If you pay someone to look after your website, you should be able to see what happens each month without logging in to anything. That is the job of a care report.
Many reports are either empty (“all good!”) or overwhelming: pages of charts with no conclusion. A useful report is short and answers four questions.
1. What was done?
List the work completed during the period, in plain language:
- Updates or configuration changes, where they are part of the agreed scope.
- Recovery points created or exported.
- Requests completed: a new page, a fixed layout, a changed integration.
- Anything that went wrong and how it was resolved.
“Updated three components” is less useful than “updated the booking widget; tested a booking afterwards”. The second tells you what was checked, not just what was clicked.
2. What was checked?
Checks are the quiet part of maintenance, and the easiest to skip. A report should say which checks ran and what they found: availability and certificate monitoring, the agreed forms or journeys, recovery routes, renewals coming up.
Be wary of reports that show only green ticks. Knowing what was tested — and how — matters more than the colour of the result.
3. What needs a decision?
This is the most valuable section and the one most often missing. Some things shouldn’t be decided by the developer alone:
- A tool or plugin reaching the end of support, with options and rough costs.
- A domain or subscription renewal that needs a payment or an owner.
- A request that needs more time than the monthly allowance.
- A recurring problem that a small project could fix for good.
Each item should end with a clear question you can answer in one reply.
4. What comes next?
A short list of priorities for the next period keeps improvements moving: the next requests in the backlog, planned updates, and anything scheduled around your business calendar, such as a campaign or a seasonal peak.
What to leave out.
Traffic charts and speed scores can be useful, but only when someone explains what they mean for your website and what to do about them. A report full of numbers without conclusions creates work for the reader instead of saving it.
Keep it readable.
A good report takes five minutes to read and keeps a history. Over a year, it becomes a record of how the website changed and why — invaluable when a new person joins your team or when you plan a bigger change.
At SiteComfy, reporting is built around these four questions. If your current reports don’t answer them, let’s talk about your website.
