![\"million\"](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/million.png\")
<\/p>\nToday is a special day: it\u2019s WP Rocket\u2019s 3rd birthday!\u00a03 years ago we launched the first version of the plugin. Since then, we\u2019ve come a long way and now we are extremely happy with the results and feedback we\u2019ve received from our thousands of customers.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s time to present a review of this last year.<\/p>\n
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This 3rd year saw two big records for WP Rocket.<\/p>\n
In January 2016, WP Rocket exceeded one million dollars in cumulative revenue,<\/strong> in the two and a half years since its launch. At the end of June, we reached the goal of 100,000 websites on which WP Rocket had been installed<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Since the beginning of this year, we have, on average, more than 8,500 new websites every month, that is 1 installation every 5 minutes.<\/strong><\/p>\n When we embarked on this adventure, we never imagined that we could reach these numbers!<\/p>\n During the last 12 months, we welcomed 4 new astronauts<\/strong> to the WP Rocket crew.<\/p>\n In order to improve the quality of our support,\u00a0Alice<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Caspar<\/a>\u00a0came on board to strengthen our team. This allowed us to reduce the average response time to tickets, to translate and enrich our documentation, and to respond to customers in Italian, Spanish and German.<\/p>\n R\u00e9my<\/a>\u00a0joined the team and became the Lead Developer for the project. He\u2019s responsible for WP Rocket\u2019s development and for every new technical decision.\u00a02.8 was his first version as a Lead, and he developed two brand new features: sitemap preloading and database optimization. \u00c9milie<\/a>\u00a0joined us so that the future of WP Rocket and\u00a0WP Media<\/a>\u00a0will be built in the best possible way. She will be deploying her wide experience in management, project management and marketing, especially in the field of customer acquisition.<\/p>\n Finally, we also welcomed Guillaume<\/a> for 5 months. He worked on the WP Rocket website for the implementation of new servers and the SSL certificate, the environment management and deployment by Git and the new \u201cAccount\u201d page (coming soon). He will complete his mission with us next week and we thank him for his contributions.<\/p>\n Nowadays, the WP Rocket team is composed of:<\/p>\n During WordCamp Europe 2015 in Sevilla, we attended the presentation by Joan Boluda: \u00a0On Internationalization – Plugin Documentation and Support for the Whole World<\/a>.<\/p>\n This talk was full of good ideas and a lot of common sense. It started with a challenging introduction. Someone wanted to hire Joan to develop some forms and he suggested to the client to use Gravity Forms for that. Unfortunately, the client didn\u2019t speak English and documentation\/support was not available in other languages. It was therefore not practical to use Gravity Forms due to the lack of translation.<\/p>\n In 2014, only 5-10% of the world population spoke English<\/strong>. This can represent a loss of income if your site and documentation cannot be understood by non English-speaking people.<\/p>\n At the time of the conference (June 2015), our documentation was available only in English and we were offering support in French and English.<\/p>\n Since then, the conference has influenced the way we manage our support and our team. We took the opportunity to translate WP Rocket documentation into 5 languages:<\/p>\n We\u2019re now able to provide support in these 5 languages. Translating your website and documentation shouldn\u2019t be the only goal. In fact, they have to be complemented by support service in those same languages, so that your user can be fully satisfied with your product. If your site has been translated into Spanish, but your support only speaks English, this will be frustrating for your Spanish customers, who will expect to be assisted in their own language.<\/p>\n Translating your website and documentation will allow you to increase your revenue and reduce the number of support tickets.<\/strong> If you do have not enough internal resources to do that, don\u2019t hesitate to use the services of an external provider.<\/p>\n In 2015, we worked a lot on our licence renewals. This is an important part of the life of a premium plugin, because it might be the only source of recurring revenue that you have. For us, renewals are a major factor since they represent 18% of our monthly revenue<\/strong>.<\/p>\n One of the reasons which could explain the low conversion rates on renewals, is that they are not automatic. Every year, you have to send a series of emails a few days before the expiration of the licence, in order to remind your customers of the necessity of renewing.<\/p>\n To fix this problem, some products like AffiliateWP and Easy Digital Downloads put in place an automatic renewal mechanism, starting from the day of the licence purchase.<\/p>\n Instead of sending the emails before the expiration date, you should send them to remind your customers to check their credit card expiration. The constraint for customers is that they have to renew their license every year. But from our side, we decided to see the problem from another point of view.<\/p>\n To solve the issue, we put in place a new strategy: an offer to renew the licence for 2 or 4 years.<\/strong> In order to make the offer attractive, we provide 12 extra months for every renewal done over several years.<\/p>\n To improve conversions, we also use our email campaigns to regularly keep our customers updated and communicate with them: new updates, promotional offers, new version upgrades, etc.<\/p>\n The renewal plans are also available on the account page of every customer:<\/p>\n We started to apply this strategy in June 2015. Below, you\u2019ll find the 2015 stats regarding the number of renewals per month:<\/p>\n There is no doubt about the efficiency of this strategy, which is at the moment really unique within the WordPress premium plugin market.<\/p>\n 2015 ended with 2672 renewals<\/strong>, compared to the 306 we had in 2014. This represents a 773% increase.<\/strong><\/p>\n In the first half of 2016 we registered more than 2900 renewals.<\/p>\n To complete this strategy, last October we explained why, in our opinion, offering lifetime licenses with updates \/support \/ number of sites, is not a good idea:\u00a03 Reasons Why You Shouldn\u2019t Offer Lifetime Licences.<\/a><\/p>\n
\nIn the 1st half of 2016 alone, WP Rocket saw $605,000 of revenue, that is an average of $100,000 per month. So, the previous record, established in 2 and a half years, will likely be equaled within less than one calendar year!<\/p>\nNew Astronauts on Board<\/h2>\n
![\"astronauts\"](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/astronauts.png\")
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\nHe\u2019s also in charge of Level 2 support tickets, that is, all the tickets needing a developer\u2019s intervention to be resolved.<\/p>\n\n
Translating Documentation in 5 Languages<\/h2>\n
![\"flags\"](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/flags.png\")
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\nWe welcomed Alice and Caspar to the team, who together speak English, French, Italian, Spanish and German.<\/p>\n\n
A New Strategy for Licence Renewal<\/h2>\n
\nSo, is this really a good solution? Chris Lema suggests the right way to implement this strategy:\u00a0WordPress plugins and auto-renewals<\/a><\/p>\n![\"WP](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/wp-rocket-renewal-offers.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"wp-rocket-2015-renewals\"](\"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2\/wp-rocket-2015-renewals.png\")
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