shopify store monitoring
Shopify uptime monitoring for your store, checkout, domain and SSL
Short answer: Shopify hosts your storefront, so you are not monitoring it to catch Shopify's outages. You are monitoring it to catch the failures Shopify's uptime number explicitly does not cover: a broken theme edit, an app that jams the cart, an expired or misconfigured custom domain, a certificate that never renewed. Those return a perfectly healthy HTTP 200 while your store is unbuyable, and Shopify's status page stays green throughout. AlertPing checks your real storefront URL every 30 seconds from three regions and reads the page content, not just the status code.
Last updated July 2026 · Shopify facts checked July 15, 2026
alertping ▸ run check
live
▸ type a domain and run a real-feel check
▸ probes from 3 regions · FRA · IAD · SIN
▸ waiting…▌
queued probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 3/3 regions (FRA, IAD, SIN). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 3/3 regions . First fail: Frankfurt.
start here
Shopify hosts your store. So what are you actually monitoring?
Worth being straight with you, because most pages on this topic are not. If Shopify's platform goes down, an uptime monitor will not save you. You cannot fail over, you cannot patch it, and you will usually hear about it from Shopify at roughly the same moment your monitor does. If that were the only failure mode, external monitoring would be theater.
It is not the only failure mode. It is not even the common one. Most Shopify stores that stop taking orders do so while Shopify itself is perfectly healthy, and the reason is right there in Shopify's own fine print.
shopify's own uptime claim
“Shopify has maintained a 99.9% uptime as a platform, calculated for all major Shopify services, in all geographic regions, for the past 90 days.”
That is a genuinely strong number and Shopify deserves credit for it. Read the next sentence on that same help page, though. The figure excludes third-party service outages, theme customization errors, app errors, planned maintenance, and force majeure events.
Read that exclusion list again as a merchant rather than as a lawyer. Apps, themes, third-party services. That is very close to a complete list of the things that actually break a working store. Shopify's 99.9% is a promise about Shopify's infrastructure, and it is kept. It is not a promise about your storefront, and it was never meant to be. The gap between those two things is the entire job of external monitoring.
who owns what
What can break on a Shopify store, and who catches it
The useful question is not “is Shopify up?” It is “can a customer in Ohio load my product page and pay?” Those come apart more often than merchants expect.
| Failure | Whose fault | In Shopify's 99.9%? | On shopifystatus.com? | External monitor catches it? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify platform outage | Shopify | Yes | Yes, usually | Yes, but you cannot act on it |
| Theme edit breaks the page | Yours | No, excluded | No | Yes, with a content check |
| App errors or rate-limits the cart | Third party | No, excluded | Rarely | Yes, with a content check |
| Custom domain DNS misconfigured | Yours | No | No | Yes |
| SSL certificate stuck or unavailable | Yours | No | No | Yes |
| “This store is unavailable” | Yours | No | No | Yes, with a content check |
| Broken redirect after a migration | Yours | No | No | Yes |
| Regional reachability problem | Network or CDN | Sometimes | No, it reports global state | Yes, with multi-region checks |
Count the rows. Six of the eight are yours to fix, invisible to Shopify's status page, and outside the number Shopify reports. Shopify's status page even says so itself, in a line that is easy to walk past: “Some issues affecting a small percentage of stores may not be reflected here.” A store-specific problem is, by definition, a small percentage of stores.
the 200 problem
Your store can be broken and still return 200 OK
This is the part that catches people out, and it is why a status-code-only monitor gives false comfort on Shopify specifically.
A broken theme still serves
A bad Liquid edit renders a blank page, a page missing its add-to-cart button, or a wall of unstyled text. Shopify's web server did its job and returns 200. A monitor watching only the status code sees a healthy store.
“This store is unavailable”
Shopify serves this page for an unpaid plan, an expired trial, a password-protected store, or a domain misconfiguration. It is a real page, served successfully. Status code: 200. Orders taken: zero.
An app kills the cart
A subscription or upsell app hits its rate limit and its injected script throws. The page loads. The button does nothing. Nothing in the HTTP response says anything is wrong.
The fix: check for words, not codes
Point the check at your storefront and assert that the response body contains a string that only appears when the page is genuinely working. On a product page, the price or the “Add to cart” label. On the homepage, a collection title or your tagline. Then invert one: alert if the body contains “This store is unavailable”. AlertPing's checks support keyword and body assertions the same way our API monitoring asserts on JSON fields, so the monitor fails when the page stops saying the thing it should say, not when the server stops answering.
The same logic applies to a WooCommerce store, where you own the hosting too. We covered that in how to monitor WooCommerce uptime and checkout.
your responsibility
The custom domain is the part Shopify does not own
Shopify runs the store. You run the domain that points at it, and your registrar has no idea it is doing anything important. This is the most under-monitored surface on a Shopify store and the one with the cleanest failure modes.
