Today we welcome Phil, the owner of Capital Web Design, a Canadian web services agency based in Ottawa.

WPMU DEV: Congrats on your professional success, Phil. Please tell us straight away, how did you grow your business so fast?

Phil: I wouldn’t say the business itself grew that fast. I’ve been building websites in some way or another since the early 2000s. Either static sites coded by hand (HTML + CSS + Javascript), using frameworks (VueJS), or with WordPress.

I started my freelance web design company in 2014, after being approached to do a replacement build for what was a costly, difficult to maintain website – and that became my first client. From there I found small and medium businesses in my hometown that had old, unsupported and unmaintained websites, or who had no website at all.

As I continued my efforts, my business ethos emerged: help companies, nonprofits and individuals in my city build a web presence they can be proud of. I focused on creating bespoke WordPress web design based on well-supported multipurpose themes, WPMU DEV and other dependable plugins, and fully managed white-glove web hosting.

Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of working with 20+ clients, and have built 60 websites targeting a multitude of industries and commercial sectors.

WPMU DEV: That’s awesome. Did you know about WPMU DEV at that time?

Phil: I had known about WPMU DEV since around 2016-18, back when you offered dozens of plugins for all sorts of functionality. I couldn’t justify the cost of a membership then, but I popped in every so often to check and see what progress was being made.

In 2019, Hosting was added as a WPMU DEV service – and this really caught my attention. During the Black Friday promotion that November (lifetime reduced membership cost!), I joined as a member, and I can’t see myself ever leaving.

It was a perfect storm: high-quality plugins + managed hosting + 24/7 support + highly reduced cost.

WPMU DEV: So as you were building your clientele, you were putting together your professional tool box. Can you give us a peek inside?

Phil: The tools and services from WPMU DEV have been invaluable to me.

Plugins have provided me with consistency and reliability for all of the most important aspects of WordPress websites.

Knowing that I can count on Hummingbird and Smush for performance optimization allowed me to stop using other freemium plugins such as W3 Total Cache, Autoptimize, WP Super Cache and EWWW Image Optimization. I found these plugins were all good at some things, but had a lot of paywalled features that Hummingbird and Smush offered out of the box, for free.

Defender has been a great peace-of-mind addition to my repertoire, as the one-click recommended fixes are super straightforward and quite effective.

Forminator forms may be difficult at times to style with CSS, but that’s more than made up for in functionality. The drag-and-drop UI makes it much easier to build forms compared to Contact Form 7, and the amount of extras that are baked in (calculation, email routing, etc) blow other (often paid) form builders out of the water.

WPMU DEV: Aside from plugins, you mentioned our services have made a huge impact as well. Can you expand on that?

Phil: When it comes to services, it’s hard to put into words just how much The Hub and the associated Hosting have helped me throughout the last few years.

I have worked with hosting providers like 1and1, DreamHost, Media Temple, Digital Ocean VPS, and Bluehost. Each had their advantages, but in the end it always became a chore to use their services. It was clear that the quality of their offerings reflected the low cost they positioned themselves at. They were in a perpetual fight to undercut their competitors on price, at the cost of quality of service and support.

WPMU DEV Hosting came in late in the game, but out of the gate addressed two of the major concerns I experienced at other hosts: lack of support, and lack of trust in the infrastructure.

By having dedicated resources (versus shared), the web servers were consistently fast, reliable, and offered premium features such as staging, backups and WAF.

WPMU DEV: Walk us through a typical work day; what you reach for the most, and your usual workflow.

Phil: I keep The Hub open in a tab at all times, refreshing it every once in a while to keep track of ongoing community discussions, website maintenance statuses, and plugin updates.

I subscribe to key email notifications to receive alerts of technical issues on my managed sites, as well as member discussions in the WPMU DEV member forums, blogs and newsletter.

When a technical issue occurs, I’m able to troubleshoot it quickly. If I’m unable to resolve it on my own, the LiveChat support is always there to help me right away.

WPMU DEV has allowed me to optimize my workflows across the board, in areas like:

• Faster site creation with one-click managed WordPress server provisioning from The Hub.
• Easier client invoicing using Client Billing.
• More efficient website monitoring and maintenance through The Hub.
• Lower maintenance effort required with WPMU DEV plugins.
• Faster technical troubleshooting with the LiveChat support.

WPMU DEV: Outside of your own talent and determination, what would you say has contributed most significantly to your growth?

Phil: WPMU DEV has reduced my server build-out time from 30 minutes to 3 minutes (90% reduction). Over the past few years I’ve stood up well over 75 servers, so this has saved me many hours of effort.

At the time of joining, The Hub allowed me to manage about a dozen sites from a central location as opposed to manually logging in to each separate site. This was a reduction of biweekly maintenance effort from approximately 60 minutes to 2 minutes.

Client billing and streamlined invoice creation allowed me to save approximately 20-30 minutes per invoice creation, which throughout the past few years I estimate has saved me over 30 hours of work.

All of these time and effort savings have allowed me to comfortably take on more projects and clients.

Since joining WPMU DEV, my completed projects count has grown approximately 416% – with each project being more efficient to produce than the last.

WPMU DEV: As a self-proclaimed diehard fan, you know we’re constantly upping our game and adding new features and services to our offerings. What’s a newer release that you’re really getting into?

Phil: Reseller focus. I look forward to adding WPMU DEV automated site provisioning via the reseller offerings, as well as domains and email reselling.

WPMU DEV: One last question; let’s close it out with a fun one. If you could talk to yourself at the start of your career, what would you say?

Phil: At the start of my career, I often looked up to senior staff who seemed wise beyond their years. I was afraid of making mistakes or breaking something, for fear that those-who-never-broke-anything would look down on me.

I would try to explain to a younger me that wisdom comes with experience, and experience comes from doing things, failing, and working through the failure.

The more things you work on, the more you get exposed to what works and what doesn’t. Failing or breaking something isn’t strictly negative, because every failure is a learning opportunity: troubleshoot what went wrong, understand how to fix it, and implement a solution.

Do this cycle enough times and you start to pre-emptively detect patterns, plan for success, and you get faster at fixing problems. Don’t be afraid of failure because the more you fail, the more you learn and the wiser you will become.

That wraps up this premiere episode of our Member Success Stories. Thanks to Phil for his candid, insightful answers in our interview.

Phil is one of WPMU DEV’s Agency Partners, and uses his 20 years of web design experience to achieve one goal: give back to his hometown by building modern websites for businesses and nonprofits in the Canadian capital.

You can reach Phil via his agency partner listing or visit Capital Web Design.

As someone who runs a web development business, you probably send emails daily. Which means you might spend several hours each day crafting and revising them.

It also means that if you streamline all of this emailing you can save a lot of time.

For instance, you could use this time to offer better support, generate more business, and build your brand.

But to do all this, you need to master the tool that all successful freelancers have learned to use:

Email templates.

So to help with that, here are 9 useful templates to give you a head start.

Add them to your toolkit and save time, become more productive, and grow your web development business.

Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:

• Most Needed Email Templates for Developers
  • Template #1: Seeking Referral Work
  • Template #2: Onboarding Clients
  • Template #3: Seeking Testimonials
  • Template #4: Featuring as Case Studies
  • Template #5: Declining Projects
  • Template #6: Scheduling Calls
  • Template #7: Following Up
  • Template #8: Reporting Delays in Submission
  • Template #9: Cold Emails
• 3 Free Handy Gmail Plugins to Install Right Now
  • Boomerang for Gmail
  • UglyEmail
  • PixelBlock

Most Needed Email Templates for Developers

Template #1: Seeking Referral Work

If you’ve ever noticed how salespeople work, you’ll know they request referrals immediately after closing a deal.

It’s almost as if seeking referral business is the last step of their closure process.

Just like salespeople, you too can make such requests a part of your project handover process.

Here’s an example of an email you could send:

Subject line:

Know someone else who could use my services?

Email:

Hey [first name],

Just wanted to check in and ask if you have any contacts of yours that could benefit from my services?

As you’d know, referrals make great leads. So, if you know someone who could benefit from my service, I’d really appreciate an intro.

I’d be grateful for the favor.

Thanks,

[your name]

Bonus tip: Name a specific person in your client’s contacts who could hire you.

Consider adding the following text to the template:

“In fact, I was just looking at your LinkedIn contacts and realized that you’re connected with Mr. _________. Would be great if you could recommend me to him. Or, anyone else you can think of.”

Don’t think you’re being creepy (or sounding like a LinkedIn stalker!).

You’re just being smart (you have to be in this dog-eat-dog world) and making it easier for the client to pass along your name.

Template #2: Onboarding Clients

When you’ve got a project and are ready to get started, it’s time to send the onboarding email.

The onboarding email is your chance to tell the client how the project will proceed.

It eliminates unnecessary exchanges that happen when the client is clueless about what’s going on at your end.

Subject line:

Quick update

Email:

Hey [first name],

Thanks a lot for choosing me for your project. I’m really excited to start working on it.

Looks like I have all the details I need. In case I need anything else, I’ll reach out to you. Otherwise, I’ll update you on [date] with details on how the project is coming along and hopefully have the first version ready for your review. You can find the detailed project plan here [link to the plan doc].

Thanks again for trusting me with your job.

You can always email me if you have any questions.

Best,

[your name]

Bonus tip: If you use project management software like Basecamp or Trello, introduce it to your client in your onboarding email. Say something like:

“Also, you’ll shortly get an invite from [project management tool]. We use it to keep track of our projects. It would be great if you could get on board. It will be a lot easier for you to monitor the project progress through it.”

Template #3: Seeking Testimonials

The best time to send the testimonial request email is when a project is freshly delivered because a client is highly responsive at this time.

Subject line:

I’d love to hear your experience working with us

Email:

Hey [first name],

I hope you’re doing well. 

Just wanted to ask if you could share your thoughts on how your project with us went, and if we could use it as a testimonial.

