What to Put on Your Status Page (And What to Leave Out)

Creating a status page is a great first step.

Creating a useful status page is where most teams go wrong.

Too little information leaves customers confused.

Too much information overwhelms them.

The best status pages strike a careful balance: clear, focused, and reassuring.

Here’s how to get it right.

Start With Components, Not Servers

Customers don’t care about hosts, clusters, or internal service names.

They care about what they use.

Good status page components are customer-facing, for example:

Web App
API
Dashboard
Authentication
Payments
Background Jobs

Each component should answer a simple question:

“Is this part of the product working right now?”

Avoid exposing internal infrastructure unless your audience is highly technical.

Use Simple, Consistent Status States

More status labels don’t equal more clarity.

Stick to a small, well-understood set:

Operational – Everything is working normally
Degraded Performance – Working, but slower or partially impacted
Partial Outage – Some users or features affected
Major Outage – Service unavailable

Consistency matters more than precision.

Incidents Should Tell a Story

When an incident happens, your updates should read like a timeline — not a mystery.

A strong incident includes:

Acknowledgement “We’re investigating an issue affecting the API.”
Progress Updates “The issue has been identified and a fix is being deployed.”
Resolution “The issue has been resolved and systems are operating normally.”

Customers shouldn’t need to infer what’s happening. Spell it out.

What to Leave Out of Your Status Page

Some things actively reduce trust when shown publicly:

Stack traces or raw error messages
Internal service names
Blame or speculation
Overly technical root-cause detail mid-incident

Save deep technical analysis for internal postmortems.

Public status pages are about reassurance, not diagnosis.

Your Status Page Is a Communication Tool

The goal of a status page isn’t to prove how complex your system is.

It’s to:

Reduce uncertainty
Set expectations
Show accountability
Keep support channels calm

If a customer leaves your status page feeling informed, you’ve done it right.

How CheckStatus Helps You Get This Right

CheckStatus is designed around these exact principles:

Component-based status tracking
Clear, opinionated status states
Simple incident timelines
A clean public interface focused on clarity
No unnecessary noise or complexity

Everything is built to help you communicate better when it matters most.

Final Thought

A great status page doesn’t just report outages.

It builds confidence — every day your systems are operational, and especially when they’re not.

If you haven’t reviewed what’s on your status page lately, now’s a good time.

Create your status page in less than 5 minutes.

More guides and best practices coming soon.