Hexometer Review

Your website should be functioning at its top level for your online business to succeed. However, issues like server outages, security errors, poor performance, responsiveness, etc. can bring your website at risk.

And the worst part – you wouldn’t even get a hint of these issues, let alone solve them. And that’s why you need a website monitoring tool like Hexometer.

Hexometer is a website monitoring tool that checks your website for availability, SEO, health, security, and several website issues automatically. Not only that, it alerts you and your teammates promptly whenever these issues hit your website for a quick solution and to prevent adverse business impacts.

Let’s dive in for an in-depth review of Hexometer with its pros, cons, features, and pricing.

Hexometer Overview

Hexometer is a website uptime monitoring SaaS tool for detecting issues on websites automatically using advanced artificial intelligence (AI). It monitors your website 24/7 and detects problems so that you can prevent significant effects on your business.

It checks different aspects of a website from uptime to security to SEO, to make sure the website is running at its best. You can monitor uptime, HTTP response time, email servers, CDNs, DNS, SEO, and third-party services too with Hexometer.

To be precise, Hexometer checks six core areas of the site –

• Availability
• Performance
• User experience
• Health
• SEO and
• Security

The best part of using this tool is that it provides alerts as soon as the errors occur, so you can give attention to solving the issues ASAP. And receiving notifications is easy through emails, SMS, Slack, Telegram, and Trello.

Since the app runs on the cloud, there’s no need to worry about installation, space allocation, and lags. You can just sign up for it and start monitoring your website in minutes.

It’s useful for businesses like eCommerce to ensure the best user experience and protect ad campaigns by monitoring landing pages. Moreover, web agencies also use it since it has a multi-client dashboard to monitor clients’ websites.

Hexometer Features

Being an automated issue detection tool and notification tool, Hexometer saves you a lot of the hassle of optimizing websites. Let’s see the features of Hexometer that give you overall control of your site status.

1. Availability Monitoring

With availability monitoring, Hexomatic automatically monitors web pages for availability to make sure it’s live 24/7. It offers standard monitoring and advanced monitoring to make sure no page or service issues go unnoticed.

The standard monitoring lets you track the downtimes for crucial pages and services. You can configure the monitoring settings with time intervals, and from several locations – US, Europe, and Asia.

In addition, it can also let you set it up for services like email servers, CDN, DNS, SFTP, POP 3, IMAP, and other third-party services.

On the other hand, advanced monitoring provides a unique and more powerful way of checking the uptime – with keywords.

It lets you check the presence or absence of keywords/key phrases on the pages to validate the uptime checks. This method is useful to bypass undetected page errors due to page caching.

The reports of downtimes and HTTP response times can be accessed from the dashboard. You can also export them into Google Sheets or CSV.

2. User Experience Monitoring

Detecting end-user experience issues like responsiveness and errors in content could take days to figure out and resolve. Luckily, Hexometer saves you that time by constantly monitoring them.

The user experience feature is to ensure that your website visitors have a pleasant browsing experience. It checks your website for three major issues that can affect the user experience on your site.

• Spelling and grammar
• Responsiveness
• Mobile Friendliness

Hexometer offers smart crawlers that check important pages to monitor and checks the pages for user experience metrics as per your set frequency – daily, weekly, or monthly.

You can carry out on-demand spelling and grammar checks to perform an in-depth analysis as per the configured schedule. It will show the reports on the pages highlighting the errors with a red underline.

Similarly, Hexometer checks your pages for responsive display issues using eight different devices with different-sized screens including desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Moreover, you can also view the errors users might face while accessing your site from mobile devices. You can add your home page to check mobile-specific issues to receive alerts for related problems.

3. Performance Monitoring

Website speed is one of the crucial factors that have an impact on your business. Website visitors tend to bounce from slow websites more as the load time increases. To detect lags and errors causing slower page loading, Hexometer offers a performance monitoring feature.

It performs timely checks of the page speed of crucial or newly updated pages automatically. In fact, it lets you view the speeding issues for both desktop and mobile devices individually.

