Our website client reports help you understand how your website is performing, from the number of visitors to how fast it loads. Here’s a quick guide to what it all means.
Our standard monthly reports will tell you about:
- Website statistics (analytics) overview
- Software updates and optimisations done by us
- Backups done, plus security and performance checks
Premium reports are available monthly, fortnightly or weekly and include our search optimisation report. Find out more about that here.
About the reports
We generate the reports through an app we use to manage the WordPress websites we look after remotely. This records everything we do via the app, as well as monitoring website health.
Why provide reports?
All too often we have no idea of what is happening on our websites, and that’s a missed opportunity.
It pays to understand how people use your website, so you can make improvements so it serves your business better, and help improve where it appears in search. Also, for us it’s a way to show you the work we do behind the scenes to keep your website up to date, keep it secure and loading fast.
It helps de-mystify what we do, as well as hopefully helping you understand your website a little more. And it illustrates the high technical standards we work to.
But most of all, it’s a way to improve our service to our clients and add value to what we do.
Analytics
Your website uses Google Analytics to record visitor statistics, and the report provides an overview of these, including:
- The number of visitors (sessions) over time
- How visitors found your site (referrers)
- Most popular pages
- Search terms used (keywords)
- Which countries your visitors are in
Updates and optimisations
WordPress websites have three elements that require regular updating:
- WordPress itself (the core software)
- Plugins, which do specific things like contact forms, for example
- Themes (one per site) which control the design of the site
We do most of these updates remotely and these are recorded in the report.
However, especially with complex plugins, like WooCommerce, for example, we usually log in to the website and do the update manually, to make sure everything contiues to work. These are not recorded in the report.
Optimisations
Every website builds up code ‘junk’ over time and we keep on top of this through our remote app, which is in turn added to the report as optimisations.
Once again, the report doesn’t include other optimisation(mostly to improve load speed) that we do on each site and on our hosting account.
Backups
We back up (make a copy of) your website once a month through our remote management app, and these are listed in the report.
This means that if something goes wrong with our hosting account, we have a copy of your site to restore that’s less than a month old.
This part of the report section also provides a basic technical specification for your website.
However, this is just the back up backup, as we also take backups of websites and emails every 24 hours, and retain copies going back 30 days, so if anything goes wrong, we have copies of your website.
Security
This shows the result of the monthly security scan we run on your site, checking for vulnerabilities and malware, and checking whether it has been blacklisted.
Due to the precautions we take, there should never be a problem here, but it’s good to know that everything is OK.
Performance
We also run a monthly performance check on your site and include the results in the report. But what is performance? Basically, it’s how quickly your website loads.
Loading speed makes a huge difference to your website. Nobody likes a slow website or waiting for a page to load, and we aim for a load speed of 2 seconds or less.
Even if your website was built by us years ago, we continue to work to make it load faster, both at the hosting level and on your website itself.
The performance check is a good way for us to monitor the health of your site and uses two of the best-known performance checks, Google PageSpeed and Yahoo’s YSlow.
WooCommerce
All the basic WooCommerce data for your online shop, if you have one, without having to log in to your admin area.
How to interpret our Premium SEO reports
We also offer Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) reports, which can tell you where your site stands with Google and are a great starting point for any improvement you wish to make. Find out more about them here: Premium SEO reports.