Since 2020, we’ve shared annual “year in review” reports to show our commitment to you — our customers — and WooCommerce for the long term. This year is no exception!
In this post, we’ll share detailed numbers about our growth, support, and development activities from 2024, along with what we achieved and our plans for 2025. We believe in being transparent about how we work, as it helps us build trust with our customers and show our commitment to making your online store better.
You can read our past transparency reports here:
Let’s dive into our 2024 review!
The year in numbers
- Sold 4,273 new plugin licenses, compared to 3,896 in 2023. That’s a ~10% increase. We estimate selling fewer licenses next year, as we’ve introduced multi-site upgrades for our most popular plugins.
- Revenue grew by 29% this year. Of course, our expenses increased too.
- Our refund rate is at 6.2%, that’s 0.15% more than last year.
- Released 1 new WooCommerce plugin. We now sell 7 plugins and 6 add-ons.
- Released 90 updates across all plugins and add-ons. Ideally, we’d like this to be less, but the continued development of WooCommerce Blocks forced us to release a few extra updates.
- We’ve seen positive growth in our website traffic this year, with pageviews up by 25% and new visitors increasing by 53% compared to last year. While these numbers are encouraging, we’ve noticed our traffic has mostly remained steady over the past year, so we’ll need to review our approach.
- On average, we get 16 new support conversations per day; that’s 2 to 3 more than last year. We received a whopping total of 18,063 messages this year (averaging 49 per day) and our busiest day of the week is Thursday.
- Support ticket distribution: 27% pre-sales, 14% licensing questions, 59% technical questions.
- We wrote 11 additional help articles this year. The knowledge base now contains 159 articles.
- Our free plugins are now running on more than 60,000 websites and have been downloaded more than 1.2M times!
- We’re proud to serve amazing customers in 164 countries — and this year, we welcomed our first customer from Ethiopia!
How we grew our WooCommerce plugin business this year
This year, we focused our efforts equally on marketing and development. Let’s have a look at what we did this year.
Fine-tuning our content marketing engine
Last year, we focused less on traffic from the WordPress plugin repository. Even before the recent WordPress drama, it became clear that relying solely on traffic from the repository was a bad idea.
This year, we continued that trend and invested in fine-tuning our content marketing game. Ine joined the team part-time as head of content, which makes the process of finding and scheduling topics, and proofreading the final content, much smoother.
We’re quite picky in terms of the content we add to the blog (as we want it to be useful rather than click-bait), so Ine is a welcome addition to the team!
WCEU sponsorship
In June, Wombat Plugins sponsored WordCamp Europe (WCEU) for the first time. Having previously enjoyed the vibrant WordCamp events as attendees, we decided it was time to take our involvement to the next level by sponsoring the 2024 event in Torino, Italy.
If you’d like to find out what it cost, and if it was worth it, we wrote about our WCEU experience in detail here.
We won’t sponsor WCEU in 2025. It’s a fantastic opportunity, but it was a lot of work and we want to learn from the experience and fine-tune our strategy before we sponsor again.
Launched a new plugin
Since 2022 we have focused our efforts on improving our existing plugins instead of launching new ones, making sure our current products meet your needs.
But in July 2024, we finally launched a new plugin: WooCommerce Discounts! Honestly, it was one of the hardest plugins we’ve ever built! It turns out that doing complex automatic discounts — without slowing down the site — is really tricky. When looking at existing plugins, we found they are either over-engineered, using a lot of spaghetti code to slow them down, or have a confusing and outdated admin UI. So we saw an opportunity to create our own take on it.
When we create a plugin, we want to do 2 things:
- Make it simple to use.
- We recognize most users will use the plugin for simple things, but we also like to facilitate complex use-cases without losing on performance and ease-of-use.
It took us several weeks and a lot paper (we prefer to plot scenarios the traditional way!) before we translated the logic into performant code.
Here’s an unlikely, but complex use-case for discounts: “Buy 2 shirts and 1 pair of shoes, and get up to 2 pairs of socks for $5 each”. While unlikely, it highlights some of the difficulties we faced when building the plugin:
- Product overlap: When checking the cart for eligible products, both shoes and socks might belong to the same product subcategory (like “footwear”), making precise identification critical but more difficult.
- Recursion: Discounts can apply repeatedly for larger carts (e.g. 4 shirts + 2 shoes = 4 socks).
- Multiple checks: The plugin needs to first validate the discount conditions and then correctly match eligible products, ensuring items like mismatched shirt sizes don’t disrupt the logic.
Enhancing our website
This year, we’ve also taken the time to implement some small but important changes on our own website.
Trust symbols
We created a TrustPilot profile and added trust badges near the most important CTA buttons throughout the website. It was a lot of work, but we managed to gather over 100 reviews in just 1 year and received an “Excellent” score of 4.8. Trustpilot calculates scores differently from a simple average, which gives more weight to the “Excellent” rating and makes it feel genuinely earned. We’re kinda proud of that achievement!
Unfortunately, adding those signals doesn’t really increase conversion rates. Customers seem to care less about reviews than we initially expected.
All-Access Bundle
During Black Friday, we also introduced the All Access bundle, which offers all our plugins and add-ons (and future work) at a lower price. It’s a slow start, but we’ve gotten 8 sales so far!
