Status pages that customers trust: what to put on yours

During an outage, every customer asks the same question at the same time: is it you or is it me? A status page answers it once, for everyone, and keeps the answer up to date. Done well, it turns a flood of support tickets into a link.

Done badly — green while everything is on fire — it does the opposite: it teaches customers not to believe you.

Update it automatically

The most common reason status pages lie is that someone has to remember to update them, in the middle of an incident, while also fixing it. Connect the page to your monitors instead. When a monitor goes down, the page shows it within the check interval, without anyone touching it. Your written updates then add context to a status that's already accurate.

Show what customers recognise

Customers don't know your internal service names. List what they use: Website, API, Dashboard, Payments, Email delivery. Group them in a few sections if you have many. In Zharp, each resource on a page has its own display name — your monitor's real name, URL and settings are never shown.

History builds trust

A page that's always green looks either perfect or fake. Ninety days of daily uptime bars, including the bad days, show that the page is real. Past incidents with their updates show that you communicate when things break — which is what customers are really evaluating.

How to write incident updates

• Post early. "We're investigating errors on the API" within minutes beats a perfect explanation an hour later.
• Say what's affected, in plain words. "Some API requests are failing", not "elevated 5xx on ingress".
• Update on a rhythm, even when there's no news, so people know you're still on it.
• Close it properly: what happened, that it's fixed, and what you're changing so it doesn't happen again.

Let people subscribe

The customers who care most shouldn't have to keep refreshing. Let them subscribe to updates and announce planned maintenance ahead of time, so a scheduled window doesn't look like an outage.

Put it on your own domain

status.yourcompany.com reads as part of your product and is easy to remember. In Zharp you add a CNAME record pointing to statuspage.zharp.io, and the page is served on your domain once the record is verified. Pages can also be password-protected or private, for internal or customer-specific status.

An example

Zharp's own status page runs on Zharp and is updated by the same monitors described here: zharp.io/status. Every Zharp plan includes status pages — the status page docs walk through setting one up.