User Guide

Tap any site card on the main screen to open its full diagnostic view. This is where a single check becomes a complete picture — not just whether the site is up or down, but why: response time, HTTP status, DNS resolution, the SSL certificate chain, and whether common ports are open. You can also rename the site, move it to a category, open it in a browser, copy its URL or the whole detail block, and re-check it on demand.

When a long site list gets in the way, open the filter screen from the tune button beside the add-website field on the main screen. Pick a category, a problem, a certificate state, or a range of expiry dates — the count at the top updates as you go, telling you how many sites still match. Nothing is applied until you tap OK, and Clear all, beside it at the bottom, puts every option back to Any. While a filter is active the tune button wears an ON badge, so you always know why the list looks short.

The Dashboard turns your monitoring history into interactive charts. It opens on an Overview that says in plain English whether anything needs attention and whether your alerts can reach you. Switch between status, response time, SSL, issues and the full site list, spot your slowest sites, and see which certificates are closest to running out. Long-press any bar on the response-time or SSL chart to see the site name and its exact value, and open any chart full-screen for a cleaner look.

Control how often Beyond Site checks your sites. A shorter interval means you find out about problems sooner; a longer one is gentler on battery and data. Automatic checks run in the background, even while the app is closed. A site that needs watching more or less often can have its own timer: hold the refresh button on its card for two seconds and pick an interval, or choose Use global timer to go back to the shared one.

Taking a site offline on purpose? Pause monitoring so a planned outage does not trigger a flood of alerts. The DT chip on a site card pauses just that one site, so a single server’s maintenance window does not silence your watch over all the others. The DT button in the app bar opens Schedule Downtime, where Downtime now pauses every site straight away and where you can plan downtime ahead — for all sites, one site or a category, once or on a repeat. A running schedule, or the all-sites pause, takes priority over a card’s own DT; the card’s countdown carries on underneath and picks up again afterwards if it has time left. Monitoring resumes on its own when a downtime ends, and the paused sites are checked straight away.

A history of every downtime, so the answer to “why was monitoring paused on Tuesday?” is still there weeks later. Each downtime — from a site card’s DT, the all-sites Downtime button or a schedule — appears once, saying which sites were paused, when it started and for how long, when it finished and why, and how long it lasted. Scheduled downtimes are recorded even when they ran while the app was closed. When you pause from a DT button you are asked for a short note explaining the reason, a schedule’s reason becomes its note, and any entry can be given or edited a note afterwards by tapping it. Entries are grouped by the day they started, newest first.

Set the thresholds that decide when Beyond Site warns you. Three levels — green, orange, and red — each carry their own SSL-expiry day range, and one alert is sent as a certificate reaches each level, with another when it is renewed. The app enforces red ≤ orange ≤ green so the levels can never overlap or conflict. Each level can have its own recipient list, and you choose per level whether alert emails are sent as well as push notifications. DNS changes have their own email switch and recipients. One Save Settings button, floating at the bottom of the screen, saves everything on it, and leaving with unsaved changes asks whether to save them.

Connect Beyond Site to your own mailbox and alerts can reach you by email as well as by push notification. Choose your provider and the usual host names, ports and security modes are filled in for you, or pick Custom and enter any SMTP or IMAP server — including a company Exchange server. Every field stays editable. You can verify your incoming settings and send yourself a real test email before you rely on it, and the password is kept in the device keychain rather than in plain text.

Look up and validate a domain’s DNS records, including A, AAAA, MX, TXT, CNAME, CAA, and SOA. Beyond Site checks DNSSEC signing, compares results across global resolvers for propagation consistency, and keeps each site’s recent checks. Every card says whether its latest check changed anything, when it ran and what ran it — Manual, Auto or Report — and opens to every value that went and came, so a change found overnight can still be read after a later check comes back clean. Enable 24-hour auto-monitoring to be told the moment a record changes.