Pricing table changes
For Advanced Product Fields, buyers can now choose the number of sites for their license. Prior to this change, they could only buy a 1-site license. Introducing this change means we’ll likely sell less licenses in 2025 compared to 2024, but that’s okay!
Account updates
Since November, customers can upgrade their license from their account. Prior to November, users that wanted to upgrade their license had to contact us, and we had to manually perform the upgrade. As a small business, we happily do a lot of things that don’t scale, but it feels good to reduce friction and finally automate this process!
Minor brand refresh
Kevin, our site’s wombat mascot, got a minor makeover! The new version of Kevin (on the left) is an improvement over the old design (on the right) as it makes him look a bit more expressive.
We loved the “old Kevin”, but when our designer stopped accepting work, we had to find a new one, which led to the update. Thankfully, we found an incredible designer who’s ready to take Kevin to new heights!
It’s been a strange year
Despite our growth, it’s been a turbulent year. Typically, we can predict strong quarters (like winter) and slower ones (like summer), but this year broke the pattern—even Black Friday wasn’t the same frenzy as last year. It made forecasting hard and made the year feel less successful.
Only after crunching the numbers did we realize it wasn’t a bad year at all. Some fellow business owners speculate the US elections may have played a role, but I’m hopeful things will return to normal next year.
A challenging path ahead
Let’s be honest here for a moment: running a business isn’t easy, and it feels like we’re at a crossroads. Here’s what I mean:
We are a small team, and we prefer it that way. Our size allows us to release updates and features quickly without waiting for approvals from “higher up”. I (Maarten, the founder) still handle some customer support directly, which might be atypical but helps us understand exactly what you need.
Being a small company means we can do all that. We can stay closer to our customers. As a bonus, we can often offer higher-quality plugins at a lower price compared to larger businesses (did you know we lowered the price of some of our packages this year?).
But it’s becoming harder and harder to remain small.
WordPress and WooCommerce are very saturated markets with lots of competition. As the competition increases their budgets and team sizes, we are forced to grow too.
In an ideal world, we could dedicate all our time and money to perfecting our software — the thing that matters most to you. But how can we stay in business if no one knows we exist?
It’s simple: if we want to compete and remain relevant, we’ll have to get more hands on deck and invest in the areas where the industry directs its budgets.
WP Drama
The final months of the year triggered criticism on social media after WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg publicly targeted WPEngine — a competing WordPress hosting company. This was quickly followed by a series of actions on Matt’s part that hurt the wider WordPress community and displays just how fragile the WordPress ecosystem can be as one man holds the keys to the kingdom.
We don’t want to be overly dramatic, but ultimately it’s hard to ignore when something like this happens. It reassured us — and a lot of other companies in the space — that putting your eggs in one basket is a big mistake.
This is why we’ll likely no longer release new free plugins on the WordPress repository and why we need to invest more energy in growing our own audience.
Did we meet our goals this year?
Our main goal for the year was to release 2 new plugins. This is the 3rd year in a row where we intend to release more plugins than we actually do. While we didn’t quite hit our goal, we are very happy with the plugin that we released. WooCommerce Discounts closes some important gaps that WooCommerce store owners were running into, and we’re proud to offer a lightweight, performant option for those who need it.
In terms of brand awareness, it was very exciting to run a booth at WordCamp Europe this year and experience the event from a different perspective. Judging by the number of wombat stickers we handed out, we hope more people now know about our business and will remember our name. Online, we continue to create content that helps storeowners manage their WooCommerce business and that puts our products out there.
We also had a goal to cut some of our running costs. We made the move from HelpScout to FreeScout for our customer support. So far, this transition has been a win-win: we created a HelpScout-like layout for the customer support team, so they can continue to work with what they know, and we’re saving over $400 per year. The amount saved will only increase if we hire more support agents, so that’s a considerable bonus.
We also set out to improve our checkout process, but unfortunately, the payment provider we use (Paddle) doesn’t allow for many changes, so we didn’t make any progress in that area.
Another goal we set for ourselves was to create video content, but we haven’t been able to produce a video so far. It’s on our to-do list for early 2025.
Goals for 2025
A larger team
To make it easier to work on several streams simultaneously, this year we will try to expand our team on a project basis. We will work with 1 or 2 developers to keep the coding side going while we focus more on the business side of things. Ideally, we will also hire another support agent to help with the ever-increasing flow of customer requests.
Release 1 new plugin
We still like the idea of becoming a one-stop-shop for quality WooCommerce plugins. We are steadily getting closer to that goal, but this year we would still like to develop a new plugin that complements our current offering.
Brand awareness
While our website traffic increased this year, our approach can use some fine-tuning. We want to make sure more people know what we offer and will continue to work on our strategy to get more eyes the our website.
Thank you!
We’d like to thank you, our customers and readers, everyone on Team Wombat, and our friends and colleagues in the WordPress community. Without you, this journey would not have been possible!
Will you be along for the 2025 ride?
I found you on X. Thanks for sharing this update! Very helpful for fellow entrepreneurs like myself.
Paul
Thank you! Good luck on your journey! It can be hard but worth it in the end 🙂