A Platform for Builders - How to win Web Developers?

Editor's Notes

• #3: “You are on mute!” That was the most used phrase in 2020. Followed by “Can you hear me now?” This phrase is representative for this pandemic that still affects all our lives - some more, others less - I can still see my proud but also excited son sitting in front of my laptop and joining his first virtual classroom - Overwhelmed teachers who now have to deal with technology problems - Students reporting overloaded servers with lots of downtime, unable to finish their exams - Restaurants offering delivery services online - Suddenly having to register online for getting a haircut. So many challenges to overcome - millions of small businesses had to re-invent themselves in order to survive. Helen & Max, some of my friends from Berlin have a tiny Korean restaurant and purely lived from Word-of-Mouth and passing by visitors - until the first lockdown. Now, within shortest time, they organized local delivery services with online booking and later added an online store for selling the favourite of the day - Korean Kimchi. And there are many examples of companies who successfully switched from a local business to an online business: a handmade bracelet store is weaving its way to success. A Small business powered by WordPress Toolkit and WooCommerce on top of Plesk & cPanel is helping founders go online. Sometimes a simple idea is all you need to make a big change! Pura Vida (Spanish for “pure life”) is proof of that. The company, now in its fourth year, was born as a result of a chance encounter in Costa Rica, where founders Griffin and Paul bought a bunch of handmade bracelets from a couple of local jewelry makers. After returning to San Diego (and selling every one of the 400 bracelets they had bought), Pura Vida was born. Nowadays, the business has expanded somewhat - with 10+ Costa Rican locals in full-time employment hand making the bracelets, which are sold all over the world to a loyal customer base.
• #4: This is a super exciting story about Paleo Bakehouse - a self-described “home kitchen” retail store that only made a few thousand dollars in revenue every month. Their new Digital presence strategy definitely paid off. Vinny’s Bakehouse has doubled its revenue every 2–3 months and grown from thousands in annual revenue into a million-dollar business, from a home kitchen into a factory, and from 3 to 12 employees.
• #5: But who builds all those websites, online stores and services? And how are those typically built? Most professional websites are either built by Web Agencies or freelance and employed Web Professionals - we call them Builders. Before we deep dive into the needs of Builders and some exciting Market statistics, I would love to share an exciting story from one of our partners.
• #6: Our partner HostPress made it from a tiny Agency business towards one of the best “Managed WordPress Hosters” which was only possible thanks to Plesk & WHMCS as their technology partner. As everyone, including Kinsta and WP Engine, was running after managed WordPress Hosting, Marcus Krämer and his team thought of bringing something better and unique. They thought of building a cloud infrastructure that would help developers deploy and scale applications. To bring their plans into action, Marcus set up cloud infrastructure, installed Plesk on it, and almost instantly began reaping the benefits of the leading WebOps platform. It allows everything to be managed for the day-to-day operation of a website from one place. The outcome: By March 2019 the company earned 400 customers and launched around 1,000 cloud servers instances through an accelerator program. The next year, the company was offering Smart Updates powered by AI and became one of the first managed WordPress companies to do so. Among the tested providers by Cloud Spectator, HostPress came out third overall - receiving a bronze medal plus the title of Germany’s best WordPress hosting provider - powering thousands of high traffic sites on hundreds of cloud servers! So who are their typical customers?
• #7: Their main customers are Web Developers - these are people whose business it is to develop professional websites and who want to earn money with it. This target audience is very interesting since while earning money, they are willing to pay a premium for more value that saves their precious time. Because for web agencies it‘s not the cheapest price that counts. It‘s all about the flow, the end results and how many customers they can make happy! What do those Builders actually really need? [next slide] They need security...