I understand this sort of thing can be a hassle, so I’ve put something together to save you time if that makes life easier:

[testimonial text]

If you’re OK with it, I’ll add it to my portfolio (along with your pic). In case you’d like any changes, please feel free to make them.

I’d be really grateful if you could spare 5 minutes for this.

Thanks,

[your name]

Bonus tip: Always be in “testimonial mode.”

So, if you send a version or prototype or anything that wows your client and they send you some great feedback, immediately send them a request to use their response as a testimonial.

Here’s a message you could send:

Hey [first name],

Glad you liked the work, and thanks a lot for your kind words! Would you mind if I used your feedback as a testimonial?

Thanks,

[Your name]

Bonus tip 2: For the testimonial text, avoid generic testimonials like “great service provider” or “dependable contractor”.

Instead, focus on how you solved a client’s problems.

For inspiration, just google some top WordPress developers and check out their testimonials page.

If you want a good example, here’s the testimonial page of developer Bill Erickson.

Instead of a great testimonial, choose one that will get you hired.

Bonus tip 3: Try the following easy to use testimonial formula that Conversion Copywriter Joanna Wiebe recommends:

I approached {business name} because __________. {Person at business name} helped me by __________. The result was __________. One thing I liked was their __________. I found the experience __________. I would recommend {business name} to people who need __________.

You can also send the testimonial request email to your clients via LinkedIn.

Template #4: Featuring as Case Studies

Case studies are 100% more powerful than testimonials because case studies show a potential customer how you solved a client’s problem, whereas the most that testimonials can do is share a client’s experience.

Subject line:

Would you like to feature in our latest case study?

Email:

Hey [first name],

I’m looking to add a new case study to my portfolio and would love to feature your project.

All I ask from you is that you fill out this form (shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes).

And as a gesture of thanks, I’d love to give you a XX% discount on your next project. Once I’ve written the case study, I’ll send it for your approval and if you’re happy with it I’ll go ahead and publish it.

I’d be really grateful for your help.

Thanks,

[your name]

Most clients participate in case studies because they want to help you and are happy with your work, so don’t promise do follow backlinks or exposure for the client’s business (especially if your portfolio isn’t a popular one).

Also, avoid sending case study questions inline in an email. It can get messy to reply to so many questions and could mean a lot of back and forth with emails.

Instead, use free tools like Typeform or our own Forminator to build beautiful case study questionnaires.

Template #5: Declining Projects

The benefit of sending decline emails is that the client can start looking to hire someone else. It also helps avoid follow up emails.

Email:

Hey [first name],

Thanks for reaching out and considering me for your project.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to give it a pass. I don’t feel I’m the best person for the job because [an honest reason like: I’m booked for the next 3 months OR it’s not in my area of expertise].

However, I think [person’s name] should be able to help you out. Would you like me to connect you with him/her?

Best,

[your name]

Template #6: Scheduling Calls

Big development projects often involve a lot of communication.

Often, most of it happens over messenger apps or calls, and not in emails. So, keeping a call schedule email can come in handy.

Subject line:

Call at [time], [day]?

Email:

Hey [first name],

Wanted to ask if you could get on a Zoom call with me for about 30 min on [day] at [time]?

I had a few things I wanted to talk about:

#1
#2
#3

Please let me know if the timing works for you.

Thanks,

[your name]

Listing the call “agenda” helps the client decide if they can postpone the call or if it’s urgent and needs to be discussed right away.

Also, once you get off the call, write a quick email to the client summarizing any important points that might have been discussed on the call.

You can also consider recording the call if you’re not great at taking notes. But before you record, tell the client that you plan to record it.

Template #7: Following Up

If a potential client doesn’t get back to you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t want to hire you anymore.

It could be that they’re keeping too busy or have just missed your email. Follow up emails are helpful in such cases.

Subject line:

Any updates?

Email:

Hey [first name],

I wanted to follow up and see if you’re still interested in hiring me or if you want to talk more about your project?

Thanks,

[your name]

Heather Morgan, CEO of Salesfolk, a company that helps top SaaS companies write cold emails, says that you might want to send up to seven follow up emails.

She says, “That’s because about 33% of your total (positive/neutral) responses will come from emails 5-8, so if you’re not sending eight you’re missing out on leads.”

Morgan also recommends against repeating the same text in the follow-up emails.

Template #8: Reporting Delays in Submission

Things get out of control sometimes and you might need more time to complete a project than you originally committed to a client.

The moment you realize you’re going to miss a deadline, email your client.

Subject line:

Project deadline update

Email:

Hey [first name],

I’ve suffered a XX-day loss to my work week because of [reason]. As a result, it won’t be possible for me to submit the deliverables that were due on [original delivery date]. The earliest I can get them to you is by [revised deadline].

I understand this delay may be inconvenient for you and I sincerely apologize for it.

Is it possible for you to accommodate the new deadline?

Best,

[your name]

If the delay is particularly inconvenient for the client, you may want to offer to forgo some of your fee to make up for it. You may want to add the following line to the email:

Also, I can completely understand if you’d like to deduct a part of my fee to compensate for this delay.

Template #9: Cold Emails

When it comes to cold emails, you’ll find that using templates isn’t as easy to get results.

The only way to get a response from a cold email is to do your research and learn the art of writing cold emails.

But to give you an idea of the cold emails that work, we’ve dug up two great samples.

The first one is from Masswerks. It’s simple, direct and effective. In fact, the following cold email earned the agency a $15k consulting project:

Masswerks’ email shows that cold emails can be effective without taking the flattery or clever route. Also, note how the agency highlights its results-driven approach without sounding salesy.

The second one we quite like is from freelance designer Jake Jorgovan. The following email brought in $4,250 for Jorgavan:

That’s it For The Templates

But to make the most of them, try using a canned replies extension for Gmail, so you don’t have to copy and paste the templates each time you want to use them.

You can do a search in the Chrome Web Store to find one you’d like to use.

In addition, consider installing the following Gmail plugins as well. They will give you more control over how the conversation happens.

3 Free Handy Gmail Plugins to Install Right Now

1.Boomerang for Gmail

This plugin lets you schedule emails. It’s particularly helpful for freelancers and agencies that serve clients in different timezones.

Whether it’s your pitch email or a status update, Boomerang for Gmail helps you deliver emails within your clients’ working hours.

The free plan limits the amount of emails you can schedule, but you can upgrade to unlock additional features like more emails, recurring messages, unlimited tracking, and more.

2.UglyEmail

This Chrome extension lets you identify emails that have opens and click-tracking enabled.

Sometimes some clients could be tracking your email opens and clicks. And if for some reason you aren’t in a position to respond to a certain email immediately, the client may feel that you aren’t responsive.

So if you can’t reply right away, it’s best to not read such emails. UglyEmail adds an eye icon in front of all emails that attempt tracking.

3.PixelBlock

UglyEmail helps you identify emails that are being tracked; PixelBlock lets you block all tracking attempts.

This is a must-have plugin for every web developer or agency because you don’t want your clients to know that you read their email at “1.03 AM on your mobile.”

Other than privacy intrusion with such information, a client may feel that you aren’t a true professional because your work spills into your free hours.

For a lot of freelancers, canned responses and the above plugins will suffice. However, if your business has grown to a point where you need more features, try full-blown CRM tools like HubSpot, MixMax, or Streak.

Sending Emails Should Be The Easiest Part Of Your Day

In most email clients, you can access templates with 2-3 clicks. All you need to do after that is make a quick tweak and you’re ready to hit “Send.

So why not start using templates and make sending emails the easiest part of your day.

Feel free to use these emails as they are or personalize them so they match your tone and style. And make sure to use a reliable email hosting service for your domains too!

The 5 W’s and the H refers to the six questions that a reporter should answer in the lead paragraph of a news story (as long as they are relevant and make sense). The questions are the following:

• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why
• How

5 W’s and the H – Question Guide for Brainstorming

But even if you aren’t a reporter, you can still use these questions to help you brainstorm for content marketing ideas and map out an outline for your content.

Below is a list of the questions and some possibilities for each. The questions provided are as general as possible in order to provide a guide that you might use for any topic. For that reason, they may seem a little strange unless you have a specific topic in mind.

Who

• Who is involved?
• Who is affected?
• Who will benefit?
• Who will be harmed?

What

• What is your topic narrowed down in a simple phrase/sentence?
• What does your topic involve? (i.e. What are the different parts to it?)
• What is it similar to / different from?
• What might be affected/changed by your topic?

When

• When does this take place? When did this take place? When will it take place? When should this take place?
• Does when this takes place affect the topic?

Where

• Where does this take place? (Where did it …. Where will it … Where should it ….?)
• Does it matter where it takes place? Is it affected by location?

Why

• Why is this topic important? Why does it matter?
• Why do certain things happen? (What are some causes and effects within the topic?)

How

• How does this topic work? How does it function? How does it do what it does?
• How did it come to be?
• How are those involved affected?

There is another question that I will throw in here: “What if?” What if is not a question a reporter would typically use, not in the lead paragraph anyway, but it’s often an excellent question to ask for other types of situations.

What If

• What if everything worked as it should?
• What if everything didn’t work as it should?
• What if this topic didn’t exist?

An Example: Answers to the 5 W’s and the H

In order to make these questions more concrete, I will go through each of the questions and show you the answers I came up with in the writing of this post.

It’s important to note that this is a BRAINSTORMING technique. When you’re answering the questions, you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your ideas are perfectly expressed or even if they’re good! The idea behind brainstorming is to GET QUANTITY, NOT QUALITY.

Once you have a lot of ideas down on paper (or on the screen, as the case may be), then you can go back and pick out the ones that seem to have the most merit.

So, here’s my brainstorm for this topic, which is “using the 5 W’s and the H as a brainstorming technique.”

Who

Who is involved?

• Anyone who produces or consumes content. – Bloggers, designers, developers, clients.

Who is affected?

• Anyone who produces or consumes content. – Same as above.

