How to Set Up a Public Status Page for Your SaaS
Your SaaS is down. Customers are refreshing, getting errors, and doing the one thing you really don't want: heading to Twitter to ask "is it just me?" That single tweet does more damage than the outage itself, because now everyone knows — and you look like you don't.
A public status page fixes this. It gives your users a single, reliable place to check whether your service is working. No guessing, no support tickets, no social media spiral. Just a page that says "yes, we know, we're working on it" or "everything is fine, the problem is on your end."
And yet, most early-stage SaaS products don't have one. They wait until after their first major outage — the one where the support inbox explodes — to set one up. Don't be that team.
Why Your SaaS Needs a Public Status Page
Let's start with the selfish reasons, because those tend to be more persuasive than "it's the right thing to do."
It reduces support load. When your service goes down, the first thing users do is contact support. "Is the site down?" "Are you aware of the issue?" "When will it be fixed?" A status page answers all three questions without a single human interaction. Teams that add a public status page typically see a 30-50% drop in support tickets during incidents.
It buys you credibility. Downtime happens. Every SaaS goes down. What separates the companies users trust from the ones they abandon is transparency. A status page that shows real-time status, historical uptime data, and incident updates signals that you take reliability seriously. It's the difference between "these people are professionals" and "I wonder if anyone is even working there."
It sets expectations. When a customer sees "API — Degraded Performance" with a note that says "investigating elevated error rates, ETA 30 minutes," they know what's happening and can plan accordingly. Without that, they're flying blind — and blind users make noise.
It protects your brand during outages. The narrative around an outage matters. If users find out about it from your status page with a clear explanation, you're in control. If they find out from a Reddit thread full of speculation, you're not.
What to Include on Your Status Page
Not all status pages are created equal. Here's what actually matters, and what's just noise.
The Essentials
Component-level status. Don't just show a single green/red dot for your entire product. Break it down by the things users care about: API, Dashboard, Authentication, Webhooks, Payment Processing. When your webhook delivery system is lagging but the main app is fine, users need to know that.
Current status indicator. Operational, Degraded Performance, Partial Outage, Major Outage. Keep the vocabulary small and consistent. Users should be able to glance at the page and know the situation in under two seconds.
Uptime history. A 90-day uptime bar or chart gives users long-term confidence. It shows them you're not just telling them things are fine right now — you can prove that things are fine most of the time. This is especially valuable for enterprise prospects doing vendor evaluation.
Incident history. Past incidents with timestamps, descriptions, and resolution notes. This serves double duty: it shows transparency, and it gives your team a lightweight incident log without needing a full postmortem process for every blip.
Nice to Have
Subscriber notifications. Let users subscribe to status updates via email or other channels so they don't have to keep refreshing the page. This is the difference between a status page that reduces support tickets and one that eliminates them.
Response time graphs. Beyond just up/down, showing response time trends helps users understand performance degradation before it becomes an outage. A slow API is often worse than a brief downtime — slow failures cascade in ways that hard failures don't.
Custom domain. Running your status page on status.yourcompany.com instead of a third-party subdomain keeps the experience branded and professional. It also means the status page is reachable even if your main domain's infrastructure is down (assuming you host status on separate infrastructure).
What to Skip
Too many components. Listing every microservice, every database, every queue — that's an internal dashboard, not a status page. Users don't care about your Redis cluster. They care about whether the features they use are working.
Manual-only updates. If your status page relies entirely on someone remembering to update it during an incident, it will be wrong at the worst possible time. Automate the basics (up/down status) and layer manual updates on top for context.
Status Page Best Practices
Getting the page set up is the easy part. Running it well is where most teams drop the ball.
Automate Status Detection
The single most important status page best practice: connect it to real monitoring. A status page that requires someone to manually flip a switch during an outage is a status page that will show "Operational" while your users stare at 500 errors.
Wire your uptime monitoring directly into your status page. When a monitor detects that your API is down, the status page should reflect that automatically — no human intervention needed. Manual updates should be for adding context (what went wrong, what you're doing about it), not for changing the status indicator itself.
Keep Components User-Facing
Name your components the way your users think about your product, not the way your engineering team thinks about your infrastructure. "API" is fine. "us-east-1 ALB target group" is not. "Payment Processing" is useful. "Stripe webhook consumer pod" is not.
If you're running Kubernetes and want infrastructure-level visibility, that's what internal dashboards and Kubernetes monitoring are for. The public status page is for customers.
Communicate During Incidents
A status page that just flips between green and red without any explanation is only marginally better than no status page. When something goes wrong, post updates:
- Investigating — "We're aware of the issue and investigating."
- Identified — "The issue has been identified. Root cause is X, working on a fix."
- Monitoring — "A fix has been deployed, we're monitoring to confirm resolution."
- Resolved — "The issue has been resolved. Service is operating normally."
Keep updates brief, factual, and frequent. One update every 15-30 minutes during an active incident is a reasonable cadence. Users can handle "we don't know yet" — what they can't handle is silence.
Choose the Right Uptime Display Window
Showing 30 days of uptime history is the sweet spot for most SaaS products. It's long enough to demonstrate reliability patterns but short enough that a single bad day three weeks ago doesn't dominate the view forever. Some teams show 90 days — that works too, especially if your uptime is consistently strong.
Put the Status Page on a Separate Domain (or Subdomain)
If your main application goes down because of a DNS issue or a CDN misconfiguration, you want your status page to still be reachable. Host it on a subdomain (status.yourapp.com) that's served from different infrastructure than your main product. Otherwise, the status page goes down at the exact moment people need it most.
How to Set Up a Status Page With StatusDude
If you want to get a public status page running quickly without building anything from scratch, here's how it works with StatusDude's status page feature.
Step 1: Set Up Your Monitors
Before you build the status page, you need the monitoring that feeds it. Create monitors for the critical components of your service — your API endpoint, your dashboard URL, any public-facing services. StatusDude supports HTTP, TCP, and heartbeat monitors, so you can cover web endpoints, database connectivity, and background job health.
With uptime monitoring in place, you'll have real-time data flowing in automatically.
Step 2: Create Your Status Page
Create a new status page from the dashboard and give it a URL slug (e.g., status.yourapp.com or yourapp.statusdude.com/status). Add the monitors you want to display publicly. Not every monitor needs to be on the status page — internal health checks and infrastructure monitors can stay private.
Step 3: Group and Label Components
Organize your monitors into logical groups that make sense to your users. "Core Platform," "API," "Integrations" — whatever maps to how your customers experience your product. This is the user-facing layer, so think like a customer, not an engineer.
Step 4: Share It
Link to your status page from your app's footer, your documentation site, your support portal, and your login page. The whole point is that users can find it without asking. A status page nobody knows about is a status page that doesn't reduce support tickets.
When to Set Up Your Status Page
The short answer: now. Before your first real outage, not after.
Setting up a public status page takes less than 10 minutes if you're using a hosted solution. There's no reason to wait, and every reason not to. The teams that wait until after a major incident always say the same thing: "We should have done this months ago."
You don't need to be a large company to benefit. Even a solo founder running a SaaS with 50 users looks more professional with a status page. It signals that you're building something serious, that you respect your users' time, and that you're not going to leave them guessing when something goes wrong.
If you're ready to get started, StatusDude's free tier includes a status page with up to 7 monitors — enough to cover the critical components of most early-stage products. Check out our pricing for details on what's included at each tier.
Downtime is inevitable. How you communicate it is a choice. Make the choice before you have to.