Guides, news & industry insights
Practical guides for WordPress and e-commerce alerting, product news from the FlowAlert team, and honest takes on where monitoring is heading.
Why We Send Ourselves a Fake Emergency Every Monday
Pagers don't break loudly — they rot quietly: expired tokens, muted sounds, rules that stopped matching. The case for a weekly, acknowledgement-required drill through your real alerting pipeline, and why we run one on ourselves.
WordPress Maintenance Plans: What Agencies Should Actually Promise
Updates and backups are table stakes every competitor also lists. The care plans that survive renewal promise response — known within five minutes, acknowledged within fifteen — and keep the receipts to prove it.
On-Call for a Five-Person Team (Without Pretending You're Google)
Incident commanders and severity matrices are for companies with an SRE department. The small-team version of on-call: one primary, an escalation chain instead of a calendar, nights that stay quiet, and a weekly proof it all still works.
Uptime Checks vs Heartbeats: Which One Actually Catches Your Failure?
"Is the site up?" is really two questions: can the world reach you, and is the machinery inside still running? What each monitoring direction catches, what it misses, and the grid that diagnoses both.
WooCommerce Failed Payments: The Revenue Leak Nobody Watches
A declined card isn't a lost sale — unless nobody notices for a week. Why WooCommerce payments fail, why the failures are silent, and the minutes-not-days recovery playbook.
New in FlowAlert: Uptime Checks — We Now Watch Your Site from the Outside
Every site in your dashboard can now be probed from the outside: three failed checks page whoever's on call, recovery closes the loop, and WordPress check-ins got a lot smarter about quiet nights.
Your Website Is Down. The First 30 Minutes — a Small-Business Playbook
Down for everyone or just you? Host, DNS, SSL, or last night's plugin update? A calm, ordered checklist for the worst half hour — and how to hear about the next outage before a customer tells you.
Opsgenie Is Shutting Down. What Small Teams Should Do Before April 2027
Atlassian retires Opsgenie on April 5, 2027, folding alerting into Jira Service Management. What that means, what the default path costs, and how small teams can migrate calmly — without adopting an ITSM suite.
WP-Cron Not Running? How to Tell — Before Your Customers Do
Stuck scheduled posts, skipped backups, renewals that never fired — WP-Cron fails silently because it only runs when someone visits. How to diagnose it in five minutes, fix it for good, and get paged when it breaks again.
Contact Form 7 Not Sending Email? Here's the Fix (and the Safety Net)
The form says thank you — the inbox says nothing. Why wp_mail() fails silently, the SMTP fix that lasts, and the push-notification safety net that means a broken mail server never costs you a lead.
Stripe Push Notifications: Know the Moment You Get Paid
Get an instant push notification for every Stripe payment, failed charge, or dispute — paste one webhook URL into Stripe and you're done. No code required (but the API route is still there when you want custom logic).
Send Push Notifications from Any REST API: The Complete Developer Guide
A language-agnostic guide to sending push notifications from any backend using the FlowAlert REST API — with examples in Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, and cURL.
Shopify Push Notifications: Get Alerted the Moment a Sale Happens
Set up instant push notifications for Shopify orders, refunds, and fulfillment events using Shopify webhooks and the FlowAlert API — works on any device, no app required.
How to Send Push Notifications from Next.js (App Router & Server Actions)
A practical guide to sending real-time push notifications from a Next.js application using Server Actions, Route Handlers, and the FlowAlert API — with TypeScript examples.
WooCommerce Order Notifications: Get Instant Push Alerts on Every Sale
Stop refreshing your WooCommerce dashboard. Set up real-time push notifications for new orders, refunds, failed payments, and low stock — directly to your iPhone or Android.
How to Send WordPress Push Notifications (With or Without a Plugin)
Send instant push notifications from WordPress to your phone — using the no-code FlowAlert plugin for WooCommerce and popular form plugins, or the REST API for anything custom.
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