Who will benefit?

• Both the creators and the consumers will benefit.

 Who will be harmed?

• No one harmed, however, it will take effort on the part of the creator.

What

What is your topic narrowed down in a simple phrase/sentence?

• It’s a brainstorming technique that consists of six questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.

What does your topic involve? (i.e. What are the different parts to it?)

• It involves going through and answering a series of questions. It also involves creating new questions.

What is it similar to / different from?

• It’s similar to other types of prompts, to anything that’s meant to stimulate you and help you to see deeper into a subject. It’s also similar to a checklist.
• It’s different from just winging it and not going through your topic in a systematic way.

What might be affected/changed by your topic?

• The quality of the content might be affected (for the better, of course). It can lead to more details and a more thorough examination of the topic.
• The ease at which the content is created might be affected. Could be easier because the questions act as a guide. Could also be more “difficult” in some ways because it forces you to think and consider things on a deeper level. In the end, however, even though that may be more “difficult,” it should result in better content.

When

When does this take place? When did this take place? When will it take place? When should this take place?

• The brainstorming can take place at many points in the writing process. It should take place at the beginning in order to generate ideas and to help map out directions. But it can take place for individual points within the larger points. This can be done during the revision stage.

Does when this takes place affect the topic?

• Doing it at the beginning of the writing process is ideal. Doing it later in the writing process can also be beneficial in order to delve more deeply into certain points.
• It may help to use other brainstorming techniques before using this one in some cases, especially if the content creator is having a difficult time pinning down ideas or getting a hold of the topic.

Where

Where does this take place? (Where did it …. Where will it … Where should it ….?)

• It can take place digitally (on computer, online) or it can be done with paper. Essentially, however, it takes place in the mind. It forces you to reach into your mind for answers. And if they aren’t there, it may force you to look for answers elsewhere – to research them.

 Does it matter where it takes place? Is it affected by location?

• That depends on personal preference.

Why

Why is this topic important? Why does it matter?

• It helps in generating ideas.
• It helps in being thorough.
• It helps in mapping out a direction/creating an outline.
• It helps in answering questions others might have.
• It helps in creating questions that others should have thought of but didn’t.

Why do certain things happen? (What are some causes and effects within the topic?)

• The questions force you to approach the topic from many different angles.
• They force you to be thorough.
• They help you think of new ideas.
• They make the process of generating ideas easier.

How

How does this topic work? How does it function? How does it do what it does?

• It works by prompting you.
• It works by making you go deeper than you might have “on your own.”
• It works by making you look at things from several angles.

How did it come to be?

• It came from journalism originally.
• It has since been adopted by many writers as a technique for brainstorming.

 How are those involved affected?

• It makes it easier for a content creator to delve deeper into a topic.
• It relieves some stress placed on the creator because he/she knows that answering the questions will at least produce some good ideas to work with.

What If

What if everything worked as it should?

• If everything worked as it should, then a content creator would be able to easily create quality content after running through the questions.

 What if everything didn’t work as it should?

• If it didn’t work as it should, then the creator would possibly abandon the project.
• If it didn’t work as it should, then the creator would possibly be left with more answers than questions. However, having questions that can be investigated would probably still lead to quality content, and possibly even better content because those eventual answers may be hard to come by for most – and therefore would be perceived as more valuable.

What if this topic didn’t exist?

• It this technique didn’t exist, then content creators wouldn’t necessarily have a sure-fire way to make sure they were covering their topics from all the essential angles.

A Finished Example

By the way, did you notice that I actually answered five of the six questions in the lead of this post? Although this isn’t a “news” story, it can still be an effective technique.

Here are short answers that I pulled out of my notes in order to help me write the lead paragraph.

• Who – content creators
• What – brainstorming technique: 5 W’s and the H
• When – when they need to create content; in the exploring stage
• Where – (not really so important here)
• Why – to easily explore the topic in detail and give direction to the content; produce quality
• How – by answering a set of simple questions that come at the topic from different angles

And here is the lead paragraph with five of the six answers incorporated. You’ll notice that they aren’t the word-for-word answers from above, but the ideas are still there.

If you are someone that needs to create content in order to connect with your audience (who), then you may find it difficult to produce quality material (why) on a consistent basis (when). If that’s your situation, then using a well-worn writer’s technique (how) called the “reporter’s questions,” or “the 5 W’s and the H” (what) may be just what you need.

(Note: “Where” is not really essential for the lead paragraph in this case.)

>> Coming soon will be another brainstorming technique related to the 5 W’s and the H.

Photo: The 5 w’s sales qualification questions (who, why, when, what, how, where) to solve a problem sketched in chalk on blackboard and  Brainstorm from BigStock.

Visitors to your site want to have their questions answered instantly. They want to be able to see what your products cost without having to speak with a salesperson or request a quote. They want to be able to click a button and speak with a customer service representative if they need additional help. And, the list goes on…

While your customers are demanding a better experience, you may be asking yourself, “How do I make my prospects and customers happy while not breaking the bank, having dozens of different software plans, and hiring more employees?”

Well, we have some good news to share with you – with HubSpot’s completely free all-in-one CRM, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service WordPress plugin (not sure what a CRM is, find out more here) you can better attract, engage, and (who knows, maybe) delight your prospects and customers effectively all in one platform without spending a single penny.

In this article, we’ll go over how to engage your visitors & customers more generally and how you can go about doing that with the HubSpot WordPress plugin.

Convert your website visitors by adding value with Forms

Forms vary in many ways – length, format, content type, appearance and purpose. However, they should fit your business’s needs, collect the information you want from your visitors, and ultimately provide value to your prospects and customers.

If you already have forms on your website, that’s great! Submissions should automatically sync with your HubSpot contact database when you have the HubSpot WordPress plugin installed. HubSpot can monitor any submission on your website and pull in the details that the user inputted.

If you don’t have forms on your website yet, that’s okay! HubSpot has a free form builder in the plugin, or you can use another forms plugin, such as Forminator (which is pretty amazing, just fyi), and have them automatically connect with your HubSpot account. Forminator’s extended HubSpot integration allows for setting up a free WordPress support ticketing system too.

Engage & help your visitors with Live Chat

Sometimes, your visitors don’t want to fill out forms. There are many reasons for this… maybe your call-to-action is too generic or even too invasive by asking for a lot of information.

Have you recently been to a website and engaged with someone in sales, customer support, or even a bot? It’s best to give your visitors different options to engage with your business.

In a recent study asking, “when you have a question or problem you need help with, how do you like to connect with a company’s customer service group?” 48% of the respondents answered with live chat, and 57% of the respondents said they are interested in getting information from bots when browsing a business’s website.

With the big shift in how customers are shopping and researching online, live chat and bots are an easy way to help your customers and save you massive amounts of time and energy. And, it’s very simple to add live chat and bots to your website. In the quick walkthrough below, you will see how easy it is to create a step by step bot that asks questions to qualify your visitors and learn more about their interests.

With HubSpot’s WordPress plugin, you can add live chat to your website in less than a minute and build chatbots to engage with your visitors while you’re away from your computer or even sleeping! If you care to chat with your visitors, you can use HubSpot’s free mobile application or the web app.

Organize, enrich, and track each visitor in a tidy timeline with Contacts

Typically, when someone submits a form on your website, you would receive a simple kickback email with the details they entered and most likely a record saved in your WordPress form editor.

What you may not know is that you’re missing out on a lot of additional information that would help you better engage with your prospect. These additional insights include what pages they viewed, how many times they’ve visited your website, how they found you, and so much more.

Here’s a gif showing a contact’s timeline with all the valuable details:

Imagine being able to know everything about what people are doing on your website, when, and who exactly they are. You can use these details to notify your sales team, trigger an email, and much more.

You can manage up to 1 million contacts in your HubSpot account for free, forever.

Create segmented contact groups with Lists

So you want to know which contacts are visiting your pricing page? Which customers are looking to upgrade or even cancel? You can use Lists in the HubSpot WordPress plugin to create filtered groups of your contacts based on their specific interactions, behaviors, and other metadata that you’ve gathered.

For example, if a lead visits your pricing page, it’s a good inkling that they might be evaluating your products. You can use this valuable insight (and others like it) to reach out and help them, create a tailored chatbot, or even send them an automated email to move them closer to purchasing.

You can use these segmented lists to power more personalized content in email, ads, and in your content.

Follow-up with automated personalized messaging with Email

Educating your contacts and customers through targeted, personalized email is a great way to drive engagement. If you’re sending blanket emails today and hoping they work, you may be getting large amounts of people to unsubscribe from your communication due to its spammy nature. People’s inboxes are overly cluttered, and one of the easiest ways to cut through the noise is to personalize your messaging with things like their name or company name in the subject line and copy.

Think about this: You now know every page each contact is looking at on your website, if they are customers or not, and other information that you’ve gathered when they fill out forms or engage with your chatbot. You can create segmented lists to group very similar contacts together. And, now you can send beautiful, responsive emails to them that feel personalized and helpful!

The goal of any business is to help its customers! Understand your customer’s needs, be helpful and personalized, and always be timely. Now you can do it more easily.

Measure business performance with Dashboard

Now that you’re starting to get the hang of engaging and delighting your contacts and customers, you must be wondering how you can see how your business is performing.

With HubSpot’s Dashboard built into the WordPress plugin, you can view your growth and highlight the areas you need to improve upon.

You can view basic reports and even build custom reports to analyze any part of your business. Since all of your valuable contact data is stored in your HubSpot account, you can build dashboards showing each part of your business’s success.

Almost 2 thousand years later, humans would invent technology that would pretty much allow the same: Code.

So, “what does this have to do with WordPress?” you may wonder.

A lot, actually! We’ll come back to this in a bit.

Prefer a video instead? You’re in luck :)

Is WordPress Really Free?

This is a question many who are looking to create their first website ask.

And the answer is YES.

