Reporting02 June 20265 min read

The maintenance report clients actually read

A good monthly report has three numbers and one sentence of context. Everything else is noise your client will skip.

Joost Bakker

Clients do not read changelogs. They want to know that their site was online, that it was kept current and that nothing dangerous is waiting.

Lead with uptime as a single percentage, the number of updates you applied and the number of open security findings. Three numbers, above the fold.

Add one short paragraph in plain language about anything unusual that month: an outage, a plugin you deliberately held back, a certificate that renews soon.

Send the report on a fixed day. Predictability is what makes a maintenance contract feel like a service instead of an invoice.