HTTP methods for website monitoring: GET, HEAD, and POST explained

HTTP methods are standardized commands that tell a web server what action to perform on a given resource.

It all starts with asking the right question

This should be what you ask before adding a monitoring check: if my users were here right now, how would I know things are working? You didn't just test for the press or blog you inherited in a cron job you encountered near the right time. Website monitoring used by real teams, every time you set a monitoring check, is about asking: is this URL actually up and running, and doing what it's supposed to do?

Most teams monitor with one setting only and never think about it again. That's where things go wrong. The method you choose decides whether the server accepts or rejects the request, what comes back in the response, how much bandwidth you're consuming, and ultimately, whether the results you're watching at the console actually reflect what your users are actually experiencing at your site.

Site24x7 supports GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, PATCH, and more for website monitors and REST API monitors. Here's what each one does, when to use it, and how to put your configuration right the first time. Let's start with the universal basics, and the one most teams misconfigure.

GET—because a 200 status doesn't always mean everything is okay

Of all the methods available, GET is the one teams reach for instinctively—and for good reason. When Site24x7 sends a GET request, the server returns the full response body: HTML, JSON, XML—whatever the endpoint is built to deliver. That full response is what separates GET from a simple "is it alive?" check.

However, what looks like a clean GET response from a server can mask real problems. A CDN might quietly serve a stale cached page with a 200 OK status, even while the origin server is completely offline. The monitoring check would say the server responded fine, nothing wrong. But it's expired content.

GET paired with a keyword check fixes this gap. In a website monitor on Site24x7, configure an exact keyword—with such a keyword in the content, checking whether your endpoint returns the expected live content. The content-matching ensures a request is hitting the live application logic—not a stale cache. The website is actually delivering the live content, not a cached version.

Use GET when you want to verify what a page is actually serving, not just that it responded. Not just the response code but when the content matters—especially when content is configured behind CDNs that might serve up out-of-date content.

HEAD—the quiet watchdog your infrastructure team will love

HEAD and GET are almost siblings. The request looks identical to the server—the server even runs the same internal processing. But the server only returns headers, never the response body. No page content, no HTML, no JSON—just headers.

For pure availability checks, HEAD works great. In a HEAD check with Site24x7, the monitoring probe verifies availability from response headers alone. But that alone, across 15 endpoints at 1-minute frequency over 30 days of monitoring—the bandwidth cost is a fraction of what a full GET would cost. For high-frequency monitoring, HEAD is cheap.

The thing is, HEAD is not a universal replacement for GET. If you're running content validation or keyword checks, you need GET because HEAD doesn't return a body to validate against.

So GET validates content and HEAD confirms availability. Between them, they cover a lot of ground. But there's a third method in their family, and it's the one closest to what your users actually spend their time trying to do.

POST—monitoring the moments that actually matter to your users

GET and HEAD ask the server for information, while POST sends data to it. This is what real users do when they submit a form, sign in, or complete a purchase or booking.

This is the gap that catches teams off guard. If your monitoring solution only uses GET and HEAD, you have no visibility into the workflows your customers care most about. Think about the last time you had a login form break, an account creation fail, or a payment that threw a timeout.

Site24x7 supports four approaches for POST data:

• Form-encoded: Standard HTML form submissions—think login pages, contact forms.
• JSON: For REST APIs and modern applications.
• XML: For SOAP-based services and legacy integrations.
• Raw: For custom formats or payloads that don't fit the other categories.

For REST API monitors, Site24x7 also supports PUT, PATCH, DELETE, OPTIONS, and more. And if you have something sensitive that sits behind a standard REST method with a custom HTTP method, you can configure that too.

Beyond the core three

GET, HEAD, and POST cover the vast majority of what website monitoring needs. But if you're running REST APIs or have endpoints that need updating or deleting resources, there's more.

