--- title: "Website Uptime Checker — Free Live Status Test" description: "Free website uptime checker. Instantly test if a site is up, see HTTP status code, response time, redirect chain, and server response details." canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/tools/website-uptime" source: "https://lemwatch.com" --- # Website Uptime Checker > Check if any website is up right now. Get HTTP status code, response time, full redirect chain, server header, and content size in seconds. "Is the site up?" is asked thousands of times a day across every engineering team in the world. Most of those checks could be answered faster than the asker can open their monitoring dashboard. This tool is the fast answer. ## What "up" actually means A site is "up" if it responds with an HTTP status code in the 2xx or 3xx range within a reasonable timeout (we use 12 seconds). 200 OK = perfectly up. 301/302 redirects = up but redirecting. 401/403 = up but requires auth. 404 = up but page not found. 5xx = down (server error). Connection refused / timeout / DNS failure = down (server unreachable). ## What this tool returns, in plain language - **Status code**: the final HTTP code after we follow all redirects. 200 is the only one that means "working normally for everyone." - **Response time**: end-to-end time from when our edge function fires the request to when the response body is fully received. Note: this is measured *from our server*, not from yours — your latency may differ if you're in a different region. - **Redirect chain**: every URL the site bounces through. `https://example.com → https://www.example.com → https://www.example.com/en/` is three hops, two redirects. - **Server header**: what the origin (or CDN) admits it's running. `nginx`, `cloudflare`, `Vercel` — useful for spotting infrastructure changes. - **Content-type / content-length**: confirms what was returned (HTML page? JSON API? Image?) and how big it is. ## Common patterns you'll see **The www-canonicalisation redirect**: `example.com` → `www.example.com`. One hop. Normal. Caching makes this nearly free. **The HTTPS upgrade redirect**: `http://example.com` → `https://example.com`. One hop. Mandatory in 2026. **The geo-language redirect**: `example.com` → `example.com/en/` → `example.com/en/home/`. Two hops. Adds latency for every first-visit user and tanks LCP. Replace with server-side detection or a single 301. **The tracking-parameter redirect**: site adds `?utm_*` then strips it again. Pointless hop. Eliminate. ## When response time looks bad Anything over 600ms TTFB is uncomfortable; anything over 1500ms is a problem. Common causes, in order of frequency: shared hosting under load, no CDN, blocking database query in the request lifecycle, server in the wrong region for the user base, plugin/middleware overhead (WordPress especially). The fix sequence is usually: CDN first (free Cloudflare), then move to better hosting, then optimise queries. ## One-shot check vs. continuous monitoring This tool answers "is it up right now?" in real time. For "was it up at 3am last Tuesday?" or "alert me when it goes down," you need continuous monitoring: scheduled checks every 1-5 minutes from multiple regions, SLA tracking, incident timeline, on-call alerting. That's what LemWatch's paid product does — this free tool is the one-shot version. ## What this tool checks - Whether the site responds with a 2xx or 3xx status (counts as "up") - Final HTTP status code after following redirects - Response time in milliseconds (TTFB-ish, server-side from our edge) - Full redirect chain (every hop with its status code) - Server header, content-type, and content-length ## Why it matters A site being "up" isn't binary — it can return 200 OK and still serve a broken page, or redirect 7 times before settling, or take 12 seconds to respond. This tool surfaces all of that in one shot, with the actual data Google's crawler sees: status code, redirect chain, response time, and server header. For real ongoing uptime monitoring across multiple sites you need our paid product, but for one-off "is this site dead?" questions, this is faster than any monitoring dashboard. ## How to fix what it finds - If you see a 5xx error, check your hosting provider's status page first, then your server logs - If response time is over 1500ms, you almost certainly need a CDN (or you have a database query problem) - A long redirect chain (>2 hops) is a CWV killer and an SEO disaster — collapse it to a single 301 - If the site is up here but down for users, suspect a regional CDN issue, DNS propagation lag, or geo-blocking - For 24/7 monitoring, multi-region checks, and alerts on changes, sign up for LemWatch paid monitoring ## Methodology From our edge function (US-East region), we send a GET request to the URL with `User-Agent: LemWatchUptime/1.0`, a 12-second timeout, and `redirect: manual` so we can capture every hop. For each redirect we record the URL and status code, follow up to 8 hops, and consume the body (to avoid resource leaks). We measure total wall-clock time from request fire to body received and report it as `response_time_ms`. We capture the `Server`, `Content-Type`, and `Content-Length` headers from the final response. The `is_up` verdict is true if the final status is 200-399, false otherwise (including timeouts, DNS failures, and connection refused). Single-region by design — for multi-region uptime checks, use our paid monitoring tier. ## This tool also answers ### Is it just me or is the website down for everyone? This check runs from our servers, not your network. If it reports the site as up while your browser cannot reach it, the fault is local — DNS cache, VPN, ISP route or firewall — rather than the site being down. ### How do I check if a website is up right now? Enter the domain and the tool makes a live HTTP request immediately, returning the status code and response time. A single check tells you the state right now; continuous monitoring is what catches the outage you are not watching for. ## Frequently asked questions ### Why does my site show as down when it's clearly up for me? Three common causes: geo-blocking (you're in a region the site allows, we're not), DDoS/bot protection challenging our request, or a regional DNS issue. Check the redirect chain and error message for clues. ### The response time looks fast but my users say it's slow. Why? We measure server response time only. Your users' total page load includes DNS lookup + TLS handshake + every blocking CSS/JS/font request after the HTML loads. Use our Core Web Vitals checker for full page-load timing. ### Why does it follow redirects? Can I see just the first response? The redirect_chain field shows every hop including the first response, so you have both views. We follow them by default because most users want to know "where do I end up", not "what's the first response". ### Does it check pages that need a login? No — we send no cookies or auth headers. Anything that requires authentication will return 401/403 and show as up-but-protected, which is the correct answer. ### Can I monitor my site continuously with this? Not with the free tool. For continuous monitoring (checks every 1-5 minutes from multiple regions with alerting), sign up for LemWatch — the free tier covers 10 sites and email alerts. ### Is it just me or is the website down for everyone? This check runs from our servers, not your network. If it reports the site as up while your browser cannot reach it, the fault is local — DNS cache, VPN, ISP route or firewall — rather than the site being down. ### How do I check if a website is up right now? Enter the domain and the tool makes a live HTTP request immediately, returning the status code and response time. A single check tells you the state right now; continuous monitoring is what catches the outage you are not watching for. ## Related - [All free tools](https://lemwatch.com/tools) - [SSL Checker](https://lemwatch.com/tools/ssl-checker) - [DNS Lookup](https://lemwatch.com/tools/dns-lookup) - [Check Site For Malware](https://lemwatch.com/tools/website-malware) - [Cookie Compliance Checker](https://lemwatch.com/tools/cookie-compliance) - [Lemwatch pricing](https://lemwatch.com/pricing) - [All monitoring checks](https://lemwatch.com/features) - [WordPress Detector](https://lemwatch.com/tools/wordpress-detector)