Every monitoring tool asks you the same question: how often should we check your site?
1 minute? 5 minutes? 15 minutes?
Most people pick a number and move on. But the interval you choose has a bigger impact than you might think — it directly affects how quickly you find out when something breaks.
In this post, we'll break down exactly when faster checks matter, when they don't, and how to set up monitoring that matches the criticality of what you're protecting.
What Check Interval Actually Means
When you set a check interval of 5 minutes, your monitoring service pings your site every 5 minutes. If the site is down, you won't know until the next check happens.
This creates a concept called Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) — the average time between when an outage starts and when you find out about it.
Here's the simple math:
- 1-minute checks = up to 1 minute of blind time
- 5-minute checks = up to 5 minutes of blind time
- 15-minute checks = up to 15 minutes of blind time
On average, you'll detect issues in half that time. But worst case? You're flying blind for the full interval.
And that's before you even start fixing the problem.
When 1-Minute Checks Matter
Faster monitoring isn't always necessary — but for certain use cases, every minute counts.
E-commerce and Checkout Flows
If your checkout page goes down, you're losing real revenue every second. A 5-minute detection delay could mean dozens of abandoned carts and failed payments.
For transactional sites, 1-minute checks are table stakes.
SaaS Products with Paying Customers
Your customers are paying for reliability. When your app goes down, they notice — and they expect you to know before they do.
Paying users have zero tolerance for "we didn't know it was down."
APIs That Other Services Depend On
If other products or integrations rely on your API, an outage cascades fast. The faster you detect it, the faster you can communicate and recover.
High-Traffic Sites
On a site with 10,000 visitors per hour, a 5-minute outage means ~830 people hitting an error page.
With 1-minute checks, you cut that exposure dramatically.
SLA Commitments
If you've promised 99.9% uptime, you only have about 8.7 hours of downtime allowed per year. Every minute of detection delay eats into your margin — and your credibility.
When 5-Minute Checks Are Fine
Not every endpoint needs the fastest possible monitoring. Here's when slower intervals make sense:
Marketing Sites and Blogs
If your blog goes down for 5 minutes, nobody's losing money. It's not ideal, but the stakes are low.
Internal Tools
Admin dashboards, internal wikis, staging environments — these don't need 1-minute checks. 5 or even 15 minutes is reasonable.
Early-Stage Products with Few Users
If you have 10 users and no revenue yet, 5-minute checks give you solid coverage without overthinking it.
Cost-Sensitive Setups with Many Monitors
If you're monitoring 50+ endpoints and budget matters, you might reserve 1-minute checks for critical paths and use 5-minute checks for everything else.
Non-Critical Status Pages
Your public status page should stay up — but if it lags behind by a few minutes, it's not the end of the world.
The Hidden Cost of Slow Detection
Let's walk through a real scenario.
You're using 5-minute checks. Your site goes down at 2:01 PM. The next check runs at 2:05 PM and fails. Most monitoring tools then run a confirmation check to avoid false positives — that's another 1–5 minutes.
So the timeline looks like this:
| Event | Time |
|---|---|
| Site goes down | 2:01 PM |
| First failed check | 2:05 PM |
| Confirmation check | 2:10 PM |
| Alert sent | 2:10 PM |
| You see the alert | 2:12 PM |
| You start investigating | 2:15 PM |
That's 14 minutes before you even start fixing the problem — and users have been seeing errors the whole time.
Now compare that with 1-minute checks:
| Event | Time |
|---|---|
| Site goes down | 2:01 PM |
| First failed check | 2:02 PM |
| Confirmation check | 2:03 PM |
| Alert sent | 2:03 PM |
| You see the alert | 2:05 PM |
| You start investigating | 2:06 PM |
You've cut detection time by 10+ minutes. That's the difference between a minor blip and an incident your users remember.
Finding the Right Balance
You don't have to monitor everything the same way. The smart approach is to tier your monitors by criticality.
Tier 1: Mission-Critical (1-minute checks)
- Production website / app
- Checkout and payment flows
- Core API endpoints
- Authentication services
- Database-backed pages
Tier 2: Important (3-5 minute checks)
- Marketing pages
- Documentation sites
- Secondary APIs
- Webhooks and integrations
Tier 3: Low Priority (5-15 minute checks)
- Internal tools
- Staging environments
- Status pages
- Admin dashboards
This approach gives you fast detection where it matters most, without overcomplicating your setup.
How Webalert Helps
Webalert was built to make fast monitoring simple:
- 1-minute checks included on all plans — no premium tier required
- Per-monitor configuration — set different intervals for different endpoints
- Instant alerts via email, SMS, Slack, Discord, and webhooks
- No extra cost for faster intervals
- Simple dashboard to see what's critical at a glance
You shouldn't have to pay extra or jump through hoops to know when your site goes down. Fast detection should be the default.
Final Thoughts
The check interval you choose directly impacts how quickly you can respond to outages. For critical systems, 1-minute checks aren't overkill — they're essential.
For everything else, 5-minute checks are perfectly reasonable.
The key is to match your monitoring to your stakes. Tier your endpoints, prioritize what matters, and make sure the things that can't go down get the fastest possible detection.
Faster detection = faster recovery = happier users.