Status pages
Status pages: why you need one and how to do it well
A public status page cuts support tickets, builds customer trust and forces you to communicate better during incidents. Here's what it should include.
UptimeAnchor team · · 6 min read
When a service goes down, the first thing users do is wonder whether the problem is on their side or yours. Without an official source, they open tickets, post on social media and call support. A status page answers that question before it's even asked.
The concrete benefits
- Fewer duplicate requests: instead of answering the same question a hundred times, you update one page.
- More trust: transparency during an incident is valued more than perfect, silent reliability.
- A sales argument: enterprise customers increasingly ask for a verifiable uptime history.
- Internal alignment: the team always knows the official status communicated externally.
What a good status page should include
Understandable components
Customers don't care that node db-eu-2 is slow: they want to know whether they can pay or log in. Group monitors into components with clear names such as Website, API, Payments and Customer portal.
Visible history
90-day uptime bars show the reliability of the service at a glance. Hiding the history for fear of showing a past incident backfires: a well-handled incident is more reassuring than an empty page.
Announcements and maintenance
Announce scheduled maintenance in advance, with date, time, expected duration and impact. During an incident, post regular updates even when there's nothing new: “we're still investigating” beats silence.
Domain and independence
Publish the status page on a subdomain such as status.yourdomain.com, but make sure it's hosted on infrastructure separate from your own. A status page that goes offline together with the service it's supposed to report on helps nobody. With UptimeAnchor the page is served from our infrastructure, even when you use your own domain.
How to write an update during an incident
- Confirm the problem and its impact: what isn't working and for whom.
- Say that you're working on it and when the next update will come.
- Update when you identify the cause and when you apply a fix.
- Close with a resolution message and, for major incidents, a short post-mortem.
A status page doesn't eliminate outages, but it changes how your customers experience them. And it's often the difference between a customer who leaves and one who appreciates how seriously you take them.