What should a monthly website maintenance report include?

A professional monthly maintenance report is how you verify that you’re getting what you’re paying for. It’s not a one-line “everything looks good” email — it’s a documented record of specific actions taken and metrics tracked. If your current care plan provider isn’t sending you this, either they’re not doing the work or they don’t want you to see the details. Neither is acceptable.

What Every Report Should Document

• Uptime percentage and any downtime incidents. Your site should be up 99.9% of the time. The report should show your actual uptime for the month and document any downtime events — what caused them, how long they lasted, and what resolved them.
• Updates applied. A specific list of what was updated: WordPress core version, plugin names and version numbers before and after, theme version if applicable. “Updates were applied” with no specifics is not a report — it’s a sentence.
• Backup status. Confirmation that backups ran successfully every day (or per the agreed cadence), where they’re stored, and whether a test restore was performed that month. You want to know your backups actually work, not just that they ran.
• Security scan results. Results from the monthly (or more frequent) malware scan: clean status, or documentation of any findings and what was done to remediate them.
• Core Web Vitals and performance metrics. LCP, CLS, and INP scores for your key pages. If scores are degrading, the report should flag it and note whether it’s actionable.
• Issues identified and resolved. Any 404 errors, broken links, crawl issues found in Google Search Console, or other site health items — with a status on each.

Why This Accountability Matters

Monthly reporting creates a paper trail. If something does go wrong — a hack, a ranking drop, a site outage — you have documentation of the site’s state in the weeks before the incident. That context matters for both diagnosis and any service dispute resolution.

The Other Reason to Ask for This

Care plan providers who can’t produce this report don’t have the infrastructure to generate it — which means they probably aren’t running the monitoring tools in the first place. A detailed monthly report is the minimum accountability standard for professional managed maintenance.

Our care plans include monthly reporting that covers every item on this list. Ask us to show you a sample report before you commit to anything.