Notification when user sees error message

Sign up for uptimerobot.com and it will email you when a site goes bye-bye. It’s free for up to 50 sites. It can’t be done with a plugin because a 5xx error means the site is down.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).

Thank you but I’m not interested in being notified if the site is down; I can actually see that for myself. I’m worried about a user being denied access to a page or service that may be somewhat unique to their situation (e.g. Mac platform or browser) and/or that page or service! The site may be up and running except for this anomaly. I want to be notified if an error message is sent to the user and some details of the circumstances. Any plug-in for that you recommend?

We had a situation last week where I was on the phone to a potential supplier and we were discussing the site Automotive-Art.com She complained that she was getting 503 error messages when she tried to access product pages. She was on a Mac platform. During this exact same time period, I could access those pages without difficulty. I was incredulous that she could not access pages that I could and what worries me that except for the exceptional circumstances of my being on the phone with her, I would not have known of the problem. We were able to fix the problem (or so I have been told.) So can you help me?

Why she sees the error and you don’t:
https://support.tigertech.net/503-error

This plugin might help:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/500-503-error-pages/

As I said, on a 5xx error the site is down, so plugins are not going to help.

A 503 itself says that there’s a server problem in the http request. Whether or not the plugin would work depends where in the stack the error happens and if it happens before the plugin would see it. For example, as @sterndata noted, a problem in .htaccess that causes a 500 error would block WP from loading, in which case a plugin is not a reliable thing for looking for PHP or apache errors.

Another approach is to use a rewrite rule in .htaccess to load a page which could send you an email notification:
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/custom-error.html

[Thanks to @sterndata for the additional information.]

Hi bdbrown, the tigertech explanation was very helpful. But if I understand the second hyperlink page, it’s not linking to a “plug in solution’. It appears to describe how to generate a static message when a user confronts a 503 situation. Will the process described send the message to me? I’m not technically proficient to tell. I’m confused that you described that link as offering a “plugin solution”. Did you have another link in mind?

The original “plugin solution” I linked may or may not work, as pointed out by @sterndata, depending on when the error occurs. A redirect using your .htaccess file does require more technical proficiency. Providing that level of help is beyond the limits of what most in the community here are willing to offer in their spare time (everyone here is a volunteer). In addition, it doesn’t really address the cause of the problem which is likely somewhere within the processing of your site in a particular user configuration. You should consider hiring someone so that you can give them direct access to the site for a more efficient fix than we can provide here. A couple of different places you can try are https://jobs.wordpress.net/ or https://jetpack.pro/.

I totally appreciate your input and follow-through (said sincerely). I will use both those URLs to try to get some qualified help.