Best tools to create custom Status Pages for your website

15 minutes reading


Deploying and bringing your precious website online is the final stage in the development process. However, it is only the beginning of a huge journey filled with cutthroat competition, an oversaturated market, and customers’ ever-changing preferences and needs. From now on, businesses will face many new challenges on their path to successful existence.

To emerge victorious, they will take numerous steps, from analyzing visitors’ behavior patterns to conducting marketing campaigns to running social media advertisements. But first and foremost, they will ensure their platform meets the target audience’s expectations and requirements by regularly maintaining and adopting a fully-fledged incident management system. The latter involves various components and stages, including the introduction of status pages.

What Is a Status Page for a Website?

The status page is a crucial part of the incident management strategy and incident response plan. It displays information about the system’s health, incidents, scheduled maintenance, and downtimes with users, customers, and all other stakeholders. It comes in two variants: public status page and private status page.

The public status page is for regular users, customers, and loyal fans of the brand. It provides mostly superficial yet still crucial information for happy utilization of the platform or service. As a rule, this includes operational status and updates on the resolution of the current problem.

The private status page is generally for engineering, IT, Ops, and support teams. Though, it may also serve authorized customers. It is completely locked down to this group and may include all sorts of information concerning the system’s health, from the availability of certain parts of the server or product to technical issues to some functionality unique to the niche.

The prime goal of the status page is to provide businesses with complete control over how they communicate an incident and scheduled maintenance with the stakeholders and give them the opportunity to cushion the aftermath of the issue.

On the other hand, the primary purpose of a status page is to bring internal departments on the same page and allow regular users to check if a given service is operational.

The key feature of the status page, whether private or public, is that it is directly connected to the monitoring platform. It plays a role of “a door” for stakeholders into the World of technical specification, issues and their resolutions, and maintenance events.

Status Page on Dropbox

The Context of the Status Page

Status pages come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are minimal, showcasing a tiny fraction of the system’s health, while others comprehensively uncover all crucial factors and aspects of the platform. The content largely depends on the goal the company pursues with this approach and the target audience’s requirements and needs.

Generally, public status pages may include these data:

  • Overall status and status per server area or product. It could be no issues, maintenance, degraded, partial outage, or outage.
  • Uptime and downtime bar.
  • Uptime and incident history.
  • Incident report.
  • Search by specific criteria.
  • Subscription form to collect subscribers who call for updates through email or other alternative means of communication.
  • Primary navigation with the home button.
  • Link to the page where users may send a query to the support team.
  • Brand identity elements: logotype, mascot, hero illustration, color scheme, and typeface.

The private status page may include all sorts of information that the technical department finds valuable and critical to address the issue and keep the website running.

The good news is all status page properties can be easily customized. Boring data can be transformed into a digestible masterpiece with the help of graphs and charts. Business owners may set the look and feel of each element making the page blend into the web platform’s environment, proving that it is an integral element of the website and user experience. Consider Pulsetic as a case in point. Here, customers may customize every inch of the status page through the traditional drag-and-drop playground.

Snippet from the tutorial - How to create fully customized public and private status pages in Pulsetic

Snippet from the tutorial “How to create fully customized public and private status pages in Pulsetic.”

Importance of Introducing a Status Page on a Website

Having a well-crafted status page can make or break a company’s survival in the cutthroat market. The quality of the platform through which the brand communicates with its potential clients and loyal fans significantly affects results. It needs to be flawless from top to bottom – every detail counts. The importance of creating a status page cannot be stressed enough; nevertheless, let us list some strong reasons to plead the case.

Increase Credibility

Showcasing your platform’s operational status to your prospective customers and loyal clients is one of the most important things you can do. You improve transparency in communication and relationships by clearly stating that your service or website is on or off, displaying historical uptime, and describing problems you experience along with steps taken to sort them out. This builds the brand’s credibility increasing the chances of your customers buying from you.

Without a status page, people may question your legitimacy as a company that provides critical services for them. Informing people about the system’s health makes people comfort that you are a real business that cares about its clients.

