A Visit from the Good Idea Fairy

WordPress Business Roundup for the Week of October 17

Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org

This week I sat down again with Eric Karkovack to record an episode of The Excerpt to talk about the three top WordPress stories on the top of our minds. The temporary loss of active install stats at WordPress.org has created an opportunity to rethink long-held assumptions and find new ways forward, so maybe it’s not surprising that we made nearly the same selections. There’s a single throughline in this episode — what works, what doesn’t, and what will take WordPress businesses forward in the product, agency, and hosting spaces. A lot of people are thinking down this track and a lot of good ideas are coming forward. We’ve tried to pull together the ones we feel are best. LISTEN or READ →

Are Active Install Counts Relevant to Your Business’s Success? (Even if they are accurate?)

In “WordPress.org is ineffective for plugin distribution in 2022,” Alex Denning argues the likely temporary loss of Active Install Growth data for plugin owners is not a bottom-line, business-relevant concern. Apart from the revelation that that data itself was not just obfuscated and inexact but “basically garbage,” Alex draws on Ellipsis‘ marketing experience and extensive data (as well as Iain Poulson‘s insights at WP Trends) to show 1-2% conversion rates are the norm for plugins in the WP.org repository. Only a couple of big players can crack the 100k+ install tiers today.

Let’s Fix What’s Broken (The Plugin Repo) Not What Isn’t (The Freemium Model)

Matt Cromwell politely disagrees with Alex as he makes The Case for the WordPress Plugin Freemium Model. (There’s a great Post Status Slack thread on it too.) In it, Matt describes ways plugin owners can make the plugin repository’s search engine work better for them, but Matt also notes a few of its deficiencies as well.

As Justin Labadie and others point out, the search algorithm retrieves irrelevant results with more active installs than the plugin being searched for in many cases. It isn’t possible to show all your plugins together anywhere on the repository apart from a buried profile tab under Contributor History. Even author searches do not retrieve every plugin from that source.

Matt’s best point is that an average conversion rate is just that — an average. He’s seen much better results due to marketing efforts he feels are accessible to many plugin vendors. Matt also points to examples of successful freemium plugin shops, like Paid Memberships Pro which recently did an A/B test with their pricing page. Jason Coleman reported the version with a freemium option converted better.

Follow Leaders, Adopt Standards

10up‘s newly released resource site for Gutenberg Best Practices is a signal WordPress has turned a corner. Here are expert tutorials, resources, references, and example code connected to 10up’s GitHub discussion board for this evolving community resource. It’s intended to go beyond the official WordPress documentation, according Fabian Kaegy‘s launch announcement. It’s a “more client-services-centric approach tailored to engineering enterprise-level editorial experiences.” Enterprise agency adoption of Gutenberg is huge. As we see a growing body of accumulated knowledge, standards, and best practices emerging, it signals and amplifies a wave of change.