What is in the monthly maintenance report

Once a month WP Safer writes a single document about the work done on your sites in the month that just ended: the backups taken, the updates applied, how much of the time each site was reachable, and where each site stands today. It arrives by e-mail, and the same document is available as a page you can hand to someone else and as a PDF. This article is about what is inside it.

It is produced for the previous calendar month — a month that is over. There is no partial report for the month in progress.

The four numbers at the top

The report opens with the month, the number of sites it covers, and four figures: backups taken, updates applied, uptime across the fleet, and the average Site Health score. Everything below is the detail behind those four.

Backups

How many backups completed during the month and how much they came to, how many runs failed, and — the number that actually matters — how many sites ended the month without a single successful backup. Each site then gets its own line with its backup count, total size and the time of its last one.

Three situations are kept apart, because they mean different things:

• No schedule. Nothing was ever set up for this site.
• Scheduled, but nothing ran. There is a schedule and it produced no backup this month — the line that deserves your attention.
• Runs failed. Attempts were made and did not finish.

Updates

Core, plugin and theme updates applied during the month, how many failed, and how many were rolled back, with a per-site breakdown. Below it the report lists the changes worth reading one by one — core updates, failures and rollbacks — with the site, the date, what changed and how it ended. Routine successful plugin updates are not listed individually; they are in the counts.

Uptime

Uptime per site for the month, total downtime, every incident with its cause and duration, and the average response time (time to first byte). The fleet line says how many of your sites were actually measured, not just how many you have.

Checks are made from a single monitoring location, in Finland, and the report says so at the bottom rather than implying a worldwide view.

Site Health

The Site Health score for each site — as it stands at the moment the report is opened, not an average for the month. WP Safer does not keep a history of the score, so it is labelled for what it is: today's reading, printed next to the month's work.

File integrity

If file integrity scanning runs on your account, the document also shows the state of the last completed scan per site: open findings and when the scan ran. Like Site Health this is a current reading, not a monthly average, and files you have accepted as known are not counted.

Expiring soon

Certificates and domain names that are close to their expiry date. This block only appears when something is actually due — an empty warning section every month teaches you to ignore it.

What the report will not do

It does not fill in gaps. Two rules run through the whole document:

• A site that was not measured is not credited with 100%. It stays in the list and says not enough data yet. A site you connected last week should not look like a perfect month.
• A section with no source is not drawn at all. If update history is not being recorded for a period, the report does not print “0 updates” — it says the history is not available. Zero and “we did not look” are different answers, and the report never passes one off as the other.

If nothing at all was measured for your sites in that month, no report is sent. There is nothing to say, so nothing is said.

A note on older months

The report is built fresh from your records every time it is opened, rather than stored as a file. Update history is kept for 180 days, so a report for a month further back than that will list fewer changes than it did at the time — the page states this at the bottom instead of quietly showing less.

Next: when the report is generated and sent, the PDF and the shareable link, and choosing what goes into it.