WordPress is a free and open-source software (FOSS) that you can use, modify, and redistribute as you wish.

Note: By WordPress here, I mean WordPress.org, the self-hosted, free, open-source platform. Not WordPress.com, it’s a related but totally different commercial cousin. You can read more about their differences here.

“But I Still Have to Spend Money to Use It, Right?”

Also YES.

While WordPress, the software, is free, using it to create a live website does incur some costs.

This isn’t a limitation of WordPress as such. All websites hosted online work this way, whether you use WordPress to build them or not.

You need to rent resources on a web host to serve your WordPress site to the world.

WordPress hosting costs as little as $4/month to 1000s of dollars depending on your site’s needs. Most website owners settle for something in between, striking the perfect balance between value and cost.

Note: If all you want to do is try WordPress out, just to experiment or learn, you can do it without spending any money by installing WordPress locally on your PC.

But Why is WordPress Free?

This is easier to grasp by reading the license.txt file included with every WordPress download.

“This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.”

What Exactly Does “Free Software” Mean Though?

To understand this, we have to go back in history and take a look at the origin of free software movement (FSM). It’s a social movement with a goal to guarantee certain freedoms to software makers and users alike.

It’s inspired heavily by the traditions and philosophies of the 1970s hacker and academia culture, which encouraged sharing knowledge and DIY.

FSM was founded in 1983 by Richard Stallman by launching the GNU Project at MIT. FSM was (and still is) a mass-collaboration, free-software movement, the likes of which humanity had never seen before.

Its turning point came in 1985 when Stallman established the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to support FSM. A few years later, in 1989, Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License (GPL or GNU GPL) for use with programs released under the GNU Project.

The GPL license allowed people to study, run, share, and modify the software code as they wished.

But Why Free?

Code isn’t like tangible goods. For instance, if you have an apple, and I take it from you, I now have an apple and you don’t have one. However, if you have software and you share it with me, we both have the software now.

In a way, code is an intangible thing like knowledge or ideas. You don’t lose your knowledge or ideas if you share them with others. On the contrary, it only makes them even more widespread. Free software is meant to do the same.

Another ethical argument put forward by FOSS advocates is that since the software can be copied and distributed at scale with minimal resources, the super high profit margins make it unjustifiable beyond a certain point.

Most of the richest companies in the world today are software companies. Many of them use FOSS tools in their daily work, while still keeping their core software locked. And they keep getting richer and richer.

These two arguments are essentially the main reason why FSM activists want code to be free.

On GPL and Free Software

GPL has gone undergone two major revisions since its inception in 1989 (v2 in 1991 and v3 in 2007). But its core philosophy has remained the same. It’s defined by its adherence to 4 Fundamental Freedoms that are considered essential to any “free software”:

• Freedom 0: Run the software for any purpose.
• Freedom 1: Study how the software works through open access to its source code, and change it to do what you want.
• Freedom 2: Redistribute copies of the software to anyone without any restrictions.
• Freedom 3: Modify the software, and redistribute the modified software to anyone.

WordPress.org lists these freedoms as their philosophy too.

One core tenet of GPLv2 license is that if you make any modifications to the software licensed under it, the modified code MUST also be licensed under GPLv2, and released along with build & install instructions.

Note: As per FSF’s definition, not all open-source software is “free software” (free as in freedom, not free as in beer). But all “free software” is by definition open source.

Some prominent software licensed under the GPL include:

• Linux Kernel — powers the Linux OS, which in turn powers most web servers
• MediaWiki — the wiki software on which Wikipedia runs
• Android OS (major parts of it) — the most used mobile OS in the world, uses the Linux kernel
• WordPress — powers more than 33% of all the websites

With these stats, I’m not exaggerating when I say that free, open-source software has changed the world.

WordPress as a Free Software

WordPress was born out of the same philosophy as FSM. It was created in 2003 by Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg.

They started it by forking a popular-but-abandoned blogging platform called b2/cafelog.

You may find this hard to believe, but the most popular blogging platform today was itself conceived in a blog post by Matt, and its co-founder Mike, was the first one to comment in support of it.

"Fortunately, b2/cafelog is GPL, which means that I could use the existing codebase to create a fork, integrating all the cool stuff that Michel would be working on right now if only he was around. The work would never be lost, as if I fell of the face of the planet a year from now, whatever code I made would be free to the world, and if someone else wanted to pick it up they could. I’ve decided that this the course of action I’d like to go in, now all I need is a name. What should it do? Well, it would be nice to have the flexibility of MovableType, the parsing of TextPattern, the hackability of b2, and the ease of setup of Blogger. Someday, right?"

– Posted on January 24, 2003, by Matt Mullenweg on his b2/cafelog blog.

"Matt,
If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing. I’m sure there are one or two others in the community who would be too. Perhaps a post to the B2 forum, suggesting a fork would be a good starting point."

– Comment by Mike Little on Matt’s post

They could fork b2/cafelog because it was released under the GPLv2 license, so anyone was free to do with it as they wished. As such, WordPress was also released under the same GPLv2 license (and still is to this day).

In 2010, the WordPress founders established The WordPress Foundation as a charitable organization to further the mission of open source, GPL software.

It’s also a way to distance themselves from it to avoid conflicts of interest, since they have a commercial service running in parallel called WordPress.com.

Today, WordPress is updated continuously and maintained by The WordPress Foundation and thousands of contributors from all walks of life.

What About WordPress Themes and Plugins?

As per GPLv2 license, all derivative works, such as plugins or themes of WordPress, should inherit the license too.

Drupal (another popular CMS platform), which uses the same GPL license as WordPress, has a well-drafted Licensing FAQs page that explains what a “derivate work” means clearly.

However, in practice, this is much harder to enforce. There’s some legal gray area when it comes to what’s derivative work or not. According to WordPress.org’s licensing page: “we feel strongly that plugins and themes are derivative work and thus inherit the GPL license.”

How Do People Who Make WordPress Make Money Then?

This is a question that has been troubling many FOSS developers for decades.

How does one make money while providing the code they work on for free?

The simple answer is that you don’t make money by selling the code alone. It’s pro-bono work, done for the greater good, like feeding the hungry or cleaning your neighborhood.

However, there are many other ways for FOSS developers to sustain themselves.

WordPress contributors can follow any of the business models of open-source software. They can use their knowledge and expertise to serve as consultants and/or provide support. Or perhaps, they can build custom applications on top of WordPress for clients ready to pay for their professional services.

Some WordPress developers also make money by creating valuable themes and plugins. These can be completely free (supported by voluntary donations or crowdfunding), free with restricted features (paid premium add-ons), or totally pay-to-use (hey, no such thing as free lunch).

A few of these developers have gone on to found successful multi-million dollar enterprises. Some even offer hosting solutions optimized for WordPress.

Automattic Inc., a company started by WordPress co-founder Matt, is the perfect example of this. It’s notable for its WordPress.com platform, which provides an easy way for everyone to build a website without worrying about hosting and other tech-heavy stuff.

WPMU DEV, the company whose blog you’re currently reading, is another example of a successful business built around WordPress. If you’re looking for more inspirations, here’s a list of some of the most successful WordPress businesses.

Hello, WordPress!

WordPress marches on as the most popular platform to build websites. Whether you want to build a simple personal blog or a complex website selling thousands of products, WordPress can do it all with ease.

There are 54,000+ free plugins listed on WordPress.org’s repo alone, some of which are exceptionally excellent. As our commitment to the free software movement’s mission, we’ve released free versions of our most popular Pro plugins on WordPress.org.

You can also find many beautiful free themes for WordPress and build any kind of website in minutes. And if you want to go even further, WPMU DEV offers top-notch premium plugins and supercharged hosting, not to mention our stellar 24/7 support.

If you’re using WordPress in any way, take pride in knowing that the spirit of the free software movement lives on through you!

Well, I have … too many times to remember!

So, in case you ever get challenged privately, publicly (or even socially on Instagram or Snapchat) about WordPress being an “actual” CMS and not just a tool for setting up blogs or small business websites, here are some facts to arm yourself with for such an occasion.

• What Is A CMS?
• Can You Actually Spot An Actual CMS Website?
• WordPress As A CMS (More Than A Gut Feeling)

What Is A CMS?

Want to know if the WordPress CMS can handle more than just blogs and small business websites? Then check out the video below …

Rather than use the definition of CMS that my elderly mother thought she heard me say once during a family dinner (“Can’t Manage My Sister”), let’s turn to the stalwart of the online community for seeking actual and factual enlightenment, Wikipedia:

“A content management system (CMS) manages the creation and modification of digital content. These systems typically support multiple users in a collaborative environment, allowing to perform document management with different styles of governance and workflows.”

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system)

Now, I could quote Wikipedia all day long, and so I will once more. The above quote continues thusly …

“Usually the content is a website … and the term commonly refers to web content management systems. Web content may include text and embedded graphics, photos, video, audio, maps, and program code … that displays content or interacts with the user. By their nature, CMSs support the separation of content and presentation.”

Read the above definition in its totality and take a moment to contemplate the plurality of “CMSs” and to breathe in the combination of fricative sibilance, alliteration, and rhyming consonance in the final sentence “CMSs support the separation of content and presentation.”

Before we dissect this definition further, here’s what Wikipedia also has to say about the structure of a CMS, or a Content Management System:

“A content management system (CMS) typically has two major components: a content management application (CMA), as the front-end user interface that allows a user, even with limited expertise, to add, modify, and remove content from a website without the intervention of a webmaster; and a content delivery application (CDA), that compiles the content and updates the website.”

You could defend WordPress’ (not WordPresss) honor as an actual CMS armed with just the above information, regardless of whether you’re engaged in a text message war with an ignorant luddite or facing a mob of drunken social influencers at a party in Ibiza.

But, let’s not stop there. Let’s bring in the ultimate show stopper of factual honest to goodness truth … charts!