Or, you can carry out on-demand performance checks by scheduling the crawlers to check daily, weekly, or monthly depending on your plan.

You can also see the historical performance reports for your overall site performance with several metrics like page size, cumulative LS, speed index, and blocking time.

It also lists out the URLs with issues that need attention and sees the details of the issues. It will show you the full analysis of factors causing the issues and the suggestions for improving the page speed.

4. Site Health Monitoring

Your site may also face issues like broken links, missing assets, code errors, page structures, etc. due to website updates, third-party service changes, and server problems. These issues lead to having a bad impression on visitors.

With Hexometer, you can carry out comprehensive health monitoring on these four key aspects.

• URLs
• W3C markup
• JavaScript errors
• Tech stack

Hexometer scans your entire website to find the links with errors and warnings that needs fixing. It organizes and displays the errors using HTTP status codes, and the results can be exported to CSV or Google Sheets.

You can also conduct an in-depth W3C validation check to make sure that your website codes are up to the standards. The W3C check reports are generated making it easy to view the exact issues for each scheduled scan.

Similarly, Hexometer monitors your home and other important pages for diagnosing JavaScript errors on your page that may potentially break your page appearance.

And finally, it also monitors if any libraries or third-party tools like Google Analytics, chat support, Search Console, marketing tools, etc. are missing or not working.

5. SEO Monitoring

Hexometer monitors websites for on-page SEO issues and improvement chances before it affects your website rankings. It monitors several aspects of your site for SEO improvements like meta tags, open graphs, Twitter cards, and URLs.

It checks if all your pages have proper SEO titles, meta descriptions, headers, and content, and displays the details on the reports if they are missing. It also shows the suggestions for improving those meta tag elements.

Similarly, you can optimize your open graph and Twitter card elements like thumbnails, titles, and other social snippet content for optimal social sharing.

Besides, Hexometer also monitors other important SEO aspects on your pages like correct canonical URLs, robot.txt files, social links, favicons, and sitemaps.

6. Security Monitoring

Websites are under constant threat of security issues that can cause downtime and even be blacklisted on search engines causing you the loss of credibility and potential business opportunities. Luckily, Hexometer monitors your website to shield it from those threats.

Firstly, it checks your SSL certificate to make sure up-to-date and notifies you before it expires. Similarly, it also monitors the status of the HTTP security header making sure it’s active to secure your website and web applications.

Not only that, it scans your website for malicious codes, links to unsafe websites, social engineering sites, deceptive sites, and malware.

Lastly, the security monitoring feature checks your domain to make sure that it’s not on the search engines’ blacklist.

7. Notifications

Hexometer makes it very easy to receive alerts about your website if anything goes down. It sends notifications on your device pointing out the issues, so you don’t have to constantly keep an eye on them.

In fact, it provides notification alerts as soon as the error occurs so that the damage can be minimized. Additionally, it offers several options on where you want to receive the notification – Slack, Telegram, Webhooks, emails, SMS, and Trello.

8. Integrations

Hexometer integrates with several third tools and applications for better monitoring, automation, notifications, and exporting data.

Some of the integrations available right now are –

• Telegram
• Google Chrome
• Slack
• WordPress
• Gmail
• Trello
• Google Sheets
• Zapier
• Pabbly Connect
• Webhook
• Discord
• Integrately
• SyncSpider

Hexometer Pricing

Hexometer is a premium tool offering a wide range of plans as per your need. It also offers a free trial of 7 days with the starting plan, i.e. Regular Standard plan. You can sign up for it to get first-hand experience with the tool before purchasing a premium option.

Speaking of the premium plans, it has six options altogether – three in the Regular category and three suitable for Agency use.

Now, let’s see all the plans and their differentiating features.

