The problem
You find out your site or app went down the same way most people do: a customer tells you, hours after it happened. Paid uptime-monitoring services exist, but checking “is this URL responding normally” on a schedule is also a five-minute automation, not a subscription you necessarily need yet.
Expected outcome
By the end of this guide you will have a workflow that checks a site every 10 minutes and emails you only when something is actually wrong — not a notification every 10 minutes regardless.
Requirements and costs
- A running n8n instance (free self-hosted, or n8n Cloud’s free trial).
- SMTP email credentials to send the alert.
- Cost: free.
What’s in the template
- Every 10 Minutes (Schedule Trigger) — change the interval to suit how fast you need to know.
- Check Site (HTTP Request) — requests your URL and reads the actual status code back, configured to never throw an error itself so a “down” response doesn’t stop the workflow.
- Is It Down (If) — compares the status code to 200 (the normal “OK” response).
- Send Down Alert (Send Email) — only runs on the “not 200” branch, so a healthy site produces no email at all.
Step-by-step implementation
- Download the template from the link below.
- In n8n, go to Workflows → Import from File, and choose
uptime-checker.json. - Open “Check Site” and replace the placeholder URL with the site you want to monitor.
- Open “Send Down Alert” and set your real From/To addresses and attach your SMTP credential.
- Adjust the interval in “Every 10 Minutes” — shorter catches problems faster but makes more requests to your own site.
- Activate the workflow.
A real example
If the site returns a normal 200 response, “Is It Down” sends the item down its “false” branch, nothing connects to it, and the run ends quietly. If the site returns 500, times out, or refuses the connection, the status code is not 200, the item goes down the “true” branch, and you get an email like:
Subject: Site down: status 500
Body: The site returned status code 500 at 2026-10-05T09:40:00.000ZVerification and troubleshooting
What we actually checked, on 5 October 2026 (record TNT-TEST-2026-10-05-001): the workflow’s 4 nodes, 3 connections and 3 expressions were run through n8n’s own validator, which reported 0 errors. We did not execute it end-to-end against a real site and a real mailbox, so this confirms the workflow is correctly built, not that your specific SMTP provider needs zero configuration.
Troubleshooting:
- You get an alert even though the site looks fine in your browser. Some sites block automated requests with no browser-like headers; add a
User-Agentheader in “Check Site” under Send Headers. - No alert arrives when the site really is down. Test your SMTP credential on its own first, separately from this workflow, before assuming the logic is wrong.
- You want a text message instead of email. Replace “Send Down Alert” with any other n8n node that can push a notification (Slack, Telegram, etc.) — the “Is It Down” branch feeding it stays the same.
Free vs. paid
This is free and complete for checking one URL on a schedule. Paid uptime services add things this doesn’t: checks from multiple global locations at once, SMS/phone alerts, and public status pages — genuinely useful once uptime matters to customers beyond just you.
Limitations and alternatives
This only checks from wherever your n8n instance runs, so it can’t tell you a site is down for everyone everywhere, only that it’s down (or slow enough to time out) from that one location. It also checks on a fixed interval, so an outage between checks is detected late by up to that interval, not instantly.
Free resources
The download contains the ready-to-import workflow and a short setup README.
Download the uptime checker template (ZIP, 2 KB)
Is there a paid version?
Not yet. This is the complete method. TNT Review has sold nothing to date and has no checkout, so any price we discuss in future should be read as a hypothesis, not an offer.