According to trends, intelligence, and internet research company BuiltWith, WordPress is the world’s leading platform of choice for  websites using CMS technologies. WordPress powers over a third of the web’s CMS websites and blogs.

In fact, as the chart below from W3Techs.com – a company driven by a vision to provide the most reliable and most extensive source of information on web technology usage shows (and they spare no expense when it comes to graph and chart design), no other CMS platform even comes close to WordPress in terms of market dominance.

This diagram shows the market position of WordPress in terms of popularity and traffic compared to the other most popular content management systems …

W3Techs.com even anticipated the fact that doubters may disregard charts as “alternative facts”, and so they committed their results to print …

Just to restate the above …

“WordPress is used by 61.2% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 34.5% of all websites.”

There it is, those three sweet words again … “content management system.”

If around two-thirds of all the websites whose content management system “we know” use WordPress and WordPress is used to power over a third of all websites, then please try the following right now:

1. Look at your website.
2. Look at the website on your left,’
3. Look at the website on your right.

One of these is a CMS website running on WordPress.

And it’s happening right now as you are reading this with your mouth hanging open in astonishment. Folks are downloading and installing the free self-hosted version of WordPress like they found an ATM that’s spitting out free money…

WordPress Downloads. (Source: https://wordpress.org/download/counter)

Can You Actually Spot An Actual CMS Website?

Before we attempt to prove conclusively and once and for all if WordPress is an actual content management system, try and see if you can actually spot an actual CMS website built with WordPress.

You see, WordPress has long been stuck with the “oh yes, that blogging platform” status.

Although WordPress did start out as a “blogging” platform, it has evolved way beyond a technology for publishing blogs.

Businesses of all sizes use the WordPress CMS platform to power their sites, even big businesses …

You can check which web technologies are being used to power websites using various online tools. For example, here is what W3Techs.com has to say about Glassdoor.com…

But it’s not just businesses that are using the WordPress CMS to power their sites. Governments are in on it too …

Once again, this is confirmed by checking a technology identifying tool like W3Techs.com …

In a previous article, we looked at just how many university and college websites depend on the WordPress CMS …

It’s not just business, government, university and college websites, however, that are using the WordPress CMS to power their online presence. If you want true validation of WordPress as an actual CMS, then check out the websites of those who have dared to boldly go where no one has gone before … celebrity and fashion websites!

Whenever those we respect, idolize, and venerate take up a cause they believe in or promote something to make bucketloads of money, it becomes de rigueur for the rest of us all to follow suit. Planetary and interplanetary leaders are using WordPress as a CMS. If this is not validation of WordPress as an actual CMS, then what is? If not them, who? If not now, when?

To see many other examples of websites and blogs being powered by a WordPress CMS to serve all kinds of purposes for all kinds of people and institutions in all kinds of industries and walks of life, just visit the WordPress Showcase section.

WordPress As A CMS (More Than A Gut Feeling)

Now that the Word’s on the street and everybody’s talkin’ ’bout it (and bloggin’ and publishin’ with it too!), it’s time to turn our attention inwards and take a gutsy look at the guts of the WordPress platform.

If we transform Wikipedia’s definition of a CMS into a really cool infographic, it would look like this …

Anatomically speaking, WordPress has an almost identical (yep!) structure to the CMS defined by Wikipedia, with advanced website features for managing web design (i.e. themes) and site functionality (e.g. plugins, widgets, blocks, etc.)

In fact, we could rewrite Wikipedia’s definition of a content management system to describe WordPress …

“WordPress manages the creation and modification of digital content. WordPress supports multiple users in a collaborative environment, allowing to perform document management with different styles of governance and workflows. Usually the content is a website (or blog) and the term commonly refers to web content management systems. WordPress sites may include text and embedded graphics, photos, video, audio, maps, and program code (such as for applications) that displays content or interacts with the user through posts, pages, and custom post types. By their nature, WordPresss support the separation of content and presentation.”

(Source: A wise guy)

Under the “Common Features” section of its CMS page, Wikipedia lists a bunch of features that content management systems typically provide. Let’s go through and compare these features with what WordPress offers:

• Search engine optimization: This can be easily achieved using permalinks, categories, tags, SEO plugins, anchor text hyperlinks in content, internal linking, etc.
• Integrated and online documentation: WordPress provides official documentation (Codex), including support forums, and many sites include video-based and online WordPress tutorials.
• Modularity and extensibility: We call’em ‘plugins‘.
• User and group functionality: WordPress has built-in user roles and capabilities, collaborative features, comments and discussions, and can enhance user and group functionality through all kinds of plugins.
• Templating support for changing designs: Yup, we call’em themes.
• Installation and upgrade wizards: Easy peasy cee-em-ess-eze! WordPress can be installed in just a few clicks and the same goes for upgrading its core software, plus any installed themes and plugins. Many plugins even come with setup wizards.
• Integrated audit logs: Yup, got those too! From system and debugging reports, to stats in the dashboard that stare right back at you as soon as you log into the admin section.
• Compliance with various accessibility frameworks and standards, such as WAI-ARIA: Pretty sure WordPress’ got this!
• Reduced need to code from scratch: Who needs to code with WordPress when you got plugins, widgets, blocks, and shortcodes?
• Unified user experience: United we stand … hooks, lines, and filters. We don’t <div>
• Version control: WordPress has no aversions to versions. In fact, WordPress releases a new version approximately every 3 months (it’s like version control is out of control!). Check ’em out here: WordPress History
• Edit permission management: With WordPress user roles and capabilities, admins can assign default permissions to different user groups and customize these using various plugins and modifications.
• Indexing and search: WordPress has its own built-in search functionality, and all content, posts, pages, etc. are indexed and archived in the database and can be easily retrieved, filtered, and sorted internally (e.g. Table of Posts) and externally (e.g. tags, categories, calendar widgets, etc.)
• Format or style management through themes: You haven’t lived until you’ve installed and activated a new WordPress theme.
• Web-based publishing: WordPress doesn’t just publish, it can also get your site automatically indexed in search engines and your content syndicated to social networks and other sites and directories using built-in features like pinging services and RSS feeds, and various plugins and integrations with 3rd party services.

Given all of the above, it’s hard to dispute that WordPress is an actual content management system.

So, next time you’re at a party and everyone’s had a few too many and some old timer is reminiscing about reviving Frontpage or harping about the merits of some other CMS, you can deliver the kicker … WordPress is not only an actual content management system, it’s so much more!

WordPress is becoming more than a CMS, or even a web publishing platform! With the ability to use REST APIs to create a Headless WordPress CMS and developments like ‘blocks’ introduced with the release of WordPress 5.0 (aka WordPress Gutenberg), the entire platform is shapeshifting to something that even William Shatner would be proud to blog about on his WordPress site.

To quote Einstein had he been smart enough to blog before blogging and content management systems became relatively popular, WordPress = CMS².

Circadian neurologist Russel Foster says there’s no evidence that waking up early increases your wealth, it just makes you “horribly smug.” His words, not mine :)

Makes total sense though. If it were true roosters and toddlers would be making it rain.

If you’re a night owl, like a lot of the people who responded to our super scientific Twitter poll, this post is for and about you. We’re going to cover what unique benefits you receive with your vampiric sleeping habits so you can stop feeling bad about being you.

Being a night owl does come with some obstacles that make having a healthy lifestyle more difficult though, so we’ll go over some tips that will help night owls, early birds and bears?…oh my.

Why Night Owls are the Best

Night time is the best time. It’s quiet. The kids are asleep. The chores can wait until tomorrow. You have the fridge all to yourself. Light a candle and pour a drink. Staying up late is where the party is at.

Night Owls Are More Creative

• Prince
• Bob Dylan
• Hunter S. Thompson

All prolific and creative night owls.

The Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, determined that night owls exhibit more creativity. Their unconventional sleeping habits “may encourage the development of a non-conventional spirit and the ability to find alternative and original solutions.

This could also be because the prefrontal cortex a.k.a. your inner critic gets tired at the end of the day so more inventive thoughts can creep in.

Brant Hasler, assistant professor of psychiatry at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, notes that “the brain might be freed up for more divergent thinking, allowing one to make new associations between different concepts more easily.”

No wonder I don’t get writer’s block when I’m sleepy.

Night Owls are Supremely Intelligent

Psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa studied thousands of adolescents and found that people with high intelligence are more likely to be night owls. Another study suggests night owls have higher levels of cognitive ability.

Night owls also have larger social networks and play a more central role in their networks than early birds. No wonder all the other birds try to be as cool as night owls.

5 Must Join Slack Workspaces For WordPress Pros and Developers

Early bird go home, you’re drunk

Studies indicate functioning on no sleep after 17 to 19 hours is similar to having a BAC (blood alcohol concentration) of 0.05. You can get a DUI in the US for a BAC over 0.08. If you’re sacrificing sleep to wake up early, that’s probably not the best idea.

There’s better ways to get more done so you can increase your income.

Early birds are prone to tiring out sooner than late risers. A study conducted by The University of Leige in Belgium, measured the reaction time of early birds and night owls. Both groups scored similarly in the morning, but the night owls showed a faster response time in the evening and were able to sustain their mental alertness over a longer period of time.

Night Owls are Better Baseball Players

In a study on Major League baseball players, early birds got more hits in the morning and night owls got more hits when games start in the evening, nothing surprising there. But night owls play better during the day than early birds play at night. So don’t play past your bedtime.

Could this be because night owls have super strength? A study by the University of Alberta tested the leg strength of night owls and early birds. The study found that early risers experience peak brain activity in the morning which fades as the day goes on. Whereas night owls experience increased motor cortex and spinal cord excitability in the evening hours, giving them a burst of strength during that time. Early birds did not experience this phenomenon.

Why Night Owls Have it Rough

So there are some downsides to being a night owl. For one, you’re going against the grain and may experience “social jetlag“. You’ll accrue more sleep debt and might be chronically sleep deprived if your social obligations don’t alight with your preferred routine.

