Guide

Website maintenance reporting for agencies

The site was fine. The client still asked what they were paying for. That is the usual shape of a care retainer. The work happened. None of it was visible.

RetainerProof is the page you put in front of that client. A website maintenance report: the work you finished, then the checks that make the work believable. Uptime, the certificate, the domain date, a Lighthouse snapshot. One branded page. They do not get a login.

It is not an uptime monitor, and it is not a maintenance suite. I do not update plugins, I do not take backups, and I do not install anything on the server. If you already have a tool for those jobs, keep it. This is the client-facing proof layer above them.

What the client should see first

Lead with the work, in their words. “Restored reliable email delivery” is a month. “Updated DNS” is a note to yourself. The technical event can sit underneath. The line they remember is the outcome.

Under that, the checks. Was the homepage reachable. When does the certificate expire. When does the domain expire. A short miss stays on the page. I would rather show a bad Tuesday than hide it behind a green badge. The checks are there so the work is not just a claim.

There is a website maintenance report template you can copy before you wire any of this up. The WordPress-specific version of the same letter is care-plan reporting. How to keep writing those lines so the retainer still makes sense at renewal is on making the work visible.

Any stack, same report

The report does not care how the site is built. React and Next.js, Webflow, Shopify, WordPress, Framer, or something custom. If the URL is public, it can be checked from the outside. That is the whole requirement. No plugin, no child theme, no access to the repo.

Mixed stacks are the normal agency. One client on Webflow, one on a Next.js marketing site, one still on WordPress. A dashboard that only speaks WordPress cannot be the client report for the other two. The longer version of that argument is website maintenance reporting beyond WordPress.

WordPress suites such as ManageWP are still the right place to update plugins and run backups. They are the wrong place to pretend the client report has to live. That split is on the ManageWP client reports page.

Uptime is an input, not the product

Homepage checks run about every 15 minutes. When a probe goes red, you get an email, and another when it recovers. That is useful. It is also ordinary. A dedicated monitor will notice a short outage that a 15-minute check can miss. If your promise is “we will know within a minute,” keep the monitor you already trust.

What those tools do not send is the care report. The client website uptime report is the uptime section of this page, not a second product. A public status link, for the client who wants to look on a Sunday without emailing you, is optional and separate. It does not include the work. Notes on hostnames and removing the product credit are under white-label status pages.

How a month actually runs

You add the public URL and pick a cadence: daily, twice a day, weekly, or monthly. You write a work entry when you do something worth showing. The client opens the same link next month and sees the new period. In the product that page is called a digest. You do not have to teach them the word. Call it the report.

You can email up to five client addresses after a scheduled check, or hand them a PDF of the same page. A manual check does not send the mail. Alerts stay with you.

On Agency the small RetainerProof credit comes off the report and off the status page. Starter and Studio keep it. Your name and accent are on the page at every plan. There is no per-site reporting fee on top of the plan.

The first email

I send a short note with the link, not a tour of the product. Something like: “This is the maintenance report for the month. The top is what I changed. Under that is whether the site was up, and when the certificate and domain expire. Same link next month.” If I have to explain a dashboard, I have already lost them.

Do not attach a second PDF full of charts unless someone asks. The page is the report. A PDF of that same page is there for the person who still files things. It is not a different story.

Start a client website report for one site you already maintain. If the only thing you wanted was a faster ping, this is the wrong signup.

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.