What is a status page and why your customers need one
A status page shows customers whether your services are working, lists incidents and announces maintenance. Here is what to include and how to write clear updates.
A status page is a public page that shows whether your website, app or API is working right now. When something breaks, it becomes the single place where customers find accurate, timely updates instead of flooding your support inbox.
What a good status page includes
- Current status of each component, such as your website, API, dashboard and regions.
- Active incidents with a timeline of updates: investigating, identified, monitoring and resolved.
- Scheduled maintenance announced in advance, with start and end times.
- Uptime history, usually the last 90 days, so customers can judge reliability.
- Subscriptions by email, RSS or webhook so people are told when things change.
Why customers need one
During an outage, the worst experience is uncertainty. A status page answers the three questions every customer has: Is it just me? Do they know? When will it be fixed? Answering those questions publicly reduces duplicate tickets and protects trust.
How to write a clear incident update
- Say what is affected in plain language, for example "Some customers cannot log in".
- Say what you are doing about it right now.
- Tell people when the next update will come, and keep that promise.
- When it is resolved, explain the cause briefly and what you will change.
Automate the boring part
Connect uptime monitors to your components and the page updates itself the moment a check fails, then recovers when the service is back. StatusKit confirms every failure with a second check before changing anything, so a single slow response never creates a false alarm.
Ready to try it? Create a free status page in under a minute.