Stay Realistic

One of the main reasons for introducing a status page for the web platform is that it helps entrepreneurs stay realistic about their platforms’ operational statuses. Whatever reliable hosting provider they have, outages and incidents happen all the time. Some of them are not in the company’s control. Business owners need to avoid delusions and assess the situation soberly.

Even if they never have a system-wide outage, minor accidents like login disruption or degraded API access occur all the time. They significantly impact customers, leaving a long-lasting, unfavorable impression that causes many problems for brand identity. Therefore, every tiny event and inconsistency that affect user experience should be addressed.

Acknowledging this and showing concerns about communicating this information to stakeholders make this situation real for the company and serious for the support team. It sets the right priorities.

Moreover, such a responsible attitude to incidents and the system’s reliability help the company eliminate flaws and ipso facto grow and move forward.

Be In Control of Consequences

As we have just noted, incidents happen all the time. Some of them are not under human control. However, with a status page, companies may regain control of the aftermath and get a real chance to influence the consequences.

In most cases, the status page is hosted externally from your infrastructure. As a result, it is on 24/7 whether you are down or not. This is an excellent opportunity to post updates and announcements to your customers and deliver critical information. It is also a way to keep them up to date on everything your team is doing, showcasing the company’s reliability and genuine devotion to the cause.

Status Page on Intercom

Status page on Intercom

Build Trust

Perhaps one of the most intriguing reasons to have a status page for your business is to build trust among prospects and loyal customers.

First and foremost, chances are several providers operate in the same niche offering a similar service to your target audience. One way to stand out is by having a status page that communicates quality information and brings actual value to them. When something is particularly relevant to users, it increases the chance you can upsell them.

Second, people want and even demand updates during an incident because they need to quickly diagnose the impact of your platform’s downtime and communicate to their customers until it is resolved.

Third, incident reports bridge the gap between the techy platform and customers, bringing these two parties closer and making the connection tighter and friendlier.

Finally, people love knowing the details of your reliability. Uptime, downtime, incidents, and solutions to resolve problems – this information not only bothers them but also excites

All these factors develop mutual trust between the company and users.

Meet Expectations

Standards for web platforms and digital businesses rise gradually. Once mobile-friendliness was a nice feature, today it is a necessity that even Google acknowledges.

The same goes for status pages. They are no longer something extravagant or whimsical. Slowly but gradually, they are turning into an integral element of the platform. The reason for that is simple – transparency of the websites and online services has become a top priority for people. They expect businesses to be more open about their system’s health and operations behind the curtains so they can understand the company’s working culture and that there is no monkey business.

Adding a status page and making it informative and valuable helps modern businesses to meet the growing expectations of the target audience. It keeps up with the fast-paced market and its preferences, needs, and requirements.

Get Everyone on the Same Page

The well-thought-out private status page has one significant advantage for overall performance – it gets everyone on the same page by providing crucial information for all departments across verticals just in time.

This creates unity of thought, making the company work more efficiently and productively. This also contributes to the overall working culture and helps the company develop and grow.

Getting everyone on the same page

Image by Fauxels

Reduce Support Cost

Since the status page provides clients and users with the information they need, like answering such burning questions as why the system is off or why a certain unit does not work as intended, this addresses general concerns with the system. As a result, it decreases the number of people who will directly go to your support page and submit a ticket, thereby saving precious time and money allocated to the team.

Set the company apart from the competition

Last but not least. Despite status pages gaining popularity caused by growing expectations and needs for this solution, still many organizations and digital entrepreneurs ignore them. According to recent studies, over 70% of companies do not have a status page, incident management team, or action plan. Some of them believe it to be an extreme measure having blind faith in their partners, while others do not want to spend their money. Therefore, having a status page gives companies a competitive edge over others, at least for now.

Benefits of Status Pages

The importance of introducing a status page in a web platform is obvious. It gives the company control over the incident’s aftermath, increases the platform’s credibility, builds trust among the clients, and even meets the expectations of the modern digital crowd and businesses. However, there is more. Along with colossal significance, this concept comes with a list of benefits the company may enjoy. Just consider what it can do.

