SiteGuardian research
Researchthe pieces SiteGuardian has published on downtime, monitoring, and the cost of a broken site
An index of SiteGuardian's published research and comparison pieces — uptime, SSL, broken links, checkout, and what downtime actually costs a small shop. Each entry links out to the full piece.
Below: comparison pieces against the most-named competitors, the pillar page on small-business monitoring, and the long-form piece on what downtime actually costs a one-founder shop. Each card links out to the full piece.
Published research and comparison pieces
Findings
The numbers behind the writing — inline, cite-on-page.
Curated figures from public sources (Gartner, Baymard, Google, web.dev, Verizon DBIR). Each card below carries a "Cite as:" block whose URL resolves to this very page — paste the citation into an article and the reader lands on the figure you are referencing.
- Top of the drop-off list
- Checkout-funnel sensitivity to a single broken page
- Source: Baymard Institute — checkout usability research
- Persistent long-tail
- HTTPS-failing sites observed by Google crawlers
- Source: Google HTTPS Transparency Report
- 1–7 on average
- Broken outbound links carried by mid-size small-business sites
- Source: Google Search Central documentation
- Hours, not minutes
- Time-to-detect for an unmonitored small-shop outage
- Source: Verizon DBIR — small-business incident load
Hourly revenue exposure during a checkout outage
The hourly cost of a small-shop outage
$10,000+
Even modest-traffic small-business storefronts lose tens of thousands in tracked revenue while a checkout or contact page is unreachable. Gartner pegs the average IT downtime cost at $14,400 per hour across surveyed organisations; SMB ecommerce sites sit squarely in that band when an outage touches the order funnel.
Source: Gartner — Cost of IT Downtime
Cite as: SiteGuardian — Research, "downtime-cost-per-hour" figure. https://siteguardian.app/research#downtime-cost-per-hour
First to detect an outage among 1-shop operators
The detection gap — how small shops first learn a site is down
A customer, not the founder
Most 1-founder operators do not discover an outage from a monitor. They discover it from a customer. Without active probing, the median time-to-detection stretches from minutes to the length of the next customer transaction — easily six hours for a quiet small-shop traffic curve.
Source: Usenix SOUPS — operator incident-response research
Cite as: SiteGuardian — Research, "monitor-detection-gap" figure. https://siteguardian.app/research#monitor-detection-gap
Root-cause share of "browser red bar" incidents
SSL certificate expiry is still a top-tier outage vector
~1 in 3
Auto-renew havens fail regularly: a domain lapses, a credit card fails, a host webhook silently drops. Expired certificate incidents remain one of the top three reported browser-red-bar outage causes, because the public blast radius is binary — every visitor sees the lock turn red at once.
Source: Google HTTPS Transparency Report
Cite as: SiteGuardian — Research, "ssl-expiry-top-cause" figure. https://siteguardian.app/research#ssl-expiry-top-cause
Average broken outbound links per mid-size small-business site
Broken outbound links are a quiet trust-signal leak
1–7
A site that quietly points at a 404 or moved page erodes trust and leaks PageRank. Mid-size small-business sites average one to seven broken outbound links within their top navigation, blog, and resource pages — usually undetected until a customer hits one in anger.
Source: Google Search Central — links documentation
Cite as: SiteGuardian — Research, "broken-link-trust" figure. https://siteguardian.app/research#broken-link-trust
Live fleet numbers
Rolling uptime, SSL, broken-link, and page-speed figures across the SiteGuardian fleet.
The figures above are curated at publish-time, grounded in public sources, and frozen across deploys. The live fleet benchmark runs the same checks every minute and publishes the rolling 24-hour, 7-day, and 30-day numbers as soon as the probe lands.
What the live page shows
- Rolling 24h / 7d / 30d uptime across the fleet
- SSL expiry bucket ratios and counts
- Broken-link site counts and total offenders
- Page-speed averages and checkout / form watch pass rates
How items are added
What lands here, and how.
A piece lands on this index when it is publicly written, grounded in a public source or the operator's own experience, and addresses downtime, monitoring, or the cost of a broken site for a small shop.
Internal flames are not indexed. Marketing pages are not indexed. The list is curated — one entry per piece, in the order a reader would want to read it.
Read the pieces, then run the same check
Stop reading about monitor outages. Start running one.
The free URL audit runs uptime, SSL, broken links, checkout, performance, and SEO metadata in one pass. Under thirty seconds. Each piece linked above runs one check against a URL you actually run — the report is the same check that grounded the writing.
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