DNS pointed wrong
A Shopify custom domain wants an A record at 23.227.38.65 and a CNAME for www at shops.myshopify.com. Real things that break it: a second A record left over from an old host, an AAAA record (Shopify does not support IPv6, so an IPv6 answer sends visitors nowhere), a DNSSEC conflict after a registrar transfer, or a Cloudflare proxy sitting in front and interfering.
SSL unavailable or pending
Shopify provisions the certificate for you, but only once DNS is right. If TLS setup keeps failing for 48 hours you land on “SSL unavailable” and browsers throw a security warning at every visitor. A common culprit is a CAA record that does not authorize the certificate authority Shopify uses. Our SSL certificate monitoring warns you before expiry rather than after the padlock breaks.
None of this shows up on Shopify's status page, none of it is in the 99.9%, and none of it will email you. The first signal is usually a customer telling you, which means it has been broken for hours.
setup
What to monitor on a Shopify store
Five checks cover the realistic failure surface. All five fit inside the $19 plan with room to spare.
-
1
The homepage, by content
Your apex domain, asserting on a phrase that only renders when the theme works. Not just a 200.
-
2
A best-selling product page
Assert the price and the add-to-cart text appear. This is the page that has to work for money to move.
-
3
The cart
Apps inject scripts here more than anywhere else, so it breaks independently of the storefront.
-
4
SSL expiry on the custom domain
Warn well before the date, and catch the “SSL unavailable” state that follows a DNS mistake.
-
5
The www redirect
Check that www lands on the apex with a clean 301. Redirect loops after a migration are silent and expensive.
-
+
Headless? Watch Oxygen too
Hydrogen storefronts run on Oxygen, a separate component with its own failure profile. Check the rendered storefront, not the API.
why us
Why merchants use AlertPing for this
Shopify stopped pushing alerts
Shopify moved to a per-store status view behind a login and deprecated the status page SMS subscriptions and RSS feed in the process. There is now no way for Shopify to wake you up. An external monitor is the only thing that will.
Three regions have to agree
Shopify's status page reports global state. It cannot tell you your store is fine in Virginia and unreachable in Frankfurt. Three-region confirmation catches that and also stops one flaky network hop from paging you at 3am.
30-second checks
On a store doing real volume, a five-minute check interval is five minutes of orders you did not take before anyone knew. We check every 30 seconds on every plan.
SMS in every plan
Downtime happens at night. Email does not wake anyone. SMS is included and unmetered from $19, with no credit packs to run out mid-incident.
What monitoring will not do for you
It will not keep your store up during a Shopify platform outage. Nothing you buy will. It will not simulate a full checkout with a real card, so an uptime check is not a substitute for testing your funnel after a big theme or app change. And on a plain Basic or Grow plan you have no contractual SLA with Shopify to claim against, so the timestamped record a monitor gives you is useful for your own postmortem rather than for a refund. Shopify Plus is described as possibly including a 99.99% uptime SLA, but the actual terms sit behind the admin login, so check your own contract rather than trusting anyone's blog post, including this one.
merchant questions
Shopify uptime monitoring questions, answered
Does Shopify go down?
Yes, though rarely. Shopify reports 99.9% uptime across all major services for the trailing 90 days, and publishes incidents at shopifystatus.com covering Admin, Checkout, Storefront, API, Point of Sale and Oxygen. Platform outages do happen, but most stores that stop selling do so for store-specific reasons Shopify's number excludes.
Why is my Shopify store unavailable?
“This store is unavailable” almost always means a billing or domain problem, not a Shopify outage. The usual causes are an unpaid or expired plan, a trial that ended, a password-protected store, or a custom domain pointing at the wrong records. Check your plan status first, then your DNS.
Do I need uptime monitoring if Shopify hosts my store?
Yes, but not for the reason most people assume. You are not watching for Shopify's outages, which you cannot fix anyway. You are watching for theme errors, app failures, DNS mistakes and certificate problems, all of which Shopify's uptime figure explicitly excludes and its status page will not show.
Does Shopify have a status page?
Yes, at shopifystatus.com, showing Admin, Checkout, Reports, Storefront, API and Mobile, third party services, Support, Point of Sale and Oxygen. It publishes no uptime percentages, only current state and incident history, and it warns that issues affecting a small percentage of stores may not appear there at all.
What is Shopify's uptime SLA?
Basic, Grow and Advanced plans carry no contractual uptime SLA. Shopify's help center says the Plus plan might include a 99.99% uptime SLA, using that conditional wording, and the full terms sit behind the admin login. If an SLA matters to you, read your own contract rather than a third-party summary.
How do I know if my Shopify store is working?
Loading it yourself proves little, since your browser may be cached and you are one location. Run a check from outside that asserts on page content rather than the status code, from more than one region, on the homepage, a product page and the cart. That is the difference between “the server answered” and “a customer could buy something.”
Know before your customers do
30-second checks on your storefront, product pages, cart and certificate, confirmed from three regions, with SMS in every plan. Running in under a minute.