The reporting tool I couldn't find

I send detailed monthly care reports to the clients on my Managed WordPress hosting tier.

For everyone else on standard hosting? Crickets.

Sites tick along nicely. No fires. And those clients hear absolutely nothing from me unless something breaks.

There should be something I could send. Not a 12-page marketing-analytics report. Not another portal or dashboard for them to sign in to. Just a quick, honest “here’s how your site is doing” email — something that takes them thirty seconds to read and reminds them I exist.

I tried the tools.

They all fell into one of two camps:

• Sprawling marketing-analytics platforms wanting £80/month and 47 integrations I’d never use. Built for in-house teams running paid ads, not for agencies maintaining client sites.
• WordPress-only plugins that had no idea what to do with my clients’ custom-built Astro sites, Shopify stores, or anything off the WordPress rail.

So I did the dev thing. I built it myself.

Meet SendTidings

It pulls performance, uptime and SEO data from client sites and sends a clean, branded report by email every month.

No dashboard for clients to log into. No link for them to forget. Just an email that lands in their inbox — on the first of the month, every month.

The bit I’m proud of: it works across any stack. WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, Astro, Next.js, custom builds. Same tool, same report format. If you build on more than one platform — and most of us do these days — you stop juggling reporting tools.

Free tier covers your first site. The open-source, self-hostable version is planned for later in the year.

If you’re weighing up one of the tools I mentioned, I’ve since written honest side-by-side comparisons — including where the other tool is the better fit.

— Josh