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Last update on
Every year, our anniversary is one of our favorite moments. It’s the perfect time to reflect on the last 12 months and also share some feedback with you.
On our 3rd anniversary, we achieved great records, changed our price strategy and worked really hard on our documentation (see WP Rocket is 3 Years Old: Reports and Feedback).
In 2017, our 4th year, we are focusing on consolidation: of our team, our product and our figures.
Inspired by the results shared by WooCommerce, we wanted to illustrate the data we’ve found more representative of the past years through a few infographics.
Here’s our retrospective for the past years.
Our retrospective in infographics
4 years of revenue
4 years of our plugin
4 years of our team
A reinforced support team
During the past 12 months, we welcomed 4 new teammates to expand our support team. The number of tickets saw a 62% increase compared to last year, coinciding with the growth of our client base.
Number of support tickets from July 14th 2016 to June 30rd 2017
In order to help Lucy in the US timezone, we recruited Shelley, Renee and Michele.
The North American team now has the same number of members as the European team, reinforced by the arrival of Romain.
This totals 9 teammates for our support team : 5 in North America and 4 in Europe.
This mix allows us to offer you top-notch support available almost 24 hours. We can also provide documentation in 5 languages: English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.
Today, WP Rocket’s support team is composed of:
- Lucy (Lead Support)
- Marko
- Alice
- Caspar
- Shelley
- Romain
- Renee
- Michele
- Rémy (Level 2)
Support available 6 days per week
We also decided to close our support on Sundays. We used to work shifts during the weekends, but being available on Sundays was complicated. We also noticed that the majority of WordPress products worked on the same schedule.
Some others, like dedicated WordPress hosting companies, are closed on Saturdays and Sundays.
Instead, we send an automatic message to our customers to let them know they’ll receive a reply on Monday, after a proper dose of caffeine. Thanks to good organization, our teammates are able to answer you very quickly on Mondays.
A new product vision
A few weeks ago, we launched version 2.10 of WP Rocket. It was the first time we decided to add new features according to our marketing goals. Back in the day, our decisions were made in accordance with the interest and the votes expressed on features in our public road-map.
We noticed that many of our tickets were tackling issues related to PageSpeed score. For a long time we tried to educate our customers about the fact that PageSpeed has no influence on website speed, in vain.
We had the same observation about refund requests: most of them were related to PageSpeed score.
To reduce the number of support tickets and refund requests, we opted to introduce new options that could improve your PageSpeed score —of course keeping the priority on your ability to speed up your website, first of all.
Since June 7th, when WP Rocket 2.10 was launched, we obtained a 25% reduction in the number of refund requests.
A better user experience
With this last version, we also worked a lot on user experience. We can thank our teammate Caspar who did a wonderful job on this part.
Our willingness to improve user experience is coherent with the vision we have for WP Rocket. In future versions, we really want to focus on this aspect.
Our aim is to offer a plugin that is easy to configure, where you can enable all the options available without any trouble and to keep its performance the best in the market.
Preparing our new site
The 3rd version of our website will be ready very soon. Our current design dates back to 3 years, April 2014. It was created by Christelle Mozzati [FR], a freelance web designer and we are really thankful for the great job she did.
To see how the design evolved to our current version, you can click on this link to see the first design of WP Rocket’s website: http://web.archive.org/web/20130731042333/http://wp-rocket.me:80/
At that time, we bought an HTML template on Themeforest for only $6.
In 2015, Matthieu joined us as art director. From that moment, he took care of designing Imagify’s website, its online app and the WordPress plugin. Later on, he created the visual identity of our company WP Media. He also worked on SecuPress’ website and plugin – which we don’t own anymore.
For several months, we have been really focusing on the marketing aspect of our products. That’s an aspect we neglected for a long time in favor of working on our customer’s loyalty. It was time for us to think about a new website and its marketing objectives: traffic acquisition, e-commerce conversion, A/B testing, etc…
In a few days, we’re going to launch the 3rd version of our website. In this first phase, we preferred to maintain the same content – at 90% – and only make a few updates.
The reason for this choice is simple: if we modify the design and all of the content on the site, we’ll never know why the site performs better or worse. Starting with small updates to the current text, we’ll be able to know whether the e-commerce conversions change because of this or not.
Afterwards, we’ll proceed with iterations of the website using A/B testing: it will allow us to make informed decisions based on data instead of gut feeling.
WordCamp & Meetup
WP Rocket’s team, as well as the rest of WP Media members, work 100% remotely around the world. We don’t have offices. We all work from our home, be it in California, Texas, Illinois, Canada, Serbia, Italy or Germany.
We have the opportunity to spend time together every year during our startup retreat and sometimes during WordCamps, like we recently did at WordCamp Europe 2017.
These moments are always too short, so we decided to organize several meetups during the year and dedicate each of them to a specific team (developers, marketing or support).
The next meetup will be organized for the US support team and it will be the week after WordCamp US: this will allow every member of the team to enjoy the event for 3 days, then spend a week of co-working, sharing and training together.
Being present at WordCamp US will also be a great opportunity to meet our customers and share feedback with our partners. We can’t wait to be there since our team has always been very involved in the WordPress community.
What about celebrating this anniversary with us?
Now it’s time to celebrate our 4th anniversary! We invite you to join us and share your story with WP Rocket using #4FORWPROCKET on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Or simply share this article on Facebook and Twitter.
Looking forward to next year! 🙂
