Description
Most WordPress breakage follows an update. A plugin auto-updates overnight, the checkout hook changes, a button stops working — and the site keeps returning HTTP 200 the whole time, so uptime monitoring sees nothing.
NorthDuty Connect closes that gap. It notifies NorthDuty the moment something on your site changes, and NorthDuty immediately re-runs the checks that matter instead of waiting for the next scheduled slot:
- Real-browser journeys — your checkout, login, signup, and contact-form flows, run step by step, with the failing step named and screenshotted.
- Website health checks — uptime, SSL, DNS, blank pages, JavaScript errors, and the API endpoints your pages depend on.
The plugin itself stays deliberately tiny: it listens for update and content events and sends a small signed notification. All monitoring runs on NorthDuty’s infrastructure — nothing here slows your site, adds cron jobs, or stores visitor data.
What triggers a notification
- Plugin, theme, and core updates — including automatic background updates
- Plugin activation and deactivation, and theme switches
- Published content changes: posts, pages, and WooCommerce products (drafts, autosaves, and revisions are ignored)
See it in action
We keep a real WooCommerce store that we break on purpose, so you can watch a monitored checkout fail and get caught: northduty.com/demo.
External services
This plugin sends event notifications to NorthDuty (northduty.com), a website monitoring service, only after you configure a deploy hook URL on the settings screen. Until then it sends nothing.
Each notification contains: the event type (for example plugin.updated or page.published), your site URL, the changed item’s permalink and ID where relevant, and the plugin version. Notifications are HMAC-signed with the secret you configure. No visitor data, user accounts, or content bodies are ever sent.
A NorthDuty account is required to receive the notifications. It works on every NorthDuty plan, including the free one. See NorthDuty’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Screenshots
Installation
- Create a free NorthDuty account at northduty.com (no card) and add your site as a project.
- In NorthDuty, open Settings Run on site changes. On a WordPress site, the “Connect your WordPress site” card has the webhook address and a button to generate the signing secret. (Both are also under “Advanced: webhook & extra pages”.)
- Install and activate NorthDuty Connect, then paste both values under Settings NorthDuty and save.
- Click “Send test event”. It shows up in NorthDuty under Recent changes.
FAQ-e
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Does this plugin slow my site down?
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No. Notifications are sent asynchronously with a short timeout and no retries, and nothing runs on page views by visitors. The monitoring itself happens entirely on NorthDuty’s servers, from the outside.
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Does it work with WooCommerce?
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Yes — that’s the main use case. Product changes trigger re-checks, and NorthDuty runs your actual cart and checkout flow in a real browser on a schedule. The plugin works on any WordPress site, WooCommerce or not.
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Do I need a NorthDuty account?
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Yes. The plugin only sends notifications; the checks themselves run in NorthDuty. Without an account and a configured webhook address, the plugin sends nothing.
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Do I need a paid NorthDuty plan?
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No. On the free plan, every update the plugin reports gets a health check, and your journey re-runs on up to 3 updates a day (after that, it waits for its daily schedule). Paid plans, from $29/month, re-run every journey on every update and add more journeys, faster schedules and detection that works without a plugin.
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Does it work if my site is behind Cloudflare or a firewall?
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The plugin sends outgoing requests only, so firewalls that filter incoming traffic don’t affect it. For NorthDuty’s checks to reach your site, a strict bot-protection rule may need to allow NorthDuty’s monitoring traffic. NorthDuty reports a blocked check as blocked rather than as a broken site.
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Can I use it on a staging site?
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Yes. Add the staging site to NorthDuty as its own project; it gets its own webhook address and secret, so staging and production are monitored separately.
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What happens if NorthDuty is unreachable?
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Nothing visible: the notification is dropped and your site carries on. NorthDuty’s scheduled checks still run regardless — update-triggered re-checks are an acceleration, not a dependency.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“NorthDuty Connect – Checkout, Form & Uptime Monitoring” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.2
- Works on NorthDuty’s free plan: every update gets a health check, and your journey re-runs on up to 3 updates a day.
- Settings screen points to the current place in NorthDuty (Settings Run on site changes) and links to sign-up.
- Readme: screenshots and more FAQs.
1.0.1
- Renamed all functions, options, and constants to the longer
ndconnect_/NDCONNECT_prefix to avoid conflicts with other plugins.
1.0.0
- Initial release: update, activation, theme-switch, and content-change notifications with HMAC-signed delivery and a settings-screen test button.