Regular Plans

Standard: $12 per month | Monitors 2 websites | 10,000 pages per site | No advanced monitoring | 5 standard uptime monitors | 2 IP blacklist checks | 10 SMS alerts per month

Advanced: $24 per month | Monitors 3 websites | 25,000 pages per site | 1 advanced monitoring | 10 standard uptime monitors | 10 IP blacklist checks | 30 SMS alerts per month

Guru: $48 per month | Monitors 5 websites | 50,000 pages per site | 2 advanced monitoring | 25 standard uptime monitors | 25 IP blacklist checks | 50 SMS alerts per month

Agency Plans

Standard: $45 per month | Monitors 10 websites | 10,000 pages per site | No advanced monitoring | 30 standard uptime monitors | 50 IP blacklist checks | 25 SMS alerts per month | 50 agency growth tools

Advanced: $75 per month | Monitors 15 websites | 25,000 pages per site | 4 advanced monitoring | 40 standard uptime monitors | 100 IP blacklist checks | 50 SMS alerts per month | 100 agency growth tools

Guru: $125 per month | Monitors 20 websites | 50,000 pages per site | 6 advanced monitoring | 60 standard uptime monitors | 200 IP blacklist checks | 75 SMS alerts per month | 150 agency growth tools

Hexometer Pros and Cons

Now, here are some of the pros and cons of Hexometer.

Pros

• All-in-one monitoring tool
• Automated and AI-powered
• Easy to use
• Reasonable pricing and plans
• Real-time notification
• Configurable monitoring settings
• In-depth reporting and export feature
• Integration with third-party tools
• Academy, tutorials, and guides
• Dedicated support

Cons

• No free plan
• The UI can be confusing in the beginning

Hexometer Alternatives

Now, let’s look at some alternatives to Hexometer.

1. Better Uptime

Better Uptime is a popular website monitoring and incident management tool useful to ensure optimal website functioning. It monitors several website aspects like APIs, DNS, keywords, server storage, SSL certificates, and more.

Additionally, it sends you notifications with second-by-second screenshots of the errors whenever an incident occurs. You can choose to receive the alerts through email, SMS, Slack, MS Teams, push notifications, and even phone calls.

An important feature Better Uptime offers is creating public status pages. This means you can create a customized page that’s displayed to the users while they visit your site during downtime.

Compared to Hexmeter, Better Uptime lacks monitoring features for SEO, health, performance, and user experience of your site. It offers a limited free plan, but the pricing premium pricing is a bit higher comparatively.

2. Pingdom

Pingdom by SolarWinds is widely-used SaaS-based website availability, performance, and transaction monitoring tool that helps website owners minimize downtimes for optimal user experience.

It offers synthetic monitoring for simulating the users’ interaction on your site from over 100 locations worldwide. Plus, you can evaluate real users’ experiences and interactions in real-time with respect to browsers, locations, and devices.

You can receive alerts on critical site failures or incidents through email, SMS, and push notifications on mobile apps the actionable steps for resolving them. Not only that, it lets you configure who on your team receives the alerts depending on the type of error.

However, Pingdom is only limited to monitoring performance, uptime, and user experience, while Hexometer also checks your site for SEO, health, and security.

3. UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is a SaaS tool focused on monitoring several aspects of your website like server status, SSL, pings, databases, cron job, and keywords.

It lets you integrate with email, Slack, Telegram, call, and discord for sharing incident reports with your teams. Additionally, it integrates with Zapier, Webhooks, Pushbullet, Pushover, and several other tools for receiving and transmitting alert reports.

Moreover, UptimeRobot lets you create custom status pages to let website visitors know about your website status. And the tool verifies incidents from multiple locations to prevent false alerts.

UptimeRobot offers a limited free plan to get started. However, it lacks features to monitor SEO, performance, and user experience like Hexometer.

Conclusion

With Hexometer, you can let the AI monitor and audit your website at all times so you will have peace of mind.

It will monitor your site for severe issues like offline servers, expired SSL, third-party service failures, code errors, slow pages, etc. Not only that, but minor issues like missing images, spelling & grammatical errors, missing meta tags, etc. also won’t go unnoticed.

In fact, you get notifications of any issues at the device or platform of your choice, so that you can resolve them and get the website to function at its best in no time.

Hexometer FAQs