How to Protect Your WordPress Business from a Major Life Change

Night owls also run into trouble when they go against their natural circadian rhythm. If your body is entering rest and fasting mode to prepare for the night ahead and you startle it with coffee, a midnight snack and a bright idea that you want to work on, there is going to be trouble. This could be why night owls have a higher risk of developing metabolic and cardiovascular disorders. Yikes!

So what’s a night owl to do? The same thing as all the other animals.

The different types

Not everyone falls neatly into the night owl or early bird category. I certainly don’t. I’m somewhere in the wake me up before the sun and I’ll cut you group middle.

In The Power of When, Dr. Breus identifies four different kinds of chronotypes:

• Lions are your sterotypical early birds who like to wake up super early.
• Bears are the most common sleep pattern. Think of them as the 9-5ers. They wake up early but not too early and go to sleep at a reasonable time.
• Wolves are the night owls. They’re more productive late at night
• Dolphins are the insomniacs of the group and never really sleep well at all.

Now that makes more sense. Here’s a quiz to find out what you are.

So what can this tell us about how to be more successful?

In all seriousness, you can be happy, healthy and successful no matter what your chronotype. I offer this post to counterbalance all the Losers! Asleep! Not achieving! deluge that can make you feel bad about not waking up at 4am. You are, after all, not a bird or a bear or a dolphin, but a HUMAN!

How to Keep Your WordPress site Busy While You’re on Vacation

Rather than wasting your energy fighting your true nature and forcing yourself into a brutal routine, you should use your energy to make exercise a priority, watch what you eat and maintain a consistent routine. This will help you no matter what your chronotype, but it will especially help night owls curb the harmful effects of having to live in an early bird world.

Our superheroes know a thing or two about staying up late to fight crime and improve WordPress. If you’re staying up late because you’re trying to do too much and are overwhelmed, give WPMU DEV a try for free. We can help you become more efficient and generate additional income.

So if you’ve already abandoned your “wake up early” resolution, rest contently knowing that you’re following your natural rhythm.

Standing for Searchable Log of All Conversation & Knowledge, Slack is more than just a glorified text message platform. It’s a central knowledge base where ideas evolve as they’re recorded and shared openly, rather than entombed in email inboxes or lost in a social media stream. Becoming a part of different communities in Slack can help you increase your profile in the WordPress sphere.

In this post, we’re going to share some of the top Slack workspaces that are taking WordPress projects to new and exciting places. Don’t be afraid to jump on board, introduce yourself, and start bringing your ideas & experience to the table.

• All Work and No Play Makes Slack a Very Dull Boy
  1. WordPress + Slack
  2. The WordPress Governance Project
  3. WP Developers’ Club
  4. WooCommerce
• Slack of All Trades

All Work and No Play Makes Slack a Very Dull Boy

Slack workspaces are communities, just like the literal millions of assemblies found on LinkedIn and Facebook. There are also some great finds scattered randomly across the internet. For example, check out this list of Slack communities specific to remote workers.

To join a Slack workspace, you need to be allowed by the admin. For public workspaces, the process is automatic. You just enter your email and an invitation is automatically sent to you. For private Slack workspaces, you’ll need to be approved before you receive an invite.

Here are some WordPress Slack workspaces where the best and brightest gather.

1. WordPress + Slack

The main WordPress Slack community is at WordPress + Slack. Not only is this the largest WordPress Slack workspace, it’s one of the largest Slack communities on the web. There is a lot going on.

There are over 80 channels on different topics ranging from bbPress, BuddyPress, accessibility, WP-CLI, Core, to translations and more.

You’ll also find channels for WordCamp EU and WordCamp US, so you can follow up on all those connections you made.

Note, Slack communication is used for contributing to the WordPress project, be it code, design, documentation, etc. There is no support channel for WordPress on Slack; the best place for that is the WordPress.org support forums.

To join, login to wordpress.org or create an account to get started. You’ll then scroll down to the Joining the WordPress team on Slack section and click on the I understand. Please send me an invite link.

This will send an invite to the email associated with your WordPress.org account. Open up the email, click on the link and proceed to Slack.

2. The WordPress Governance Project

First announced at WordCamp US 2018, the WordPress Governance Project aims to explore and define the principles, leadership and governance model for the WordPress open source project.

When you join WordPress.org, you’ll get an @chat.WordPress.org email address that forwards to the personal email address you chose to associate with your WordPress.org account.

You’ll use the same @chat.WordPress.org email to join the WordPress Governance Project Slack workspace. Your email will be your WordPress.org username@chat.WordPress.org.

The confirmation email will take you to Slack where you will enter your name and agree to the terms of service.

3. WP Developers’ Club

Even though it has club in the name, the WP Developers Club is completely free to join. You don’t actually need to be a developer either, although the channels are dedicated to topics developers are most interested in.

There are channels devoted to the different code languages, and channels that aren’t tech related. There’s channels for gigs, mentorship, and that shameless self promotion that makes the world go round.

It’s the second largest WordPress Slack community, right behind WordPress + Slack.

4. WooCommerce

There’s a lot of WooCommerce troubleshooting going on in the WooCommerce Slack. This makes it a great log of known issues with WooCommerce and a central location for other valuable information such as WooCommerce meetups, hosting for WooComm, and more.

The WordPress WooCommerce group has channels on everything from development to themes to extensions. There’s even un canal en español.

This is a great place to get help on WooCommerce issues or hire a WooCommerce expert who knows what they’re doing.

Slack of All Trades

Slack is exploding in popularity. Even NASA has switched over to Slack for the last Mars mission.

When you’re working on the #MarsLanding but also have to keep up with all your Slack channels: pic.twitter.com/Nc5or3pfJB

— (((Ben))) (@bdh_photos) November 26, 2018

It’s a great time to get involved or start your own WordPress Slack community. You can create one for your WordPress business or for your local meetup. Starting your own Slack workspace is free and pretty easy.

Slack has completely changed the way we work at WPMU DEV. Seriously… we devoted an entire post to it. We’ve even integrated it into our famed Forminator plugin.

You can use Forminator to create a sign up page for your WordPress community. Additionally, you can alert your team on Slack when someone fills out a contact form. Best of all, you don’t have to pay an additional fee to access Forminator integrations because they’re part of the free version of the plugin.

So what are you waiting for?! One would normally say stop slacking, but when it comes to this prolific communication tool, you can’t start Slacking soon enough!

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for accuracy and relevancy.
[Originally Published: January 2019 / Revised: March 2022]

Some of the hallmarks of good website usability include:

• Mobile responsiveness: More and more people are accessing the internet via their mobile phones (and Google decrees this as important for ranking on search as part of their mobile-first initiative).
• Page load speed: Yet another important ranking signal from Google, thanks to a correlation with how people interact with websites. According to Kissmetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less!
• Website navigation: According to Orbit Media Studios, if your website is easy to use and content is easy to find, this positively affects website traffic you’ll get from search engines. Gerry McGovern conducted a study with results demonstrating that 70% of people relied on navigation rather than search when looking for something because it’s easier and faster to click on links to specific pages within a website.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on usability in terms of website menu design, best practices, and menu design inspiration.

Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:

• Website Navigation
• Best Practices in Website Menu Design Navigation
• Inspiration for Creative Website Menu Designs
• Navigation Trends
• Creative Website Menu Designs and Best Practices

Website Navigation

Web navigation is a general term that refers to the internal link architecture of a site. Above all else, its primary purpose is to help users easily find relevant content on your website. Your navigational structure also forms the basis for your website’s sitemap, which helps search engine giants like Google to index your website accordingly.

Certainly, there are several aspects that make up effective website navigation, but for now, we’ll be focusing specifically on the menu because this is usually the first-page element users interact with when they land on a new website.

Menu Navigation

Navigation menus tend to be located at the front and center of a website (figuratively speaking—a centered menu would be interesting, though). For websites with different categories, drop-down functionality is an option for conserving space and addressing the need for categorization.

Nowadays, in a show of minimalism (and mobile usability), many websites have adopted a hamburger menu design (essentially, a square with three short horizontal lines, indicating that the menu that can be expanded in a click).

Woocommerce’s Storefront theme provides a handy example, in the top right corner:

Hamburger website menu design is most prevalent when it comes to mobile website design, as developers are tasked with creating usable navigation in very small spaces. Certainly, it can be difficult to create a usable drop-down menu on mobile sites!

All that said, many designers despise the hamburger menu, which has led to a new movement of finding creative ways to make website navigation fun and functional. With that in mind, a common website menu design heuristic involves the placement of menu navigation as a permanent fixture at the top of each web page, so the user can easily find their way back ‘Home’ or seek out the next page they’re interested in.

Best Practices in Website Menu Design Navigation

Most WordPress themes come with a predefined website menu design. Whether you’re looking to justify keeping it as-is or are planning to completely redo it, here are best practices for designing menu navigation with usability and SEO in mind:

• When possible, avoid drop-down menus. Many websites like using drop-down menus because they save space but they are not recommended, especially when it comes to technical SEO. Usability tests from the NN Group found that most people dislike drop-down menus. This is because the human eye works faster than the hand, and so people find it annoying when they’ve already decided what to click on and something else drops down—leading to a decrease in visits on certain pages. All that said, the ‘mega drop down’ menu is slightly more acceptable if the website you’re designing has so much content that you can’t do without a drop-down menu design.
• Be descriptive. Get rid of generic words like ‘Services’ or ‘Products’. Instead, specify what your products or services are, since no one really searches for the generic words ‘products’ or ‘services’. Better yet, before deciding on the exact names for your menu items, justify inclusions with SEO keyword research. Orbit Media recommends using descriptive labels, as this practice benefits both users and you when search engines crawl the site. The navigation appears on every page so if you use a term related to your industry, you are alerting Google that you truly care about the topic. Don’t forget that each individual page can rank as long as it is focused on one, specific topic.
• Additionally, Orbit Media advises against format-based navigation, like arranging pages according to content—such as all videos, all infographics, and so on. This is because people search according to topic and not format.
• The positioning (or arrangement) of the items in the navigation menu matters. There is a general suggested list of pages to have on a website, such as the ‘About’ page, ‘Contact’ page, etc—these are pages most often searched for by site visitors. These prominent pages, which often have high traffic (since they’re prominently displayed) often have low engagement rates. Use Google Analytics to determine your most important pages and to find optimization opportunities. Display the most important navigation items are first (or on top, depending on the orientation of the menu bar).
• Keep menu items to a maximum of 7. Studies have shown that people can only remember or take in seven items of information at most at a time. Having too many menu item categories can potentially affect your ability to rank in search, as Google may interpret too many seemingly unrelated categories as a sign that your website hasn’t settled on a specific niche. If you know that you’ll be needing more than 7 menu items, break them down further into subcategories.