  • It may improve customer support work. A status page is a time-proven way to reduce customer queries to the support team. Since it describes the situation and keeps users updated on the progress, it eliminates the lion’s share of repetitive calls, providing the team with crucial time to sort out the problem and address it efficiently instead of reacting to an avalanche of user queries, thereby losing focus.
  • It may improve customer relationships. Many status page services allow companies to notify customers about the outage or real-time incidents by email or social media automatically. This helps to build proactive communications that alleviate user frustration and anger while improving confidence in the company’s capabilities.
  • It may improve performance. Analytics and reporting that uncover critical factors about the system lie at the core of the status page. This allows even non-tech-savvy business owners to see patterns in the system and define flaws that cannot be seen with the naked eye. By addressing these tiny errors and fractions in the platform, the team may increase the system’s performance over time.
  • It may improve brand reputation. Perhaps one of the most hidden gems of status pages is that they help companies to amplify and strengthen their brand reputation. Offering much-needed transparency allows the company to display its serious attitude towards customers and demonstrate its commitment to meeting the terms and conditions of the customer agreement.
  • It may improve the system by scheduling maintenance events without sacrifices. Maintenance of the system is a regular thing for every web platform that cares about its reliability and reputation. With a status page that offers real-time updates, including a maintenance schedule, this stage in the platform’s lifecycle will go smoothly, freeing up your team to focus on crucial tasks.

These improvements are connected to the company’s successful survival in a cutthroat market. They translate into user engagement, conversions, leads, revenue, and an excellent brand reputation that goes a long way.

Status page on Vimeo

Examples of Branded Status Pages on Websites

While private status pages are hidden from prying eyes, public status pages can be accessed by anyone. Therefore, we can explore them to get some valuable hints or tricks to create one that will resonate with the audience the best.

Let us consider four fantastic examples from different niches that serve different target audiences to see this approach in action.

  1. Public Status Page on GitHub

The first in the list is Github and its classic status page that brings actual value to the audience. The team follows the favored approach of highlighting in their public incident report the essentials of the system, such as the current operational status of all its vital components like Webhooks, orchestration, and computing for Codespaces or API requests. While this information may sound strange and confusing for regular users, it all makes sense when it comes to the technical crowd, which is the web platform’s target audience.

The page also has a block dedicated to scheduled maintenance with a thorough description of the upcoming event, incident history, subscription form, a footer with fully-fledged navigation, and a top bar menu with links relevant to incident management.

Note the design. The team ties the status page with its general theme by using the iconic illustration of their mascot, Octocat, eliminating all doubts about whom this page belongs to.

Public Status Page on GitHub

  1. Public Status Page on Paypal

Paypal is a bright representative of the fintech niche whose target audience is not only businesses but also regular users all around the World.

Being the leader in online payment systems requires the company to meet specific standards and fulfill technical duties. One of them is to show the operational status of all its major units like online checkout, payflow, account, retail checkout, and so on.

Like GitHub, the team does not overwhelm clients with too much information. Instead, they prefer a neat, clean, and straight-to-the-point approach by embracing minimalism and focusing only on crucial data. This also includes notifying customers about upcoming scheduled maintenance, which takes up its page and features vital details like affected products, APIs, and consequences that clients may experience.

Along with that, the team also includes the main menu on the status page, providing users with necessary getaways, a subscription form, and a direct link to the support hub.

Public Status Page in Paypal

  1. Public Status Page on Shopify

Shopify is one of the most popular solutions in the eCommerce sector that helps thousands of eCommerce projects successfully serve their clients across the Globe.

Like PayPal, Shopify is a tool that people strongly rely on – so it cannot let them down. However, outages, as well as human and system errors, happen all the time. The best thing that the team behind this powerful eCommerce platform for retail point-of-sale systems can do is to capitalize on their incident management system. As a result, they provide their users with all vital information so they can adapt to the situation quickly and eliminate confusion with their clients.

Their public status page showcases status per service areas and recent events history with descriptions and updates. The critical feature of Shopify is that the team provides a public incident report for each store – clients need to log into their accounts to examine their respective reports.

