The client dashboard has one flaw I’ve never been able to design around: it lives at a URL.
Which is fine, right up until it isn’t. A finance director wants the month in the board pack. Someone’s pulling a funding application together. A business partner asks what the website actually did last quarter. And your beautifully branded live dashboard, the one you’re paying for, is a link that person either can’t open or won’t bother to.
So: Export. It’s live now.
There’s an Export item in the client dashboard sidebar. Your client clicks it, a print-ready one-pager opens in a new tab, and there’s a Save as PDF button waiting. That’s the whole interaction. No account, no export queue, no email with a download link that expires before anyone clicks it.
What’s actually on it
The page runs in the order a client reads: Traffic first (visitors, pageviews, visits, average visit), then Conversions, then Search, then Uptime, then top pages and top queries.
Conversions is the bit I care about. It’s the total for the period plus a breakdown by event: call clicks, email clicks, contact forms, purchases, each with its month-on-month change.
Which means the thing your client forwards to their board isn’t a traffic report. It’s a page that says the website produced this many enquiries, and here’s whether that’s up or down on last month. Traffic is interesting. Conversions is the argument.
It’s got your name on it, not mine
Your logo at the top. Your accent colour on the header rule and the section headings. “Prepared by {your agency}” in the footer. Your client’s name on the page.
If it ends up in someone’s board pack, it’s your board pack.
Empty sections take themselves out
Not every site has conversion tracking. Not every site has an uptime monitor. Rather than print a Conversions heading with a shrug underneath it, the page just leaves the section out.
A shorter honest page beats a longer one full of gaps. Nobody has ever been won over by an empty chart.
You can switch it off
Export appears in the dashboard builder under Organisation, then Branding, same as every other page. Reorder it, rename it to whatever your clients would call it, or turn it off entirely if you’d rather they didn’t have one. It’s on by default, including for agencies who already have a saved layout, so it’ll be sitting there without you doing anything.
I suspect most people will leave it on. But it’s your dashboard, not mine.
The honest bit
This is a browser Save as PDF, not a PDF generated on our servers.
In practice that makes very little difference: your client gets a clean one-page PDF either way. It does mean the output leans slightly on their browser, and there’s no way to schedule one or have it land by email. Server-side generation is the proper version of this, and it’s the obvious next thing to build.
I’d rather ship the useful ninety percent now and tell you plainly what it is than sit on it another month and describe it as something it isn’t.
Export sat in that sidebar as a greyed-out “Soon” for longer than I’d like to admit. It doesn’t any more.
