Guide

How to monitor a Shopify domain

Shopify runs the store. The address your customers type — the domain, its DNS, its certificate — is your job.

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Shopify hosts your store and keeps its platform up — you don't need to monitor Shopify's servers. What you do need to monitor is everything between your customers and Shopify: your custom domain. The DNS records that point yourstore.com at Shopify, the SSL certificate on that domain, and the apex-to-www redirect are all yours, and every one of them can fail while Shopify itself is perfectly healthy — showing your customers an unreachable-site error on a store that is technically “up.” The setup that covers you: one HTTP check on the customer-facing domain (not myshopify.com), plus a check on the redirect domain.

What Shopify covers — and where its responsibility ends

Shopify's infrastructure is genuinely not your problem: storefront servers, checkout, their CDN, their scaling. If those break, Shopify's engineers are already on it. Their responsibility ends at the edge of their platform — and your store's address lives outside that edge. Shopify can be flawless while yourstore.com is unreachable, because reaching Shopify through your domain depends on wiring that belongs to you.

Your actual risk surface

  • DNS pointing at Shopify. A custom domain works because of records at your registrar — typically an A record on the apex and a CNAME on www pointing to Shopify. A mistaken edit, a registrar migration, a lapsed domain renewal, or a helpful teammate “cleaning up” records takes the store off the internet. DNS failure doesn't look like an error page; it looks like the site never existed.
  • SSL on the custom domain. Shopify issues and renews the certificate for yourstore.com automatically — but only while your DNS points where Shopify expects. If the records drift, issuance or renewal fails quietly, and customers start seeing a full-screen browser security warning at your checkout's front door. The free domain health check reads your DNS, SSL and response health in one report.
  • The apex/www redirect. One version of your domain is primary and the other should redirect to it. When the redirect breaks, half your typed-in, printed and bookmarked traffic fails — and it fails silently, because everyone testing the site uses the version that works.
  • Third-party apps in the storefront. Apps inject scripts into your theme. A slow or failing app script won't take the store down, but it can drag page loads badly enough to cost sales — a slow creep you only see if something is measuring response time over weeks.

What to monitor (and what not to)

  1. Monitor the customer-facing domain: https://www.yourstore.com (or whichever version is primary). Not yourstore.myshopify.com — that address bypasses your DNS, your certificate and your redirects, which is precisely the part you're responsible for. The myshopify address can be green while every path a customer actually takes is broken.
  2. Monitor the other version of the domain too. A check against the apex (or www, whichever redirects) confirms the redirect keeps landing on the storefront instead of erroring.
  3. Let the check validate SSL and watch response time. Certificate problems get caught before customers see warnings, and a response-time trend shows you what that new app actually cost.

What Shopify's status page does — and doesn't — tell you

status.shopify.com answers one question: is the platform having an incident? It's the right place to look when checkout misbehaves for everyone. But it knows nothing about your domain. It will never tell you that your DNS record was deleted, your domain registration expired, your certificate failed to renew, or your redirect broke — your store can be fully down while their status page is a wall of green. The two signals answer different questions: their page says “is Shopify up?”; your own monitor says “can my customers reach my store?” Only the second one is about your revenue, and only you can watch it.