Client Reports Revamped

Vladimir Randjelovic

October 25, 2018

Hold on to your headsets, it’s time for an overhaul! Well, a redesign of the Client Reports, to be more precise. A long overdue one. Drink up your coffee (tea lovers unite), and let’s dig into this.

What can you expect?

When someone says redesign, most of us think about adding more sparkles and making stuff shinier. However, we took the opposite approach and went with a more minimalistic design and new features.

This is a small sneak peek into what’s coming:

The design itself

A whole bunch of you are designers, and most of you gave us feedback about the old design. We’ve gathered that valuable feedback, mashed it together, and created a super design… Or a Frankenstein’s monster. We aren’t sure, but it didn’t harass the villagers yet, so we will go with super design.

One thing everyone complained about was the inability to make reports in portrait mode, which made them harder to print out and read in general. That’s why we’ve thrown out the landscape mode and made everything in portrait now.

It’s easier to print out (but think about the environment, please, and email it) and way easier to read.

The color scheme is the same, but you will have a custom color palette as one of the new options available once the final version is released.

Client Report Customization

I don’t care about design, give me features!

What was one of your biggest pains in the past? No, not that one! I’m talking about the one regarding the client reports.

Most of you complained about not having the chance to change the cover photo. Well, guess what? Yes, that’s right, you will be able to change the cover photo. 🙂

New report will have the ability to graphically showcase the difference of the results from the previous period, as well as the tabular view of the historical results.

There are a lot of more features but this is merely an introduction. Plus, I don’t want to spoil all the fun. Patience you must have, my young padawans.

But, how long must I be patient?

Not for long, as we’ve planned to release this in the near future. Currently, we are in the final testing phases before we release the Beta version of the new design. We’ll need your help to bring it in tip-top shape, so your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

How can I test the new Client Reports?

The new Client Report is still under development, but you can preview the PDF template today. Here’s how:

Log into your ManageWP dashboard
Pick a website
Go to the Client Report page
Select the “Use the new Client Report design (BETA)” option when creating a new report or editing the existing template

After that, you will be left with a shiny new design inside the known PDF format.

Client Report Cover Page

So, what now?

Now is the time you sit back, relax, and enjoy. You can send us some feedback if you want to. You know we love it. 🙂

author

Vladimir Randjelovic

He may be tall, but he is a great kid at heart and the biggest waster of an external monitor. He is an adventure loving guy, and your go-to guy if you want to hear a stupid joke to lighten your day. He is like a cat if he fits, he sits. That’s because he secretly loves them. Codename: Boban

39 responses

JArmo

October 25, 2018

I´m still waiting the possibility to send reports to my customers in their mother language. This is the most important thing for me. I have offered that I can help with translations if needed. The new design is not most important thing for me 🙁

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Mads

October 26, 2018

Hi Marco – although appreciative of your effort I’d like to chip in here and support JArmo’s viewpoint as well. Native language support is essential. My gf just signed up as a user some 2 weeks ago so we could check MWP out. Like it so far so we’d like to know if Danish is or will be supported language- wise… or if individual strings can be translated somewhere in report settings? Thanks!

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Mark

October 26, 2018

While the improvement is welcomed, these reports are still not the standard I need for the type of clients I have.

The design is still too messy, far too much whitespace, graphics used for the front page is very questionable, colour usage is poor and there is not enough flexibility when customising it.

Ideally, the design should be one continuous web sharable page with the option to have it as a print layout.

The reports should have the ability to be custom built using customisable drag and drop widgets, with choices for fonts, colours, different graphics styles, with the ability to omit certain data etc etc.

I currently build my own reports but I look forward to more improvements in the future.

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Jen Mulligan

October 26, 2018

Hooray!! I use these Client Reports often and can’t wait to see the new design! I would love to be able to customise the Google Analytics report if possible as this is one of the most important aspects of the whole report for me and my clients! Kudos to you guys for listening and implementing new and exciting features!

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Mike

October 27, 2018

There’s still the same bug/issue with the SEO reports (in fact it’s actually worse with this new design).

The keywords are supposed to be listed in order of lowest to highest i.e. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13 etc…

However, they don’t take seem to take into consideration more than 1 decimal point (I’m probably not explaining that correctly, see below) my SEO report lists the keywords in this order:

1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 2, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 3, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 4, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 5, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 6, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 7, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 8, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 9, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99

As you can see, any keyword that ranks between 2-9 is going to be buried further down in the report, not ideal when trying to convey value to a client 🙂

This only happens in the PDF report. It doesn’t happen on the SEO overview page for the website, they appear in the correct order.

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Ian Atkins

October 27, 2018

Thanks, good to see this getting some love. I really want to use reports – but echo the sentiments of Mark – I work with design led clients – and these reports still don’t match our branding.

Would love to be able to specify the font and font size as a minimum. A ‘bare bones’ un opinionated version that is so minimal I can just change the fonts, put my logo on and it’s ok would also be welcomed.

A web based version would make so much sense, drop in a CSS customising option and I’d be all over it.

Thanks,

Ian.

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Ian Atkins

October 27, 2018

Also – skipping design completely if you opened up an API for this data that would be amazing, then we could integrate straight into our client area.

Thanks,

Ian.

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Marcus Nahrgang

October 27, 2018

Not to be unfair, but I did like the old design even more. It was somehow more clear in design and not as frisky.
The client has to see, that somebody cares about his site, so it´s good to have information like performance, uptime, backups etc.
But I do not need that many performance reports (2 pages for one month) and I also agree that the focus should be on Analytics and maybe some descriptive words about SEO and trends.
Performance reports: I think, all automatic performance-reports should be in the report, but I do not think every manually triggered performance report should be noticed. When you try to optimize performance, you will initiate a lot of measurements to see, which tuning is most effective. But there are often measurements with bad counts during this period. So it would be a good idea to leave them out ;o)

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Shannon

October 29, 2018

It would also be nice if we have the option to not include the introduction/closing messages too. I find these redundant after the first time sending a report.

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Johnny

October 30, 2018

Awesome, Thank you!

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Hanneke

October 31, 2018

Thumbs up guys!

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LogoLogics

October 31, 2018

Awesome, thank you!

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Sascha

November 4, 2018

I’d like to give my 2 Cent as well! 😉 For me the most important thing would be to monitor also updates that have been done in the WP backend manually. I do this rather often and so my client reports have only 1 or 2 updates inside, as most updates are done by hand. So for me the report is worthless. 🙂 Otherwise, nice update.

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Steven

November 8, 2018

I would love to use the client report feature for 100’s of my clients but like any other professional I do my updates locally and deploy from there. If the client report could list these updates outside of ManageWP only then would it be a useful and most welcome feature.

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Anthony Bliss

February 15, 2019

Please please please, for the love of everything good. Let us remove the design you force on us on the cover pages. It breaks branding, it doesn’t look particularly great, you’re allowing us to upload a cover page image anyway, so why are all of the elements that exist by default not being removed in this case?

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