Public Status Page on Shopify

  1. Status Page on WIstia

Last but not least on our list of inspirational status pages is Wistia.

Wistia is a video marketing platform. Although it is not as popular as PayPal or GitHub, serving much fewer users, it still considers its duty to provide its customers and prospects with a public incident report.

Standing in stark contrast to the examples featured above, Wistia’s status page is one of those solutions that uncover the system’s health in all its glory, leaving no stone unturned. You may find here the operational status of the system, uptime over the past 90 days, a link to view historical uptime, system metrics, and past incidents. There is also a subscription form to sign for updates.

The key feature of this page is that the team employs vector instruments like graphs to turn boring data into a digestible piece of information. As a result, the page offers a comfortable user experience.

Status Page on WIstia

Best Practices to Create Status Page

Enjoying the benefits of the status page calls companies to stick to the best practices in this niche. Consider some great tips shared by professionals:

Choose a reliable provider

The market is oversaturated with options that come with their own merits. Reliability is one of the most crucial among all the features they present. Make sure your partner has a 99.99% uptime to serve your needs when your infrastructure experiences problems.

Meet the target audience’s requirements and expectations, and your particular needs

If you are a startup, you do not need all the extravaganzas that professional instruments offer – a small yet informative status page that uncovers critical data about operational status will do. However, if you have a huge company that operates in the SaaS niche and has customers whose businesses depend on you, you may require more than just a status bar and uptime history. Knowing your audience and company’s needs helps exert the most out of this approach without wasting precious time, money, and effort.

Have a goal

A status page may have different purposes: it might be used to build trust, eliminate user confusion, and even get subscribers. Setting the right goal helps the company prioritize features to choose the right vendor, work more efficiently towards the goal, and even get the motivation to improve marketing and brand strategies.

Automate status pages

Gone are the days when status pages were updated manually. Although this is still an option, if you want to keep up with the fast-paced World, you need some advanced tools with the quick response that does all the heavy lifting: update stats and notify customers through email or social media automatically.

Make the status page branded

The status page should not live in a vacuum. It is an integral part of the user experience that significantly contributes to the customer experience. Therefore, do not separate it from the others. Add logotype, use brand colors, illustrations, and typography, stick to the overall theme and employ the same structure and information hierarchy. This introduces consistency in the web platform, a crucial factor in customer satisfaction. It maintains the usability and learnability of your website on a high level making clients feel comfortable, thereby achieving goals efficiently and quickly.

Status page on Reddit

Status page on Reddit

Offer multiple ways to notify and update users

If you work in the SaaS sector, then it is crucial to notify your users about the service’s downtime or maintenance mode by alternative means of communication such as email, social media, text messaging, or Slack, thereby giving them a head start in resolving issues with products that are dependable on you. This helps to build a strong reputation as well as elevate customer retention.

Add a subscription form

Not only does it help to realize the previous practice, but it also builds trust and increases the brand’s credibility. It can be used for retention campaigns as well. It is crucial to note that you should not overdo it. Do not bombard customers with updates every second: this will do more harm than good.

Add contacts to point people to support agents

Although the prime goal of the status page is to eliminate repetitive user queries to the dev team, it is still crucial to provide contact information for those who still have concerns. This will give your users and customers the feeling that you will not leave them alone with this problem and that you are ready to address any concerns and issues that bother them.

Keep the message simple and clean

With an incredibly short attention span, it is difficult to cut through all noise and deliver the right message. If customers face unclear news, they will likely bounce. Therefore, it is crucial to communicate incidents clearly and concisely, avoiding excessive data and trivia.

Include post-incident data and a history of uptime

Having historical context eases frustration when something is wrong. It also gives the sense that incidents are not the norm for the company and are resolved as quickly as possible. On top of that, this information provides visibility into the system and makes it transparent, significantly contributing to the customer’s trust.

Give written updates

Although users prefer to scan rather than read, making visual data like graphs, charts, and icons the best option for them to get critical information about the system’s health; nevertheless, as practice shows during degradation or a full-fledged incident, customers require a full explanation of the situation. Therefore, it is highly advisable to include customer-pertinent information, steps the customer should take, and what is being done to resolve the incident.

