Tom Willmot on the Challenges and Opportunities Facing Enterprise WordPress • Tom Lach on the costs of rapid growth — It’s not for everyone • The Future of GiveWP and the Block Editor • Evolving Edupack — and Sunsetting It • and more…
Building, Supporting, and Selling a Winning Product — With or Without WordPress.org • Are Active Install Counts Relevant to Your Business’s Success? (Even if they are accurate? And they haven’t been.) • Let’s Fix What’s Broken (The Plugin Repo) Not What Isn’t (The Freemium Model) • Follow Leaders, Adopt Standards • Tools and expertise from rtCamp • Some great and “doable” ideas for the future of plugin business metrics on the .org repo. Could some of them help put an end to intrusive and manipulative dark patterns in the WordPress Admin dashboard and notifications?
This week I sat down again with Eric Karkovack to talk about the WordPress stories and topics that are on the top of our minds. Independently, 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.
This week Alex Denning (Ellipsis) draws on Iain Poulson‘s historical, high-level plugin data at WP Trends to offer some thoughtful, somewhat contrary, but practical and grounded perspectives on the value of Active Install Data. At the WP Watercooler and elsewhere, a realization seems to be setting in that the data is not open source and not the property of the WordPress community. Like last week’s episode of Post Status Draft with Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins, Till Krüss (Object Cache Pro, Relay) offers a lot of lessons this week about less travelled paths to success in the plugin business even as a very small company or company of one. Performance, testing, and support are key, interrelated parts of Till’s success and probably the most important ones to borrow in your own life and work if they resonate.
In 2019-20, only four plugins entered the space and broke into the upper tiers. These were Site Kit for Google, Facebook for WooCommerce, Creative Mail for WordPress and WooCommerce, and Google Ads and Marketing by Kliken. Has the WordPress.org repository become a closed shop, a tapped-out ecosystem where the winners have taken all? Here are some suggestions about how to break in or changes that could be proposed to open and diversify the repository. Until that happens, do growth charts matter?
Vito Peleg, Atarim‘s cofounder and CEO, explains how he “cracked” the partnership problem to find alignment with other companies that can help them all accelerate their growth. Alex Denning on the launch of Ellipsis‘ Weather Report: “We’ve never had this insight before, and it is exciting and terrifying to bring this kind of ‘live’ view of the industry, to the industry.” The acquisition trend is still up, on average. Meet Post Status business member Penske Media Corporation — PMC.
Every week, Ellipsis’ Weather Report will show how much WordPress and WooCommerce search and advertiser activity has increased or dropped relative to the previous week. By watching these two trendlines, you can gauge whether your own search and sales trends are performing in line with the industry at large.
Debuting a new “Weather Report,” Ellipsis Marketing’s newsletter reports WordPress is down -10.4% — in something. Let’s find out what — and why it should matter for the WordPress ecosystem for years to come.
Is the WordPress market share beginning to shrink? How do we assess market share? What metrics matter? It’s time we asked these questions.
Joost de Valk, Alex Denning, Jessica Frick, and Ben Gabler join David Bisset for a community conversation about WordPress’s (shrinking?) market share.
Alex Denning took a deep dive into the advertising campaigns of some WordPress businesses, inspired in part by recent events involving Elementor and Bluehost. Alex looks at the different ads WordPress businesses are running and considers why they might be taking these approaches, with some input from the business owners. Alex recommends re-targeting ads because…
📈 Based on search volume data from 2020, Alex Denning found some significant growth indicators in the WordPress space: WordPress keywords increased by 14.0% Plugin keywords increased 17.8% WooCommerce keywords increased 44.3% Theme keywords increased 8.7% While it was a solid year for plugins and WooCommerce, there was some volatility in theme searches. Alex notes,…
Alex Denning has a prediction I feel is insightful: “competition for WordPress products is going to get significantly more intense, and we need to start looking at product categories with much more sophistication.” I tend to agree with his assessment that “positioning within a WordPress plugin niche is going to be more important than ever.”…
If you have a product or service company and are thinking about promoting a Black Friday deal, Alex Denning has some good advice and offers some suggestions.: Alex suggests focusing “on putting together a great sale package, rather than a headline discount.” It’s best to communicate your sale clearly and early to take advantage of…
Alex Denning noticed searches for “WordPress” went up 52% in April, compared to the previous month.” Alex also notes there’s been about a 20% “bump in WordPress searches with high purchase intent in the last month.” 📈
Alex Denning takes on the topic of “Risk and reward at Black Friday with WordPress products” by drawing on this year’s round of holiday sales to “pull out some key insights for the future.” 🛍️
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