As a freelance developer managing ongoing maintenance for 11 different client sites, I'm feeling overwhelmed with the fear that something might be broken without my knowledge. It's the worst feeling when I hear from clients saying their customers are experiencing issues—I worry it will make them doubt my ability to keep things running smoothly. I've tried setting up monitoring systems and checklists for testing, but realistically, I just can't find the time to manually check each of the eight different sites regularly since it's not billable work. I believe there's a better way to automate checking critical systems across all client websites without requiring endless manual checks. How do other freelancers or small agencies handle this situation? Do they just wait for clients to report bugs?
5 Answers
Consider using UptimeRobot to keep tabs on your sites for basic issues, like uptime. If you're up for it, you could even build a simple crawler to identify broken links or errors like 404s. You might as well automate form submissions once a day to ensure everything's working correctly.
Automated end-to-end testing is the way to go. You can explore paid services for simplicity, or if you're feeling adventurous, set it up yourself using Playwright or Puppeteer. This way, you can run tests directly on your projects rather than on live sites, ensuring a smoother experience for your clients.
It's great advice! Just building it yourself really takes the pressure off.
Running tests locally does help catch issues before they hit the live environment!
Tools like Spurtest can automatically monitor your client sites, which is a lifesaver instead of getting hit with angry emails from clients! It makes management a lot less stressful.
Just be careful, some of these services can get pricey!
Using Gatus or UptimeKuma is a good strategy for monitoring multiple sites. These tools help ensure your websites stay online without a lot of manual effort.
Sentry is a fantastic tool for real-time error tracking for both front-end and back-end, which can help you quickly identify and resolve issues as they arise. It's definitely worth checking out!
Absolutely, Pingdom does have transaction monitoring that works wonders for ensuring site availability!