For REST API monitors, Site24x7 also supports PUT, PATCH, DELETE, OPTIONS, and more. And if you have something sensitive behind a non-standard method, a custom HTTP method is possible too.

• PUT: Use when you want to verify that a full data update goes through properly.
• PATCH: Use after your API supports partial updates and you want to confirm that field-level changes are accepted.
• DELETE: Use to verify a full DELETE workflow in a sandbox environment.
• OPTIONS: Use if you need to verify CORS preflight responses for a browser-facing API—especially for SPA-type applications doing cross-origin requests.

Basically, pick the method for whichever scenario is the job. The other half is setting it up.

Setting it up in Site24x7

To create a website monitor in Site24x7, you need to go to Admin > Inventory > Add Monitor > Website. Once you're there, select your method under HTTP Configuration > HTTP Method.

For REST API monitors, the path is Admin > Inventory > Add Monitor > REST API. Same layout but different options for the request body—set whether the server responds to JSON or XML.

A few settings most teams skip, but they're important along the configuration:

• If your site gets redirected at runtime or your endpoint returns custom status codes like 206 or 304 for cached requests, configure your expected HTTP response code. Otherwise, a non-200 response won't be correctly assessed.
• Both site-level and API-level scenarios can be configured with content checks at the same time.

For authenticated endpoints, Site24x7 covers the full range of requirements for real-world endpoints:

• Basic, Digest, and NTLM for legacy and internal systems.
• OAuth 2.0 and JSON Path Token for modern token-based APIs.
• Kerberos and SAML for enterprise SSO-protected resources.

Credentials across all these types are stored in reusable credential profiles—no hard-coding, no editing per monitor configuration one at a time.

Five mistakes that quietly undermine your monitoring

Getting the setup right is the foundation. But even a well-configured monitor can be quietly undermined by a handful of mistakes that are easy to make and hard to catch:

• Using GET on every endpoint is the most common one. POST-only endpoints return 405 errors on GET checks, which triggers false alerts.
• Sending POST to a read-only endpoint in the same schedule or service. Same 405 error, same false alert noise.
• Skipping content validation. A 200 OK response doesn't mean the page content is correct—your CDN could be serving stale content while the origin is down.
• Validating just the status code versus validating the response body. HTTP 200 from a server doesn't guarantee the right content is being returned.
• Not configuring custom status codes for your monitor. If your server returns 206 or 304 for caching responses, you've excluded valid responses from your monitoring.

Additionally:

• Not setting custom status values for your monitor like an alert factory. If your server returns 206 and 304 for caching, you need those included in your expected response codes.
• Store credentials in a profile, usable in one place, and every monitor that references it stays in sync. No need to update a REST endpoint bearer token in 40 different places.

Avoid these, and your monitoring will work as it's supposed to in practice.

What good monitoring looks like in practice

An e-commerce store runs a single HTTP website monitor using GET on their root landing page with a keyword check for "Add to cart," and a POST check on their cart/checkout endpoint, all with the same frequency and alerting criteria. If checkout breaks, monitoring catches it within a minute because the POST check monitors a real form submission—not a HEAD or GET on the checkout page, but an actual submission that verifies the form handler is working.

A SaaS company uses GET with keyword validation for their dashboard pages and POST monitors for their login and API token generation endpoints. If the login workflow breaks, they know within minutes because the POST monitor detected a non-200 response or missing expected content.

Both teams are doing the same thing: asking the right question at every layer of their application. What brings it back is where we started.

The right method, every time

Beyond the overall message here: it takes an e-commerce site, or a payment gateway, or a targeted use case—a custom collection on an error page your monitoring tool covers. Tagged? Because it was configured to hit the right endpoints.

GET, HEAD, and POST each cover a different part of the picture, but all things combined just work. Imagine building a monitor for a whole set of things that your application is a hybrid: landing pages, APIs, form-based checkout. Each needs its own method, and getting this combination right is what makes monitoring worth covering. Try signing up for a free trial of Site24x7.

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