In terms of the aforementioned point, United’s website menu design is too complicated—there are too many options for users to look through:

Conversely, Cafebond.com provides a well-organized example with regards to simple categorization:

• Audit your menu every now and then. Remove links that are rarely clicked on. Rename generic labels to be more descriptive for your human visitors and search engine spiders, alike.

Inspiration for Creative Website Menu Designs

Big Spaceship

Ignoring the typical website menu design heuristic (on top of, or to the side of the main page content), Big Spaceship’s menu button is located front and center on their homepage.

Once clicked, users are directed to a new page with just four menu options.

Upon picking where you’d like to go, you’re presented with additional options. Each page offers these new submenu options in different compelling and creative ways. For example, the ‘Work’ link leads to clickable photos, while the ‘Careers’ page offers up a different type of menu navigation, listing out open positions with arrows that, when clicked, drop down to show descriptions for each item.

Users can easily revert back to the main menu navigation by clicking on the “menu” button (which turns into a hamburger menu) at the bottom of the page.

Equus Design

This branding and communications agency from Singapore demonstrates the fact that minimalist website menu design is anything but boring.

There’s a fixed menu at the top of their website’s homepage, but when you click on one of the top links, each page presents its own unique navigation style. For example, on their ‘About’ page, visitors are presented with a one-page design within the existing menu navigation design that makes for an intriguing user experience.

As with the aforementioned Big Spaceship website menu design, major menu items are linked to pages structured with different internal layouts.

NKI Studio

KNI Studio has their menu in an unconventional location: centered at the bottom of the page. Additionally, you can click the “+” for relevant social links.

Navigation Trends

According to ImpactBnd, many designers are looking for alternatives to the minimalist mobile hamburger menu. In fact, Spotify removed their hamburger menu in favor of the tabbed menu, which led to a 30% increase in navigation menu clicks. Ironically, hamburger menu design still graces the likes of many articles about menu design trends!

Additionally, the use of the mega drop down and fixed top menu (both menu design trends from 2017), are still hot topics moving into 2018. Some fixed menus or mega menus are starting to include visual elements such as icons, photos, or even a map.

The Kellogg’s website provides a nice example of a multi-dimensional mega drop down menu:

Universal navigation is another website menu design trend that has been observed by many recently. At the top of the website’s home page is a link back to the main website. This is useful for businesses with many subsidiaries or franchises, such as Disney.

See this concept in action on the Disney Frozen sub-website:

All-caps corner links are another interesting creative menu design trend. This gives the website a professional feel that feels intuitive and symmetrical.

Websites that make use of this menu design trend, such as Sprout Social, have a lot of information to share but do so in a way that doesn’t overwhelm:

Light hues, sans-serif fonts, and extra spacing help make this menu design trend work.

Creative Website Menu Designs and Best Practices

Thinking creatively about site navigation elements can result in making your website more memorable, overall. But when designing, don’t forget the real purpose of site navigation: to make it easier for users to look for and access content. All the bells and whistles in the world cannot make up for website navigation that is unusable or that acts against your other SEO efforts.

While checking facts can be fun, they can also provide value to those who don’t yet know WordPress’s worth, or appreciate its reach.

If you’ve ever had trouble convincing clients WordPress isn’t just for bloggers—these share-worthy tidbits can effectively lend credence to the platform’s prolific presence.

What follows is the mother lode of most interesting stats and facts about WordPress, divided into the following categories:

• WordPress General, & Automattic
• WordPress Community
• WordPress Events
• WordPress Themes
• WordPress Plugins
• WordPress Security
• WordPress Miscellany

And away we go!

WordPress General, & Automattic

Starting us off are some general WordPress stats regarding usage, co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s company Automattic, plus a few other morsels.

#1. WordPress was first released in 2003, which means 2023 will mark its twentieth anniversary. Wow! – WordPress.org

#2. While WordPress first found its niche as a blogging platform, it has evolved far beyond that, supporting a myriad of other web content, like mailing lists, forums, galleries & portfolios, membership sites, business sites, learning management systems (LMS), online stores, and pretty much any market you can think of. – Wikipedia

#3. The most current version of the software is currently being run on only about half (53%) of WordPress websites. – WordPress.org

#4. Major core updates of WordPress get released every 150 days, on average. – CodeinWP

#5. WordPress version 5.9 has had more than 104 million downloads at the time of this writing—and still counting. – WordPress.org

#6. A total of 582 versions of WordPress have been released to date. – WordPress.org, WordPress.org

#7. On WordPress.com, an excess of 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month…

#8. …users on more than 178 countries produce about 70 million new posts…

#9. …with 77 million new, legit comments (on average) per month. – WordPress.com

#10. WordPress tracks the embeds of partner services like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and more. – WordPress.com

#11. The name “WordPress” was suggested by Matt Mullenweg’s friend, Christine Tremoulet, and was immediately well-received. Once she confirmed the domain name was available, that clinched it. – Web.Archive

#12. Technically, anyone can edit or add to the WordPress core code, since it’s classified as open-source software, licensed under the GPL. – WordPress.org

#13. Automattic officially owns WordPress, however the WordPress Foundation—a non-profit organization founded by Matt Mullenweg—owns and manages WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. – WordPress Foundation

#14. Automattic employs 1,979 people, who work on a large number of projects in addition to WordPress. – Automattic

#15. WordPress is available in more than 70 languages and there are 205 (and counting) translation locales available for WordPress. – WordPress.org

#16. WordPress systems being run on the English language sit at 49.2%. – WordPress.org

#17. English is also the most used language to write content on WordPress, coming in at 71%. – WordPress.com

#18. The WordPress CMS has a 64.2% market share of all known CMS’s. – W3Techs

#19. Because employees rarely worked out of Automattic’s physical office in San Francisco, they closed it in 2017. – Quartz

#20. Quite a few Fortune 500 companies use WordPress, including Microsoft, Target, The Walt Disney Company, Coca-Cola, and PlayStation. – ZYXWARE, Steerpoint, WPExplorer

#21. WordPress sites make up 30.3% of the top 1,000 websites in the world. – Digital

#22. There are at least 30,462,105 live websites using WordPress, with the highest numbers found in these three countries: The United States (8,858,380), The United Kingdom (769,864), and India (375,206). – BuiltWith

#23. “WordPress” gets googled around 2.7 million times every month. – KWFinder

#24. WordPress allows great variety for different types of websites, including multisite, eCommerce, and membership sites. – WPMU DEV

#25. WordPress accounts for roughly 500+ (compared to Shopify and Squarespace’s 60-80) new sites being built daily, in the top 10 million sites on the web.– CodeinWP

#26. The number of WordPress.com websites that are launched daily is 50,000. – DMR

#27. WordPress resides at the very top of the most-downloaded software list. In fact, WordPress version 4.9 has had an insane number of downloads—over 260 million. – DisplayWP

#28. The average annual pay for a WordPress Developer in the United States is $64,308 a year. Annual salaries range from $24K to $106.5K, with the majority of these between $45.5K (25th percentile) to $75.5K (75th percentile). Top US earners (the 90th percentile) make $94K annually. – ZipRecruiter

#29. WordPress has more than 500 times fewer employees than Amazon. – Automattic

#30. WordPress websites get more unique visitors a month (@163M) than Twitter (@156M)―to the tune of seven million more. – Digital

WordPress Community

The WordPress community is made up of a diverse set of people, skill sets, and websites. These WordPress stats are all about the community behind the CMS.

#31. Automattic has had 100,907 DMCA takedown notices (trademark infringement complaints), and 29.09% of copyright notices where some or all content was removed. [Time period: Jan 1, 2014 – Dec 31, 2021.] – Automattic

#32. There are lots of ways to make money from WordPress: as a theme or plugin developer, a hosting company, maintenance service, services reseller, web designer/developer, and so much more. – WPMU DEV

#33. Some of the world’s top print publications use WordPress as their online home. That includes news sites, fashion & entertainment, business & tech, and more. Some examples: USA Today, Time, Fortune, Chicago Sun Times, The New Yorker, Reuters, Variety, People, & Vogue. – CodeinWP

#34. What do Beyoncé, Snoop Dogg, Wil Wheaton, Sylvester Stallone, Usain Bolt, and the Dallas Mavericks have in common? Aside from the obvious—they’re famous in their respective fields (music, acting, sports)—they all have websites that use WordPress. – CodeinWP

#35. WordPress is not only used by bloggers, businesses, and publications, but also educational institutions, and even governments. – WPMU DEV

#36. One quarter of WordPress users make a full-time living off of the CMS. – Kinsta

WordPress Events

#38. The first WordCamp event, organized by Matt Mullenweg, took place in 2006 and was held in San Francisco. – WordCamp Central

#39. At the time of this writing, there have been 1106 WordCamp events…

#40. …in 375 cities…

#41. …and 65 countries…

#42. …on 6 continents. – WordCamp Central

#43. WordCamp 2014 was the last official annual conference of WordPress developers and users to take place in San Francisco, having been replaced with WordCamp US.– WordCamp Central

#44. Besides city-specific WordCamp events, there are a number of niche WordPress events that include WordPress for Publishers, WooConf, LoopConf, WP Campus, and A Day of REST. – Torque Mag

#45. All WordCamp organizers and speakers are unpaid volunteers, doing it because of their passion for and dedication to the WP community. – WordCamp Central

#46. The WC events are not-for-profit, and aim to be accessible to all attendees, with things like closed captioning and ticket scholarships. – WordCamp Central

#47. WordCamp events are extremely economical—sponsorships and donations make this possible, keeping ticket prices low (usually less than $40) for a 2-day event where you get high-quality speakers and networking opportunities. – WordCamp Central

#48. If you miss a WordCamp event, you can catch session recordings for free on WordPress.TV. – WordPress.TV

#49. WordCamp Europe 2017 had a record attendance with more than 1900 people from 79 countries. – WP Tavern

#50. There are 1,288 Meetup groups and 750K+ members for WordPress scattered throughout the globe. – Meetup

#51. Well-known companies in the WordPress space also organize their own WordPress conferences, including Publish by Post Status and PressNomics by Pagely.

