About this plugin
YoPingMe is a website monitoring service that
watches your sites from outside and tells you when they stop answering.
This plugin brings that view into wp-admin: a dashboard widget listing
each of your monitors, whether it is up right now, and its uptime over
the last 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days. Every monitor in the account is
listed, so if you look after several sites you see all of them from
whichever site you are logged into.
This plugin is a viewer, not a monitor. It cannot detect your own site
going down, because a site that is down does not run PHP. The checking is
done by YoPingMe’s probes from outside your server; the plugin only shows
you what they found. If you want to be told when your site goes down, set
up alerts in your YoPingMe account.
What you get
- A dashboard widget with every monitor’s current status and uptime.
- A notice at the top of wp-admin when this site went down while you were
away, so a 3am outage that fixed itself does not go unnoticed.
- A clear “as of” timestamp, so you always know how fresh the numbers are.
- An optional status strip for any page or post, if you publish a status
page in your YoPingMe account. It appears only where you put it.
- An optional one-line badge for your front page footer. It is off by default.
What YoPingMe does
YoPingMe runs HTTP, keyword, ping and TCP checks and SSL certificate
monitoring against your endpoints from probes on three continents, and
alerts you by email, webhook or Slack. The free plan covers 10 monitors
at 5-minute intervals.
Being told what you missed
When YoPingMe recorded an outage for this site while you were away, the
plugin says so at the top of wp-admin the next time you log in: how long
it lasted, when it started, and what the check saw. It looks back at most
seven days, each administrator gets their own “since your last visit”, and
the notice stays put while you work rather than vanishing on the first
click. Dismiss it and it is gone until the next outage. There is a switch
to turn it off entirely on the settings page.
This still does not make the plugin a monitor. It is telling you what
YoPingMe’s probes saw from outside, after the fact.
Showing your status page (optional)
Status pages are made in your YoPingMe account, not here. If you publish
one, the [yopingme_status] shortcode puts a compact strip wherever you
want it: the overall state, a dot per service, and a link to the full
status page. Nothing about it is automatic – with no page chosen under
Settings > YoPingMe, or no shortcode on the page, the plugin renders
nothing and makes no request for it.
The strip is drawn on your server from the status page’s public data, at
most once every five minutes, so your visitors’ browsers never contact
YoPingMe and no cookies or scripts are added to your site. The link to
the full page is always part of the strip.
Why the data is cached
The plugin reads your monitors at most once an hour and caches the answer.
The free plan includes a daily budget of API queries, and an hourly read
keeps a busy dashboard well inside it. The widget shows the time of the
last read rather than pretending the numbers are live, and a Refresh link
lets you pull fresh data when you want it.
External services
This plugin connects to the YoPingMe API to fetch your monitors’ status.
- Service: YoPingMe ( https://yoping.me/ ), API endpoint
me/api/mcp.
- When: only after you save an API key, and at most once an hour when
an administrator views a page in wp-admin. No request is made before a
key is configured, and none is made for logged-out visitors or for users
who cannot manage options. The only background request the plugin makes
is the daily report described below.
- What is sent: your API key, in an Authorization header, and the name
of the read-only operation being called ( list_monitors, and
list_incidents only when this site’s own uptime figures already show
less than 100%). No visitor data, site content, or personal information
is transmitted.
- What comes back: your own monitors’ names, targets, current status
and uptime percentages, and – when incidents are asked for – the start
time, end time, length and cause of your own outages in the last seven
days.
me/terms
me/privacy
Saving an API key you generated in your own YoPingMe account is what
authorises the plugin to contact that account. Removing the key on the
settings page stops every request immediately and deletes the cached data.
The plugin tells YoPingMe that this site is using it:
- Service: YoPingMe ( https://yoping.me/ ), endpoint
me/api/plugin/heartbeat.
- When: once after you install the plugin, and then once a day only
while you have an API key saved or the footer badge switched on. A site
that has done neither reports once and then goes quiet. The first report
goes out on activation, or within an hour of updating from an earlier
version. Sites on a local or private address never report, and
deactivating the plugin stops the reports.
- What is sent: this site’s address, the plugin version, whether the
footer badge is switched on, and whether an API key has been saved. The
key itself is never sent, and no visitor data, content, or personal
information is.
- What comes back: a short reply, which also tells the plugin whether
me should carry rel="nofollow". It is
nofollow unless we say otherwise, and it goes back to nofollow on its
own if the site stops reporting for a week.
- Why: so we know which sites run the plugin and which are still using
it. If a site we watch has not reported for 30 days we stop watching it,
after emailing the account owner a warning first; the next report
resumes it.
The optional footer badge, when you switch it on, loads one image:
- Service: YoPingMe ( https://yoping.me/ ), badge logo
svg.
- When: only while the badge setting is on, and only on your site’s
front page. Every other page makes no request. The badge is off by
me here.
- What is sent: whatever any image request sends – your visitor’s IP
address, their browser’s user agent, and the address of the page the
badge is on. No cookies are set, no scripts are loaded, and nothing
identifies the visitor beyond that.
- What comes back: the YoPingMe logo, as an SVG image.
We count these requests to see which sites the badge is running on.
Turning the badge off on the settings page stops them immediately.
The optional status page shortcode, when a status page is configured, fetches
and displays it:
- Service: YoPingMe ( https://yoping.me/ ), status page JSON API
me/.
- When: when a page or post with the [yopingme_status] shortcode is
viewed by any visitor, and a status page is either configured on the
settings page or given directly with a slug attribute on the shortcode.
The site’s server makes the request, not the visitor’s browser, at most
every 5 minutes on success, and no more than every 2 minutes while
YoPingMe is unreachable.
- What is sent: the request itself, with the standard WordPress user
agent, which includes the WordPress version and the site’s URL, plus the
server’s IP address inherent to any request. No visitor data and no
account key.
- What comes back: the public status JSON for the configured status page,
which the shortcode renders into a compact HTML strip.
- Links: the rendered strip always links to the full status page on
me.
Removing the shortcode, or setting the status page to None on the settings
page, stops these requests immediately.
me/terms
me/privacy