Status page on Litmus

Status page on Litmus

Show empathy for affected users

Create a plan of action during an outage and guidelines for the conversation with clients and visitors. Show your empathy to comfort users.

Eliminate pain points and keep the path to the status page short and clean

Add a direct link to the status page on the home page and provide a status badge in the footer that will indicate the state of the system’s health immediately.

Have a reachable and easily rememberable URL

Following conventions is what you need with the status page. Go for the ‘status.yourdomain.com’ or ‘yourdomain.com/status’ formats. The practice shows many people will first try these URL addresses since many big companies use them.

Best Tools to Create Custom Status Pages for a Website

Despite the importance of status pages, many organizations are still hesitant about the concept. They feel they are not tech-savvy enough to manage this part of the platform. Other times, they are concerned about the price and efforts that need to be put in. The good news is there is a solution out there that will work for every entrepreneur, startup, and huge organization. Consider these best tools to find the perfect match for your company’s budget, scale, target audience, and marketing strategy.

  1. Pulsetic

“We alert you when your website is down” is the motto of one of the most popular tracking devices and status page builders among small and mid-sized businesses across the Globe. Run by a team that has brought several well-acknowledged products to the digital market, Pulsetic is a reliable instrument with a long list of features. For instance, it monitors web platforms from multiple data centers around the World or provides detailed regional information.

Along with monitoring features, it offers a powerful status page builder. The latter comes with a handy drag-and-drop interface where non-tech-savvy users may quickly create the public incident report for their clients. It allows users to cover all the basics, such as uptime history, incident history, and operational status. On top of that, users may add a subscription form and create a design that fits the general theme by adding logos or setting the brand color scheme and typeface.

There is more. Pulsetic also has a range of status badges that can be customized and used in tandem with the status page in the web platform to maximize the approach.

With all that powerful features, the platform offers the best price in this niche. The starter plan, which allows monitoring 100 websites, connecting a team of 20 members, and using a multifunctional builder, costs just $39 per month.

Pulsetic.io

  1. Statuspage by Atlassian

Serving such huge clients as Dropbox, DigitalOcean, and Intercom, Atlassian is one of the leading companies in this niche. It provides a feature-rich solution for tracking serious web platforms’ performance and big clients’ performance. As befits, it comes with a professional yet intuitive and user-friendly status page builder that takes the incident management strategy to the next level.

Atlassian’s status page builder has a wealth of functionalities that let companies cover their needs and meet the expectations of their respective target markets. For instance, it provides the status of each component of the system, informs users about future scheduled maintenance events, demonstrates incident reports and updates, collects users through subscription forms, and much more. On top of that, it has a Status Embed widget that can be used anywhere in the platform to address users’ concerns right in time.

When it comes to pricing, Atlassian is on the expensive side. Plan for startups costs almost $100 per month. However, before jumping onto the platform, you may try a free plan to test the ground.

Statuspage by Atlassian

  1. Status.io

Compared to Atlassian, Status.io is a smaller platform. However, this does not mean it lacks the capabilities to generate incident reports and showcase the system’s health. On the contrary, focusing mainly on the needs and expectations of a particular market niche, it is a reliable all-in-one status page builder for small businesses across the Globe that integrates with popular services: Librato, Pingdom, Pingometer, Twitter, and Uptime Robot.

Among its main features are

  • Reliable server for hosted pages with infrastructure spanning across multiple regions.
  • Customizable designs based on a mobile-friendly and fully responsive layout to match brand identity and comply with modern standards.
  • Full support for complex multi-tenant infrastructures.
  • Widgets to display planned scheduled maintenance events.
  • Automated reminders.
  • Tools to control the status of each component and display its relevant metrics through charts.
  • Subscriber notifications.

The price is average: the basic plan sets startups back $79 per month.

Status.io

  1. Instatus

As both a monitoring tool and a status page builder, Instatus presents the possibility of detecting the problem in any website or service and generating an incident report for regular users. Much like Pulsetic, it focuses only on the essential features providing mid-sized businesses with everything they may need to maintain their web platforms successfully.

