Connecting to HeraPress
Hera Site Monitor works fully on its own. Connecting the site to a free HeraPress account adds what only a check from outside can see: HeraPress checks whether the site is up and takes daily screenshots of its home page. The site’s problems are kept in your HeraPress dashboard, and HeraPress alerts you by email, and on Telegram once you link a chat, when the site goes down, a fatal error happens or a page breaks. This article shows how to connect, what is sent and how to disconnect.
Before you connect
- Connecting is free for up to 3 live sites per HeraPress account.
- Local and staging sites don’t count towards the 3, for example
example.local,example.test,localhostorstaging.example.com. - Nothing is sent to HeraPress until you click Connect to HeraPress.
Connect the site
- Open Site Monitor in the admin menu.
- Click Connect to HeraPress. HeraPress opens in your browser.
- Sign in to HeraPress, or create a free account, and approve the connection.
- HeraPress sends you back to the Site Monitor screen, which says Connected to HeraPress.
The first contact with HeraPress happens within 15 minutes. Open your HeraPress dashboard goes to the site’s page in HeraPress. Once HeraPress’s first results are in, See history goes to the site’s history there, and See report to a printable report of it.
Site Monitor → Settings shows the connection under HeraPress: the site’s address, its plan, whether HeraPress counts it as a live, local or staging site, and the day it was connected. Open in HeraPress goes to the site’s page there.
If you click Cancel on the HeraPress page instead of approving, you come back to the Site Monitor screen, which says Connect was cancelled. This site is not connected to HeraPress. The site stays as it was, and Connect to HeraPress starts again. If the site got connected meanwhile, for example in another browser tab, Cancel in the older tab changes nothing and the screen shows no message about it.
If your HeraPress account already has its 3 free live sites connected, the screen shows HeraPress’s message as information, with what to do: disconnect one of them in your HeraPress dashboard, then connect this site again. The site stays as it was until then.
What is sent
Every 15 minutes while connected, and at once after a fatal error, the site sends HeraPress:
| What | Details |
|---|---|
| Versions | PHP, WordPress and Hera Site Monitor |
| PHP errors | The message with email and IP addresses replaced, the file relative to the WordPress folder, the line, the plugin or theme at fault, how many times it happened and the kind of request |
| Updates | Plugins installed, and updates of plugins, themes and WordPress, with their version numbers |
| Other changes | Plugins activated, deactivated or deleted, a theme switch and a PHP version change, with the names and versions |
| Page checks | Each checked page’s path, its result, the HTTP status and the kinds of problems found, when the result changes |
| Maintenance mode | Whether visitors see a maintenance or coming soon page, the plugin that turned it on, or WordPress while it installs updates, and since when; sent when it starts or ends and once a day while it lasts |
| Store | For a WooCommerce store, a spike of failed orders or hours without any order: the number of orders and the usual number only, nothing about the orders or customers |
| How many emails WordPress could not send, without the addresses or the error |
The first send, about a minute after you connect, also includes these records from up to 6 days before you connected.
When you choose Ignore until it gets worse or Stop ignoring for a PHP error or a page problem, the site tells HeraPress within a minute, so that HeraPress lists the problem as ignored and sends no alert for it, or treats it as open again. For a PHP error, that message carries the same details as the error and a count of 0. For a page, its latest result goes again: marked as ignored when you ignore all of its problems, without the ignored ones when you ignore only some, and complete once you stop ignoring them. Ignoring a store or email problem changes only this site’s screens: HeraPress is not told.
Before it stores the text of a problem, the plugin replaces email addresses and IP addresses in it with [email] and [ip]. Any other text an error message quotes is kept and sent as it is. The plugin sends no orders, no customer records and no content of your pages.
HeraPress keeps the events the plugin sends, the results of its checks from outside and its screenshots for as long as the site’s plan keeps history: 7 days on the free plan, longer on a paid plan, and 30 more days after a paid plan ends. The approved look of each page stays while it is the approved one. HeraPress’s monitoring servers keep their own records of the checks and of the alerts they sent, which include the addresses alerts went to, for 90 days.
What is read back
Every 15 minutes, and while a Site Monitor screen is open and the last copy is more than 5 minutes old (30 seconds while new screenshots you asked for are on their way or a Telegram code waits to be used), the site reads from HeraPress what it saw of the site from outside: whether the site is up, its uptime and outages of the last 7 days, its latest screenshots with their results, how many alerts were sent and how many alert messages could not be delivered, and how many test alerts are left today. The Site Monitor screen shows them on the From outside tile, in the Screenshots card and in the HeraPress card.
The screenshots, as a copy of each whole page or of its first screen, and the full-size picture, which Open full size opens and a high-resolution screen loads for the desktop screenshot, are loaded by your browser from HeraPress’s image storage at Hetzner, through short-lived links.
When you click Take new screenshots in the Screenshots card, the site asks HeraPress to capture its home page now. The request carries nothing but the site’s connection.
When you click Send a test alert in the HeraPress card, the site asks HeraPress to send one test alert to every email address and Telegram chat the site’s alerts go to. The request carries nothing but the site’s connection, and HeraPress allows a few a day.
When you click Connect Telegram, the site asks HeraPress for a one-time code and shows it only in your browser. The plugin never contacts Telegram. See Getting alerts on Telegram.
Disconnect
- Go to Site Monitor → Settings.
- Under HeraPress, click Disconnect.
- Your browser asks you to confirm. Click OK.
The site stops sending at once, and the checks from outside, the screenshots and the alerts stop. HeraPress keeps each page’s approved look and the latest screenshot on each device for 30 days, and deletes the other screenshots at once; its monitoring servers delete their own records of the site at once. Connect the site again with the same HeraPress account within those 30 days and they come back. After 30 days HeraPress deletes the rest; you can delete them sooner from the site’s page in your HeraPress dashboard. Deleting the plugin while the site is connected disconnects it too. Deactivating the plugin pauses the contact and keeps the connection.
When HeraPress ends the connection
The connection also ends when you disconnect the site in your HeraPress dashboard, or when HeraPress has not heard from the site for 30 days. The Site Monitor screen then says so, and Connect to HeraPress starts a new connection.
For 30 minutes after you open it, a Site Monitor screen, Settings included, notices a disconnect in the dashboard within a minute and reloads. Otherwise the site learns of it at its next contact with HeraPress, within 15 minutes.