WordPress Themes

#52. The WordPress community has a stellar selection of free and paid themes for users to choose from, with options for purposes as varied as a Pokemon Game Portal, to car repair shops. Though free themes don’t necessarily mean low quality, premium themes tend to be easier to customize out of the box, with more features and support for implementation. The following WordPress stats are all about themes and their use.

#53. There are a lot of variables that will affect the overall cost of a WordPress site, such as the scope and scale of your site, the level of customization and design involved, the type and quality of services you select, and the type of hosting you go with. However, the average upfront cost for a WordPress website ranges from $75 to $115,000, then plan on about $75-$15,000 per year for ongoing maintenance costs. – WebFX

#54. WordPress has released a new, free, default theme annually, with a naming convention reflective of that year, starting in 2010—with Twenty Ten. (The exception being 2018, which was skipped). – Elegant Themes

#55. The earliest default WordPress themes were known simply as “WordPress Classic” and “Default” (or Kubrick). – Elegant Themes

#56. The average premium theme costs $59. – CodeinWP

#57. The average theme subscription membership (i.e. TeslaThemes, Themes Kingdom) comes in at around $115 for one-year’s access. – CodeinWP

#58. Divi and Astra are the two most popular WordPress theme installations, with 6% (Diva) & 5% (Astra) of the market. – BuiltWith

#59. There are dozens of theme designers on the ThemeForest marketplace who have sold $1M+ in themes through the platform. – Envato

#60. In fact, Envato’s total community earnings have now surpassed $1.3 billion USD across all its sites, since it was first established over 15 years ago. – Envato

#61. Divi has been translated into 32 languages, and is live on 2,262,231 websites (1M+ of which are in the United States). – ElegantThemes, BuiltWith

#62. Based on reviews, the best free/responsive themes include Neve, Airi, Hestia, ColorMag, OnePress, OceanWP, Sydney, Astra, OnePage Lite, and Customify. – CodeinWP

#63. To customize or modify an existing WordPress theme without losing the ability to upgrade that theme, child themes are often used. The concept of parent and child theme was formed to solve the issue of losing custom styling and changes made during theme upgrades. – WPMU DEV

#64. The first WYSIWYG editor for WordPress—which allowed technophobes to post content quickly and creatively—was created by Shane Melaugh and Paul McCarthy. – ThriveThemes

#65. The block editor in WordPress, Gutenberg, was officially released with the 5.0 core WordPress version. – Ma.tt

WordPress Plugins

#66. WordPress plugins add additional functionality to an existing WordPress website. While some are considered clear winners that benefit just about any type of WordPress site, others are pretty forgettable. Reviews and word-of-mouth from fellow WordPress developers can be good guides, in addition to the following related WordPress stats.

#67. There are over 59,000 unique plugins for WordPress available to download, with new ones added to the WordPress Plugin Directory on a daily basis. – WordPress.org

#68. Jetpack and Akismet, both created and maintained by Automattic, are the most installed free plugins. – WordPress.org

#69. Akismet catches an average of 7,500,000 pieces of spam per hour. – Akismet

#70. Here are the most popular WordPress plugins, with 5 million+ active installations each: Contact Form 7, Yoast, Elementor, Classic Editor, Akismet, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Really Simple SSL. – WordPress.org

#71. Hello Dolly, created by Matt Mullenweg and introduced in May of 2004, was the first plugin ever created for WordPress. Every version of WordPress since has come preinstalled with it, making it iconic. A simple visual serving lyrics from the song made famous by Louis Armstrong, it serves no real function (and is safe to delete). – James McAllister Online

#72. Bookly PRO, FileBird, and Slider Revolution are three of the best selling paid WordPress plugins. – CodeCanyon

#73. Our very own Smush image optimizer won Torque’s Plugin Madness competition, and was named the best in the WordPress Plugin Repository. – WPMU DEV

#74. WooCommerce, an e-commerce plugin from Automattic, powers 29% of all online stores. – Built With

#75. WooCommerce has been downloaded nearly 200 million times. – WordPress.org

#76. There are a massive amount of WooCommerce extensions for customizing WooCommerce, such as payment processing, shipping, and subscriptions. Look at these numbers: WooCommerce’s site = 750; CodeCanyon marketplace = 1,426; the WordPress Plugin repository = 1,000+. That doesn’t even include the many independent websites that sell WooCommerce extensions. – WooCommerce, CodeCanyon, WordPress.org

WordPress Security

WordPress Security is a priority among website owners. With the increasing number of vulnerabilities and attacks that happen every minute, anyone can be a victim of these breaches: individuals and companies, big and small.

It is of utmost importance to keep current on the latest security updates and practices, to avoid being compromised by hackers. These stats should encourage you to pay attention to WordPress security compliance.

#77. About 30,000 WordPress websites are hacked or infected with some type of malware daily. – Patchstack

#78. Google blocklists around 10,000 websites a day. – Patchstack

#79. Of the 40,000 most popular websites that use the WordPress software, 73% are vulnerable to attack. – Melapress

#80. Weak passwords account for 8% of WordPress sites that are hacked. – WP Manage Ninja

#81. According to WordFence, there are almost 90,000 attacks per minute on WordPress websites. – Wordfence

#82. With the increase of cyberattack data thefts, organizations want to spend more money on security. Some forecasts suggest that the market will reach $170.4 billion in 2022. – Blogging Forge

#83. WordPress brute-force attacks refer to the trial and error method of entering multiple username and password combinations over and over until a successful combination is discovered. – WPMU DEV

#84. In 2017, WordPress saw the highest volume brute-force attack to date. This aggressive campaign peaked at over 15 million attacks per hour, forcing Wordfence security to scale up their logging infrastructure to cope with the volume. – Wordfence

#85. File inclusion exploits are one of the most common ways an attacker can gain access to your WordPress website. Most examples point to vulnerable PHP scripts, though it’s also common in other technologies such as JSP, ASP and more. – Owasp

#86. Cross-Site Scripting or XSS attacks account for 60% of all security vulnerabilities on the internet. – Secure Coding

#87. The four most common WordPress malware infections are Malicious redirects, Backdoors, Drive-by downloads, and Pharma hacks. – Cheq

#88. SQL injections occur when an attacker gains access to your WordPress database and to all of your website data. – WPMU DEV

#89. The WPScan Vulnerability Database is an online version of WPScan’s data files that are used to detect known WordPress core, plugins, and themes vulnerabilities. – WP Scan

#90. To date, the WPScan vulnerability database contains more than 28K vulnerabilities, 4,154 of which are unique. – Melapress

#91. WPMU DEV’s Defender security plugin is available to download for free on WordPress.org. It’s free and highly effective, offering even more incentive to protect your WordPress website.

WordPress Miscellany

For everything else that didn’t quite fit into the above categories, here are some final WordPress stats and facts for you.

#92. Wapuu is the official mascot of WordPress, created by Japanese artist, Kazuko Kaneuchi. It was inspired by Matt Mullenweg’s trip to Japan, and unveiled at WordCamp Fukuoka on February 19, 2011. – Torque, Webgaku

#93. There’s a field guide & trading post for Wapuus, where you can find one for most WordCamp events, as well as many other special Wapuu categories. – Wapu.us

#94. Wapuu’s name was chosen through the Japanese WordPress group, which organized a poll in 2011 to collect ideas for naming it. Suggestions soon followed and were voted on. “Wappy” won, but due to a trademark issue, the runner-up “Wapuu” was chosen. – Wapu.us

#95. The WordPress Wiggle (accompanying song written by Jonathan Mann), is the unofficial dance of the WordPress people. – YouTube

#96. Starting from version 1.0, every major core release of WordPress (there are 42 to date) has been codenamed after well-known jazz musicians. – WordPress.org

#97. Those unfamiliar with the CMS are usually surprised to find that there are two very different versions of the software—WordPress.org and WordPress.com. – WPMU DEV

#98. WordPress VIP is a hosting solution for enterprise WordPress installations, and uses the agile content platform. – WordPress.com

#99. There are specific recommendations for running the components of WordPress software. The versions change, based on the content of new releases, but these core components are always necessary: PHP, MySQL OR MariaDB, and HTTPS. – WordPress.org

#100. “Code is Poetry”… The famous WordPress tagline, present since the first official release of the software, to this day remains in the default footer. – WPMU DEV

WordPress has certainly evolved over time. Countless reviews and continually increasing users show that it continues to grow in function and popularity.

Because it’s efficient and well-built, you can do a lot with very little knowledge, focusing instead on creating quality content for your site. Especially if you have a quality host or site management to maintain your site for you… you’ll rarely (if ever) have to sweat the small stuff.

On the flip side, if you are willing and/or eager to learn more about it, it can become a primary (or supplemental) source of income for you, as well as an in-demand field you can immerse yourself in.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for accuracy and relevancy.
[Originally Published: September 2017 / Revised: May 2022]