How to run a morning check across a multi-site dashboard

The short answer

Open one dashboard and read it in the same order every morning: health, then visitor and revenue numbers, then anything that asked for your attention overnight. A morning check is a pass over the portfolio, not a tour of every host, analytics property, and payments login you own.

If you run a flagship site plus a few niche properties, or a marketing site plus the product, the failure mode is familiar. You remember the site you shipped on yesterday and forget the docs host. The quiet property is the one that can sit offline until a reader writes in. A fixed order removes that memory test.

Why the order matters more than the tools

Health answers a different question from stats. A health check asks whether the site responded. Visitor and revenue figures ask what the site reported after it responded. If you start with a revenue chart, a site that never loaded can look like a slow sales day. If you start with health, you know whether the numbers are even worth reading.

DashCanopy is built as that single pass. Each site you add becomes a tile. The tile shows the last health result, and it shows visitor and revenue stats when the site is set up to report them. Hosting stays with your host. Payments stay with your payment provider. The dashboard is the place you open when the question is whether the sites are up and what they have reported.

You might be thinking that a five-minute scan is too rough for a serious portfolio. It is rough on purpose. The morning pass is supposed to find the tile that needs a human, and then stop. Deep work — logs, a bad deploy, a checkout bug — happens on the host or in the app, after the dashboard has told you which property to open.

Step 1: Read health before you read numbers

Start at the top of the dashboard and look only at status. A successful response is online. A failed check — no response, or an error status — is the offline signal. A successful response that is slow can show as degraded. The current dashboard treats a successful check that takes five seconds or longer as degraded, which also covers hosts that are slow to wake from a cold start. Do not treat degraded as “down.” Treat it as “this one needs a look before you trust the rest of the morning.”

Check frequency depends on the plan. Starter checks every 10 minutes, Pro every 5 minutes, and Agency every 1 minute. On a 10-minute interval, a site that failed at 7:52 may still show the previous success when you sit down at 8:00. Glance, then refresh if a tile looks stale and you were expecting a deploy. The interval is the plan’s job. Your job is to notice the tile that is not online.

Write down, even if only in your head, the sites that are not online. Those are the only sites that get a second tool this morning. Everything else can wait until the stats pass.

Step 2: Read visitor and revenue stats on the tiles that are up

Visitor and revenue tracking is included on Starter, Pro, and Agency. The numbers appear when the site reports them — through a stats endpoint, the WordPress plugin, or another connection you configured. A tile with no figures is not a traffic collapse. It is a site that has not reported stats yet. The install guide and the WordPress plugin page describe how those numbers get pushed.

Compare each reporting site with its own recent pattern, not with a neighboring site. A docs site and a store should not match. You are looking for a break in that site’s own line: visitors present yesterday and absent today, or revenue that usually moves and has gone quiet while the health check still says online. That combination — up, but the reported numbers stopped — is a stats connection problem, not an outage. Fix the connection later in the day. Do not spend the morning rebuilding a checkout that is actually fine.

If you return a sparkline of recent visitor counts from the stats endpoint, use it as a shape, not as a forecast. Seven points tell you whether the last reading is a cliff or a normal Tuesday. They do not tell you what next week will do.

Step 3: Read alerts, then leave the dashboard

Email notifications are on every paid plan. Pro and Agency can also send SMS when you connect your own Twilio account. The morning check includes the inbox or the phone, but only after the tiles. An email that arrived at 2 a.m. should match a tile that is still offline or degraded. If the tile has recovered, note the time and move on. If the tile is still bad, that site is your first real task.

Webhook events, on Pro and Agency, are a separate feed: orders, signups, errors, and other events a site pushes in. They are not a second health check. A burst of error events on a tile that is online is a product problem. Silence from a store that usually emits order events is a reason to confirm the webhook is still connected, which is a setup task, not an emergency, unless the store’s health check is also failing.

When the pass is done, close the dashboard. The point of one screen is that you do not keep it open as a second job.

What to do with the site that failed

Open the public URL yourself. A health check from DashCanopy and a page load in your browser can disagree when a firewall, a geographic block, or a login wall is involved. If you can load the page and the tile says offline, look at the URL you saved on the site — a typo, an http address that now redirects, or a host that blocks the checker. If you cannot load the page either, go to the host’s logs and the last deploy. The dashboard has finished its job once it named the site.

Do not “fix” an outage by refreshing the dashboard until the tile turns green. Refreshing tells you whether the host recovered. It does not restart the host.

A weekly addition, not a second morning routine

Once a week, after the health pass, spend a few extra minutes on the stats. The daily question is reachability. The weekly question is whether the portfolio moved. Keep them separate so a quiet store does not make you ignore an offline docs site, and an offline docs site does not make you skip the store’s revenue tile for a week. A longer version of that weekly pass is in the weekly review.

If the portfolio grew, add the new site the same day you launch it. A monitor that does not know about a property cannot include it in tomorrow’s pass. The site list is part of the routine. Building that list is covered in matching the site list to the portfolio.

What this routine will not do

It will not explain a rankings drop, a payment dispute, or a bug in application code. It will not page you faster than your plan’s check interval. It will not invent visitor numbers for a site that has no stats connection. Those limits are useful. They keep the morning check short enough to repeat.

Plans and check intervals are on the pricing page. Starter is $19 per month for up to 5 sites, Pro is $69 for up to 15, and Agency is $149 for unlimited sites. Each paid plan shows a 7-day trial. Checkout is where the trial terms, including the card Stripe asks for, are confirmed.

Questions people ask about the morning pass

How long should a morning check take?

Long enough to see every tile’s health, and short enough that you still want to do it tomorrow. For a handful of sites that are online and reporting, that is a few minutes. The clock starts over only when a tile is offline, degraded, or missing the stats you expected.

Should I check the host dashboards too?

After the morning pass, open a host only for a site the dashboard flagged or for work you already planned, such as a deploy. Using every host console as the morning check is the habit this routine replaces.

What if I only have one site?

The same order still works. Health, then stats, then alerts. The payoff grows as you add properties, because the cost of remembering each login grows with them. One site is a fine place to start the habit before the list gets long.