{"id":3559189,"date":"2021-07-13T09:21:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T07:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/?p=3559189"},"modified":"2021-08-16T10:23:30","modified_gmt":"2021-08-16T08:23:30","slug":"8-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/blog\/8-years\/","title":{"rendered":"WP Rocket Is Turning 8, Let\u2019s Celebrate!"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s that time of year again: our long-awaited birthday party! This year, we\u2019re celebrating 8 years of growth. Time flies when you\u2019re making the web a faster place! <\/p>

To mark this special occasion, we have decided to take a step back in time and reflect on the milestones of the past year at WP Rocket. <\/p>

Also, it might be our birthday but you\u2019ll be the ones showered with gifts this year thanks to our biggest ever giveaway. As much as we love talking numbers and retracing some of our best moments, what\u2019s a celebration without presents, right?<\/p>

Ready for the party? Come celebrate with us! <\/p>

Some of Our Latest Highlights<\/h2>

8 years down, forever to go. <\/p>

It seems like just yesterday Jonathan and Jean-Baptiste, our co-founders, began to develop a WordPress plugin that could embrace web performance best practices. Almost 2 million fast-blazing websites later, we\u2019re never been closer to reaching the stars. <\/p>

None of this happened overnight though and along the way, we\u2019ve had both highs and lows, wins and challenges. On this special day, we wanted to celebrate some of our latest highlights and achievements. Buckle up and let\u2019s get started. <\/p>

Contributing to WordPress core <\/h3>

Since the very start of WP Rocket, we\u2019ve taken great pride in being part of the WordPress community and lending our support. Over the years, we have tried to contribute, both as a company and individually, to the open-source project in many ways, including organizing WordPress events, talking at WordCamps, translating WordPress, and so on. What we hadn\u2019t done yet was sponsor WordPress contributors.<\/p>

A few months ago, we decided to join the Five for the Future <\/a>initiative and pledged<\/a> to dedicate 5% of our work time to building the future of WordPress. At the moment, the WordPress core team at WP Rocket is made up of 5 contributors, all part of our Product Development squad. During their last contributor day, they submitted 2 patches to WordPress core! WordPress core development is not the only thing we work on, Piotr<\/a>, our QA tester, is part of the Test team to help improve WordPress too.<\/p>

I’m a test lead for WordPress Core 5.8. We meet weekly to manage triage (sorting & labeling issues) and testing (bug reports, questions & feature requests). The entire team is working on improving the testing process, and I do my best to make sure the experience of WordPress is flawless.<\/p>Piotr Bak, Associate QA Engineerr at WP Rocket and part of the Core Test Team. <\/cite><\/blockquote>

Joining Group.ONE <\/h3>

After 8 years of flying solo, we got hitched! Well, kinda. This year marked a new chapter in our start-up life. We joined Group.ONE<\/a>, the parent entity of several brands including one.com<\/a>, one of the largest web hosts in Scandinavia. <\/p>

Now, we had been approached by many companies over the years and had always turned them down. This time was different. In fact, two elements convinced us that this was the right move for us. For starters, hosting and web performance go hand in hand so collaborating with a hosting entity made complete sense if we wanted to help more WordPress users reach their full potential. Furthermore – and this was the most important point -, our values align. We\u2019re both obsessed with making our customers happy and share a passion for excellence. Together, we can leverage our resources while staying independent enough to each continue doing what we do best.<\/p>

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Rebranding, rebranding, rebranding <\/h3>

You know how sometimes you feel as though you might have outgrown your former favorite jacket or even your haircut? This is exactly how we felt about our brand identity. It wasn\u2019t quite us<\/em> anymore and we were longing for a change. Also, we had had the same website for about 4 years. It was time for a complete makeover.<\/p>

First, we redefined our brand values to better reflect our identity as a company. With performance, empathy, simplicity, generosity, and humility as our values, we wanted to show our human-first approach and the goals we always set for ourselves. For the website redesign, our key idea was to improve the user experience. We added new pages, worked on a simpler menu. We also created new educational content and resources accessible to everyone. And all that using just Gutenberg<\/a>!<\/p>

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The 3.9 release<\/h3>

How could we not mention this one? Our most awaited major version yet. And should we add our most challenging one too? We\u2019ve lost count of the number of times we said \u201cthis week is launch week\u201d only to postpone. But in the end, it did happen and we\u2019re quite adamant it was worth the wait!<\/p>

The idea behind this new major version was to help website owners prepare for the Google Page Experience Update. WP Rocket 3.9<\/a> revolves around two main features (Delay JavaScript Execution and Remove Unused CSS) and is all about improving our users\u2019 PageSpeed Insights score and some Core Web Vitals metrics. While we will still be adjusting some compatibility elements over the next weeks, the feedback we\u2019ve received so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we could not be happier.<\/p>

WP Rocket in Numbers <\/h2>

A few facts and figures about the most powerful caching plugin in the world<\/p>