Run a deep, single-domain security scan entirely on your device. The scan produces a banded report with a 0 to 100 posture score, covering your certificate chain, TLS configuration, protection headers and other security signals. Past scans are saved so you can review, export, share, or delete them.

Scan every site in a category in one go and get a PDF report. The report leads with the “Differences Across Sites” summary, naming the sites it compared, so you can quickly spot where one site diverges from the rest, followed by a section for each site.

Run SMTP handshake diagnostics against a mail server. Beyond Site checks the banner, reverse DNS, TLS support, and open-relay behaviour, then reports each with a colour-coded pass or fail indicator.

Quickly test whether a host is reachable and how long it takes to respond. Useful before adding a site permanently, or when you want a second opinion on connectivity.

Logs keep your most recent monitoring results — the 50 latest checks are shown, with the full total and a quick up, down and average-speed count just above them. Tap an entry to see everything that check recorded. Clear them when you want a fresh start, or import and export them for safekeeping and analysis.

See the push notifications Beyond Site has raised today, with controls to manage how they are cleaned up automatically. Each entry shows how long ago it arrived and its exact date and 24-hour time, and the Before and Now the alert recorded. Tap an entry to expand it, or long-press it to copy its details. Tapping any Beyond Site notification on your phone opens this screen. Pause the automatic removal to keep every notification, clear everything, or resume at any time.

Organise your sites into categories such as Work, Home, Live, Test, or Dev. Categories keep the site list tidy and power the Group Security Scan.

Move your sites and alert settings in or out as CSV. Export for backup or sharing, and import to restore — useful when you move to a new device or want to keep a copy of your setup.

A single checklist of everything the app needs to monitor in the background and send notifications — with the current OS-reported state and a tap-through to the right settings screen.

Build emailed reports that run on a schedule. Pick how often they go out — hourly, daily, weekly or monthly — choose which sites and checks to include, and set who receives them. Each report arrives as a PDF, either one combined file or a separate file per site. Email configuration is needed before reports can actually be sent, but you can create and save them first.

Save everything — your sites, settings and preferences — to a single .appbackup file you control, then restore it on this device or another. You can protect the file with an AES-256 password, and every backup is read back and verified before the app calls it a success. Backups go wherever you choose: save to the app’s own storage, or use your device’s file picker to put it in Files, iCloud Drive or any folder. To have backups made for you, set up Scheduled backups from the card on this screen.

Let Beyond Site back up on its own. Open Scheduled backups from Backup & Restore, switch on Back up automatically, and choose every day, a day of the week, or a date each month, at the time you want. Backups are saved on this device or, on iPhone and iPad, to iCloud Drive, and the newest one, two or three are kept: each new backup is written and checked before the oldest is removed, and backups you make yourself are never touched. Your phone decides exactly when apps may work in the background, so a backup can run a little after the time you chose, or the next time you open the app.

Wipe everything and return Beyond Site to its out-of-the-box state. A six-step flow spells out exactly what will be removed, shows the live list of stores that will be emptied, and then asks you to type RESET before anything happens — so the destructive step can never be triggered by an accidental tap. Your backup files are left untouched, and you can restore from a backup afterwards.

Choose the colours Beyond Site uses in light mode. Open Themes from the ToolKit and tap a theme to preview it across the whole app — nothing is saved until you tap Save Changes, Discard Changes goes back to the theme you had, and leaving with a preview still showing asks whether to keep it. Original Blue is the default, with ten alternatives from Purple to Slate / Charcoal, and Spectrum goes through every theme in turn, blending slowly into the next one every 30 seconds. Themes change light mode only: dark mode keeps its own colours whatever you choose.

See the health of your sites without opening the app. The widget shows the same four figures as the top of the main screen — Total, Up, Issues and Cert — with the same wording and colours, and follows your device’s light or dark mode. Pick the size that suits your home screen: the larger sizes add a headline, the time of the last check, a refresh button, and a Needs Attention list naming each site with a problem and why. It updates whenever the app or a background check records new results.