Writing a monthly website report for clients, honestly
A client report has one job: show what the website did for the business this month and what you did for the website. That fits on one page. It needs five sections, each with a number you can point to and a sentence that explains it, and no figure you couldn't defend if the client asked where it came from.
The five sections and where each number comes from
| Section | What to show | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | Page views this month against last month, with the trend by day | The site's analytics in the dashboard |
| Where people came from | The top sources: search, direct, social, referrals, AI assistants | The same analytics, by source |
| Enquiries | How many came in through each form, and whether all reached someone | The site's submissions |
| Changes made | What you changed, the date, and why | Your notes, checked against version history |
| Health | The site's security checks and last integrity scan | The public security report |
Analytics are counted without cookies, so there's no consent banner to explain and no gap from people who declined one. AI and search crawlers are counted separately from people, which keeps bot traffic out of the visits figure. Say this once in the first report so the client knows what the numbers do and don't include.
Producing it each month
- Pick a fixed day, such as the third working day of the month, and keep it.
- Pull the visits and sources for the month and the month before. Write down the two totals and the top three sources.
- Count enquiries per form from the submissions list. Then send a test submission through each form, so you can write "every form tested and working" truthfully.
- List the changes. Use your own log of requests and cross-check it against version history, which keeps the most recent saves (up to the plan's number) and where each came from.
- Open the security report at the site's
/.well-known/anticode-securityand note the date and result of the last integrity scan. - Ask the Intelligence page if a number puzzles you. It answers only from cited metrics and makes forecasts only after 14 days of data, so quote what it cites rather than its tone.
- Write one interpretive sentence per section. Then one recommendation for next month, priced if it's outside the retainer.
- Send it as an email or a short document. Ask one question at the end, so the client replies.
Writing the sentences
Numbers without a reason are noise. Pair each with what probably caused it, and say "probably" when that's the honest word.
- Good: "Visits rose from 610 to 780, mostly from search, after the new services page went live on the 9th."
- Good: "Two fewer enquiries than last month. August is usually quieter for you; nothing on the site changed."
- Not good: "Engagement is up across all channels." Which number, and compared with what?
- Not good: "You're outperforming the industry average." Unless you have a sourced benchmark for their trade and area, you don't know that.
What not to put in
- Invented benchmarks
- Industry averages from nowhere invite a question you can't answer. Compare the site with its own past.
- Vanity totals
- Year-to-date views in large type look impressive and mean little. Show the month and the trend.
- Numbers you didn't measure
- Anticode's analytics are page views by day and source; there are no heatmaps, scroll depth or A/B results. Don't imply there are.
- Jargon
- "Referral" needs a word of explanation the first time; "bounce rate" isn't measured, so leave it out.
When the news is bad
Visits fall, or a form stopped delivering for a week. Say so in the first line, with what you found and what you did. A connector that failed delivery doesn't retry, but the submissions themselves are still saved in Anticode, so you can usually recover the enquiries and forward them. Clients forgive problems far more readily than discovering them on their own.
How you know the report works
Clients reply to it, ask a question about it, or approve a recommendation from it. If reports go unanswered for three months, they're too long or too vague: cut to the five sections and one recommendation.
Limits
Anticode provides the analytics, the submissions, the security report, version history and the Intelligence page. It doesn't write, design or send the report, and it has no third-party analytics, conversion goals or heatmaps built in. The report sits inside a maintenance retainer for most agencies; see site analytics and the Intelligence page for what each shows, and managing multiple client websites for doing this across many sites.
Questions people ask
What should a monthly website report include?
Visits and their sources compared with last month, enquiries per form, changes made, the site's security status, and one recommendation.
How long should a client website report be?
One page. If it needs more, the extra detail can go in an appendix the client can skip.
Can I include bounce rate or time on page?
Not from Anticode's analytics, which count page views by day and source. Report only what you measured.