Guide

Website maintenance reporting beyond WordPress

Half the sites I care for are not WordPress. A Next.js marketing site. A Webflow brochure. A Shopify catalog. A Framer page someone designed in an afternoon and then asked me to keep alive. The retainer is the same question every month: what did you do?

A WordPress dashboard cannot answer that for those sites. There is nowhere to put the plugin. The client-facing proof has to sit above the stack, and look the same whether the site is a React app or a theme.

What an outside check can honestly say

I request the public URL. I can tell you the homepage answered, how the month of those checks looked, when the certificate expires, when the domain expires, and what a Lighthouse snapshot said. I can watch extra paths, up to 12, including an API if it is on the public internet. I cannot see your repo, your admin, or which component you renamed.

That limit is the product. I am not going to invent a plugin changelog for a site that has no plugins. The work section is what you write. If you shipped a fix, the line the client should read is the outcome. “Checkout emails arrive again.” Under it, if you want, the technical note: the form handler was using the old from-address. The first line is the report. The second is for you, or for the client who asks how.

The blank version of that letter is the website maintenance report template. The commercial overview, including pricing shape and what this is not, is website maintenance reporting for agencies.

WordPress is allowed. It is not required.

If one of the sites is WordPress, use the same report. Do not stand up a second system so that one client gets a plugin log and the others get a shrug. Care-plan wording, when you do want it, is on WordPress care-plan reporting. The difference is the examples, not the page.

ManageWP and MainWP remain better than me at WordPress operations. Updates, backups, a fleet of wp-admins. I do not do those, and I am not interested in pretending to. The client report is a different job, which is why it works on a static export.

What you set up

Add the URL. Pick how often the fuller check runs. Homepage probes still run about every 15 minutes between those checks, and you get an email when one goes red. The client does not. They get the report.

A public status page is optional, and it is the smaller artifact. Current state, recent incidents, no work log. Some clients want that link on their own domain. Most of the mixed-stack retainers I know just want the report. If you do need the public page, the steps are on white-label status pages.

A month on a site with no plugins

This is a made-up Next.js site, so you can see the letter without borrowing a real client. The numbers are not a result I measured.

Client: Northwind Studio
Site: https://northwind.example
Period: 1 April 2026 to 30 April 2026

Status: All clear.

Work this period:
- Contact form reaches the studio inbox again
  Technical note: the form handler was still using the old from-address. 45 min
- Pricing page matches the PDF they sent
  Technical note: three numbers in the page content, checked on a phone. 20 min

Uptime: no misses I would mention.
Certificate: 120 days left.
Domain: 400 days left.

There is no plugin line because there is nowhere for one to come from. If your report for a Next.js site still opens with “updated plugins,” you are describing a different site than the one they paid you for.

Nothing is installed on the host. External HTTP only. A Cloudflare challenge is marked unverifiable, not as downtime. I will not call a bot wall an outage.

Start a client website report on a site that is not WordPress. If every property you touch is a wp-admin and you want the report to be an activity stream from a child plugin, stay with that plugin.

Plans are Starter at $9/month for up to 5 sites, Studio at $29/month for up to 25 sites, and Agency at $79/month for up to 100 sites. Agency removes the RetainerProof credit on the client digest and the public status page. Prices are on the pricing page.

Related guides

See a sample digest Start your first digest

Also see pricing and a sample client digest.