Every week, our customers receive a little email from us that has the potential to make a big impact on their businesses. This email is our weekly site care report. It covers everything from site health to eCommerce performance. But like any form of reporting, it’s only effective if it’s understood and used to make informed decisions. 

For this reason, we want to outline what our weekly reports cover and how to make the most of that information to grow your business.

Most WordPress site owners know the importance of regular Theme, Plugin, and WP Core updates. Unfortunately, many site owners are forced to learn the hard way; only once their sites have been hacked or brought down by an outdated plugin. Ever heard of the Panama Papers Leak?!? Yeah, that had to do with the Slider Revolution plugin being outdated. So, this isn’t just a nice idea. It’s kind of a big deal. 

At ValiusWP we take care of updating your site on a weekly basis. And while some services provide a “one-click” update to your site, we deliver a “Safe Updates” process which ensures compatibility, makes site backups, and takes a screenshot of your site before we make any updates. If anything goes wrong during the process, or if our “before-and-after” screenshots don’t match up, we restore your site all within about 60 seconds from when we started.

Within the weekly reports, we outline what was updated, and what version it was updated to.

Shit happens! And, as Murphy’s Law states, it’s really only a matter of time. This is why backups are really an absolute must for every site. Only a few years ago, I remember backups being a luxury that you’d pay a premium for. Today however, there is no reason why daily website backups should not be a part of your process. 

At ValiusWP, we make daily backups for all of our client sites and monitor them to ensure those backups are successful and ready to be used anytime our clients need them. 

In the weekly report, you see that backups are indeed up and running on your site, how many backup points we have, and the most recent backup we have of your site. In other words, rest assured that we got you covered!

We’ve all been there. That moment when we get an email from a customer saying, “hey I noticed your website isn’t working.”

Yeah, that sucks! And that was only the customer who took the time to email, how many other customers were turned away, and how long has the site been down? 

Well, just like most website nightmares, this could have been easily mitigated with Uptime Monitoring and Notifications. 

At ValiusWP, we monitor our client sites 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If something happens, and a site goes down, we get automated texts, emails, and phone calls making sure that we know of an issue within minutes and can get to fixing things just as quickly.

Our weekly reports give an insight into overall site uptime and list any incidents of downtime, and the duration of that downtime. If your site is experiencing more and more downtime issues, it’s usually a sign of a bigger or increasing problem. Uptime reports are a bit like the canary in the coal-mine and if you’re not paying attention to your weekly reports, you might miss the signs of a bigger website or hosting problem. 

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”; it may be an old business saying, but it’s as true today as it ever was. And while it’s easier than ever to manage website analytics, it’s amazing how few companies actually use that information to make informed business decisions.

We thought we’d do something about! With each weekly report, we include basic site analytics to give our customers a weekly snap-shot into the health of their businesses.

Traffic up or down 20% this week? With a quick glance you can see and take steps to find out why. 

Performance is a major index that Google uses to rank sites. In fact, Google found that for every .5 seconds a site takes to load, respective site traffic drops by 20%. So yeah, we thought it would be good to keep an eye on it.

Within our reports you’ll see both a PageSpeed and YSlow Grade and how that compares to last week. Anything short of improvement for the week should be looked into because in today’s competitive online market, time means money. 

Everyone knows website security is important. But most people don’t know how to track or improve their site security. This is why we keep a close eye on our clients sites to make sure they’re completely free of malware or overall vulnerabilities. Should our daily scans find something, we’ll be contacted and get to work immediately to help rectify any issues that were found. 

Website security starts with a holistic approach to website maintenance which includes all the previously discussed points in this article. We see security scans as the confirmation that everything else was done correctly. 

Wouldn’t it be great to see a snapshot of your eCommerce business on a week by week basis? Yeah, we thought so too!

A new feature of our weekly reports is eCommerce statistics to give you a snapshot of just how well your business is doing. Because we think keeping a close eye on sales is just as important as monitoring every other area of your site. Now we just made it easier to do so!

Our weekly site reports are just one of the ways in which we make managing your online business easier. With at-a-glance looks at all of the key elements within, you can stay in-touch with your site without ever needing to dive in too deeply.

While we think our site reports are the “bees-knees”, we’re always looking to improve our value and provide better support to our customers. If you have a suggestion or would like to see other bits of data on your site, let us know!

At ValiusWP, we’re always happy to make your life easier.