggish | Visitors notice. Usually cache config or a slow database query. |
| > 1 s | Problem | Bounce rates climb and rankings suffer. Investigate now. |
A single good number isn't enough — degradation happens gradually. That's what scheduled monitoring is for.
The free checker answers “how fast is it right now?”. Monitoring answers the question that actually costs money:
A plugin update, a growing database table, an expired cache — each adds 100 ms. Nobody notices until conversion has quietly dropped for weeks.
Deployments fail, hosts restart, certificates expire at 03:00 UTC. The average outage lasts hours longer than it needs to because nobody was watching.
The worst alert channel is a customer email. Monitors flip that: you know first, fix it before they hit it, and look professional doing it.
Latency monitoring exists as SaaS. Here is how it compares.
| SaaS monitors (Pingdom, UptimeRobot…) | Self-hosted stacks | DeskUptime | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | $7–15/month | Free + a server to maintain | $19 once, then $0 |
| Check interval | Limited by plan | Your cron | Seconds — while your machine runs |
| Alerts | Email/SMS per plan tier | You build it | Desktop notifications + webhook |
| SSL & content checks | Add-ons / separate products | You build it | Included |
| Privacy | They see everything you watch | Yours | Yours — checks run locally |
One $19 license covers unlimited URLs on up to 3 machines. No monthly fee, ever.
Under 200 ms server response is excellent, 200–500 ms is normal, and anything consistently above 1 second loses visitors and search rankings. Judge trends rather than single measurements — a site that went from 250 ms to 800 ms has a problem even though 800 ms sounds acceptable.
Network path, caching, server load and geography all affect the number. This checker runs from Cloudflare's edge, which approximates a typical visitor rather than your own connection. Run a few checks and look at the spread instead of trusting one value.
Yes. A URL is a URL — WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, Next.js, a static host, or hand-written HTML. Nothing is installed on the target site and no CMS-specific knowledge is needed.
Install the desktop app or CLI, add your URLs, and DeskUptime re-checks them on your interval while your machine runs. If a site goes down or responds slower than usual, you get a desktop notification — optionally forwarded to a webhook. No account, no cloud dashboard, no subscription.
An occasional check of a public page is what every browser does on every visit. Use sensible intervals, respect robots.txt where applicable, and don't try to bypass paywalls or login walls — DeskUptime only sees what an anonymous visitor sees.