check out coinb.in/#fees
Electrum itself is more reliable than this site, i actually checked it during the spike but it still was suggesting 1 Satoshi/byte as transaction fee. possibly some bug in their system.
the link posted above by @TryNinja is also very helpful for estimation of fees. you take a look at mempool size in MB and then figure at which level it reaches 1-1.2 MB and if you pay that much fee you will have a high priority transaction.
for example it currently is 1 but during the spike it was 110 s/b
True, which electrum would normally update basing on whats the current fee when making up a transaction but sometimes it doesnt really make any changes and when sudden spike of fees do happen then expect your previous transaction would really have a delay due you do pay only a small portion of the fee.Usually when you click up that too thing bottom right on the client you will see preference and tick dynamic fees.
... and that is why Replace By Fee (RBF) features exist for bitcoin. i believe it is enabeld by default in the newer versions. the option is in Preference under the first tab called Fees and under the option called Propose Replace-by-fee. you can set it to always from the dropdown box.
for example if you got a fee wrong and your transaction was stuck you will be one click away from increasing the fee to a better level.