Nightshift

A service that watches your clients' websites while you sleep. Every minute it checks uptime, certificates, domains, speed, and security on any site. Where there is an integration, today that means WordPress, it also runs the updates overnight. At seven in the morning one message arrives: what went down, what is done, and what is waiting for you. Our studio's own product.

The Challenge

An agency with forty client sites is not going to log into forty admin panels every morning. So nobody does, and the problem surfaces late. A domain expires on Saturday, a certificate on Sunday, an overnight plugin update breaks the checkout, and you find out at nine when the client calls. The ready-made tools each cover one slice of this. Uptime monitors can ping a site and tell you it is down, but they know nothing about domains or speed. WordPress management tools run updates and ignore everything around them. So the agency pays for three services, each sending its own email, and nobody reads all of them. And when the third alert that week turns out to be a blip that cleared on its own after a minute, people mute the notifications and end up worse off than before. We wanted one thing that does whatever can be done overnight without a human, wakes someone only for what is actually on fire, and saves the rest for the morning.

Our Solution

• Built the whole product around one sentence: at seven in the morning one message arrives. Everything else exists to make that message true.
• Checks run every minute, and an outage is only reported after a second check confirms it. A short hosting hiccup never makes it out, which is why nobody mutes the alerts after a week.
• Whatever can be seen from the outside is checked from the outside: uptime and response time, SSL, domain expiry, DNS changes, SPF and DMARC, PageSpeed, security headers, exposed files, noindex and sitemap. The address is enough, nothing gets installed.
• WordPress updates run in a window between two and four in the morning. After each one the site is loaded again and checked that it responds and still contains what it should. If it fails, the remaining updates on that site stop and you get a message naming the plugin.
• Sites without an integration are watched too, just from the outside. Shoptet, Shopify, Webflow, or PrestaShop behave like any other address. Custom sites on Laravel or Nuxt get heartbeats, so it is obvious whether the nightly import and backup actually finished.
• Alerts go where the team already is: Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, email, a task in Productive, or a plain webhook.
• Skipped passwords entirely. You sign in with a Google or GitHub account, and we store check results plus, for sites with the integration, a list of plugins and versions. No site content, no orders, no customer data.
• The brand manual came before the first screen and holds the product together. A healthy site is grey, every status has a shape as well as a colour, and no number is shown without the time it was measured.
• The website and the app both run on Nuxt and Cloudflare. The WordPress plugin is plain PHP, 180 kB, no dependencies.
• One site is monitored free, permanently, no card. Anyone with more writes to the author directly rather than to a sales team.

What We Delivered

Technologies Used