As of April 2022 we have started sending all our website maintenance clients a monthly report. This lets you know how your website is doing, and shows what we have done this month to look after your website.
We understand that our clients come from a range of backgrounds and that the jargon in the report is not necessarily easy to understand, so this post breaks down what some of the terms mean.
First, it’s good to understand how your website was built. WordPress is like the operating system of your website. A bit like Windows or Android – it’s the platform that makes the website work. On top of that, various plugins give your site functionality. These work like programs or apps to allow your website to do all sorts of things like accept payments, send emails, display images etc. Every site has a theme which controls how the site looks. The theme controls the page layout, fonts and colours, and the way the plugins interact with the different website pages.
In the background the website runs using the PHP programming language, and has a database to store all the website content, that is managed using My SQL.
Hackers are often looking to add malicious code to websites, either to add viruses to your visitors’ computers, or to collect your clients’ usernames and passwords. It’s very important to keep everything up to date, as any vulnerabilities that hackers discover are quickly fixed by the people who maintain the various programs. In addition, a website that is kept up to date is more likely to run fast on different browsers, and be ranked highly on google.
Weekly Activity Report
In the body of the email we will give you a breakdown of the weekly activities for your site.
The “Visitors” column tells you the number of page views you’ve had on your site. This includes views from search engines looking for changes in your site. If one visitor looks at multiple pages, each page visited will count for one view.
The “Spam Contact Block” column is how many times we have protected your website from a spam comment, registration, contact email, ecommerce order or web-form.
The “Spam Firewall Block” column is how many times we have stopped a known spam robot from visiting your site. We use CleanTalk’s list of spam IP addresses to block robots getting to your site in the first place. This not only cuts down spam, but it speeds up your website for legitimate visitors, and reduces the likelihood of malicious attacks on your website.
Maintenance Overview
Your PDF monthly report is attached to your monthly email. Here is an explanation of the terms used:
| Term | Example | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Website | https://greenglen.solutions/ | Your website address |
| WordPress Version | 5.9.3 | The program that the website is built on |
| Active Theme | Green Glen Theme | The program controlling how your site looks |
| PHP Version | 7.4.29 | The programming language used to control your site |
| My SQL Version | 5.7.32-35-log | The programming language used to interact with the database |
| Website Uptime | 100% | The percentage of time that your website was accessible to your clients |
| Plugins Updated | 3 | Number of plugin apps that were updated this month |
| Themes Updated | 1 | Number of times your Theme was updated |
| Database Optimizations | 1 | To save your site getting big and slow, once a month we delete anything in your database that you’re not using any more |
Uptime Monitoring
The uptime monitoring table shows how often your site was not available over the last 7, 15, 30, 45 and 60 days. 100% uptime means your site was never unavailable. 98% uptime means that 2% of the time your site was unavailable. This may happen because there was scheduled maintenance on the server, or that some of the maintenance done by Green Glen caused the site to be unavailable for a few minutes.
Plugins Updates
This is a list of the various plugins that have been updated during this month. You will see the date they were updated, the name of the plugin, and the change in the version number.
Themes Updates
Your theme needs updating, just like your plugins. Although you only have one active theme, there are other themes installed on your site as a backup, so the theme updated might not have the same name as your active theme. You will see the date they were updated, the name of the theme, and the change in the version number.
Maintenance
To save your site getting big and slow, once a month we delete anything in your database that you’re not using any more. For example we remove deleted comments and auto-saves of pages.