The platform allows clients to integrate with monitoring services like NewRelic or Pingdom, add Google Analytics, Microanalytics, work with unlimited team members, send updates to unlimited subscribers, customize the page’s design from top to bottom and host the page on any provider.

The best part is, Instatus has a free plan so that anyone can test it. For those who are ready to upgrade and enjoy some professional features, the team offers two pocket-friendly plans with flat rates.

Instatus

  1. Cronitor

Trusted by Cisco, Johnson and Johnson, and the UK government, Cronitor boasts the greatest quantity of tools, capabilities, and freedom for serious businesses, aiming for the happiness of customers and productive workflow for the team in downtime. It covers the full ease-of-use spectrum by offering a list of integral features:

  • Powerful active monitoring control center.
  • Uptime and performance graphs in real-time.
  • Incident communication through public or private status pages.

The latter option allows for notification through alternative means like email or SMS, custom integration with PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and VictorOps, flexible and easy-to-use API, shareable incident URLs, historical incidents, and much more.

With three pricing plans, Cronitor offers clients some good choices: hacker, business, and enterprise. The first one is free of charge – it is great for solopreneurs and those who want to try out this service. The second option is for companies that steadily move forward. It does not have a fixed price, progressively growing with the company’s demands. The third option is calculated based on the enterprise’s needs.

Cronitor

  1. Statuspal

Unlike the majority of all-in-one tools in our list, Statuspal is dedicated to just one task – providing clients with a status page through a handy builder. It does not have an in-built monitoring capability. However, it perfectly integrates with all popular tracking systems on the web, including Pingdom and Statuscake. On top of that, it efficiently collaborates with notification services like Slack or Mailgun, alerting services like OpsGenie or PagerDuty, and live chats like Intercom so that customers can create fully-fledged data-fed status pages with the assistance of their choice.

Statuspal allows building both public and private versions. Each one can be fully customized to meet the brand’s requirements.

The service comes with these features:

  • Recurring automation.
  • Well-crafted incident templates.
  • Markdown support.
  • Support for over ten popular languages.
  • Uptime history graphs for a certain period, global or per individual service.
  • Subscription forms to collect subscribers and send real-time notifications on incidents and maintenance via Email, SMS, Slack, and Twitter.
  • Powerful API to showcase custom metrics.

Regarding pricing, there are four options to meet the needs of companies of various scales. Thus, solopreneurs may enjoy a beginner’s plan that costs $46 per month, startups will pay almost $100 monthly, and mid-sized businesses will stump up nearly $300 every month. Big organizations have to contact the team to get custom prices.

Statuspal

  1. Statusfy

Last but not least. Statusfy is the only option in our list that is open source. Created for tech-savvy entrepreneurs and dev teams, it allows building a Static Generated System that can be easily deployed to any hosting. It is trusted by thousands of clients around the Globe to communicate incidents with beautiful status pages. It ships in with a range of supports:

  • Support for markdown with GitHub-flavored units. Users may focus on incident reports, while the generator will provide the layout to deliver the message in the best way.
  • Support for Vue.js, Webpack, and JavaScript. Users may write CSS Styles with their favorite preprocessors.
  • Support for multi-languages.
  • Support for overall customization. Users may apply any style specification they need to make the status page fit into the general environment.
  • Support for hosting flexibility.

It should be noted that Statusfy calls for some obstacles to be overcome. For instance, not everyone can benefit from it: the system is intended for dev teams, not citizen developers. Also, as with any open-source project, it may have security breaches. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure infrastructure safety.

Statusfy

Conclusion

Status pages regularly stay ignored and underrated by companies and entrepreneurs. However, they are known as one of the dark horses of the digital World because they do so much good for the web platform and brand.

Communicating incidents, scheduled maintenance, and downtimes with your customers, as well as getting inner departments on the same page, bring numerous substantial benefits for the company that translate into revenue, a strong brand reputation, and the company’s and its products’ longevity.

Creating a status page is not rocket science. Even though it will take time, money, and effort, with the professional tools featured above, it will certainly pay off.