• #8: They need security & reliability, convenience & testing and performance. Having a website up and running is great. But what to do in times of emergency? Always have a plan B. In our case: always have a well tested disaster recovery strategy. Be confident to keep the bad guys out. Be ready to scale if there is more success than initially planned. And what about testing? Do you test your changes first on a separate test environment or do you do them directly on production? Imagine car vendors would build cars without crash tests. How would you feel? The problem is that proper testing can be time consuming and annoying, but it’s required. A broken website is definitely worse than one that was launched on time but is full of errors - especially if your customers notice it and not your team. Most hosting companies don’t support their customer at all, so testing will be a kind of test on production. Great hosters offer automatic test environments and support common testing workflows. Offer the right tools to your customers. Those that they need and know well, like Git and WP-CLI. Did you know that 90% of web agencies use Git to develop the websites of their clients? But to upload them to production after the work is done, they have to use damn old FTP because most hosters still don’t support more modern tools. Come on, 1999 is 2 decades ago! When it comes to managing multiple WordPress websites it can take a lot of time to manage them on a daily basis. Agencies love to have a dashboard with the ability to mass manage all WordPress instances. But it’s not all about reliability and the right tools. A third really important success factor is the website performance, especially for e-commerce. Making a website fast for a single request is quite easy but keeping it fast and reliable during crowded times requires tuning on multiple layers. Flow and endurance matter. My recommendation is to optimise the whole infrastructure to really decrease loading times as much as possible. Enable server level caching by using services like NGINX or varnish. A CDN is a plus for international businesses. Let’s have a quick look at some fresh data points.
• #9: What we can clearly see is that WordPress became the standard solution for websites especially powered by web agencies and high traffic websites. WordPress is meanwhile the basis of more than 40% of all websites worldwide and growing. We keep talking about it because of its importance and growth potential. So for those who don’t yet offer plans specialised for WordPress, just take a look at this graph.
• #10: WordPress is a must-have for hosters and cloud service providers: the usage of WordPress for building websites is still continuously growing. WordPress is by far the most popular way of creating websites and BTW also e-shops. More than every second newly created website is powered by WordPress. [pause] At Plesk we love numbers and measure everything. Of course we want to understand, who actually hosts most WordPress sites. Therefore we continuously [pause] scan ...
• #11: Therefore we continuously scan the entire web for years to see the latest trends and movements between service providers. You can clearly see that Automattic with their WordPress.com and WordPress VIP belongs to the largest WordPress hosters. But you can also see the immense share of Google, OVH, Hetzner, and AWS purely focussing on Infrastructure as a Service. And for sure WP Leaders like Kinsta, Pagely and WP Engine run on top of AWS & Google and so are included in their data. But there is something you cannot see here.
• #12: Our famous WordPress Toolkit is the most used software for managing WordPress sites worldwide and keeps growing quickly!
• #13: I’m thrilled to also share another data point with you: more than 1 out of 5 websites powered by WordPress Toolkit are WooCommerce Online Stores. And this number has significantly increased during the pandemic!
• #14: Surprisingly, only 30% of service providers worldwide have special plans for WordPress Hosting. At the same time, 82% offer VPS. Of course many of them offer cPanel or Plesk as Server- and Website Management solutions to increase convenience and security for their customers - but still, we see great potential for optimized up to managed WordPress solutions.
• #15: Here is an example of how AWS started promoting GoDaddy Pro Sites (also known as ManageWP), as they faced a lot of hacked servers. How? AWS, DigitalOcean and Google all told us the same story: their network engineers see lots of malicious traffic because of hacked WP sites. This happens because many users used services like Bitnami and Co. to spin up WordPress sites without knowing how to manage a whole server properly. Amazon just solved one of the biggest pain points they had with this cooperation plus generating lots of additional revenue. And so can you, let me explain to you how...
• #16: It all starts with the perfect WordPress Experience - knowing that this is what most Web Developers need today. It’s not about which datacenter and hardware size to offer, but about speaking the language of your users. It’s about the value they get from you and how they are able to succeed and get their job done with your product. Web Developers appreciate the extra value that saves their precious time and will spend a premium if you offer the right product.
• #17: WordPress Toolkit is the best software to manage WordPress sites and fulfills all needs mentioned before - whether you use it for running your high-traffic eCommerce site or thousands of websites. It’s built for power users and web agencies by people who love WordPress and are passionate about simplifying the lives of Web Professionals. WordPress Toolkit provides integrated backup, staging & maintenance support, performance tuning & caching and most importantly the tools to make your customers successful and happy - available on cPanel and Plesk. One of the most exciting features is Smart Updates. Smart Updates takes care of all your updates without ever breaking your site. This works thanks to an AI based regression testing on dynamically created test environments. Whenever there are updates available for any of your sites, Smart Updates clone your sites on an isolated test environment and test all updates automatically. If all is fine, the updates will be pushed to production like magic. But in case of any issue, the site owner receives an e-mail from WordPress Toolkit with detailed results. You as the user are always in control and the machine won’t do what you don’t want. But it helps you to reduce all operations burden to zero.
• #18: And there is so much more coming soon: Did you know that every 2nd WP site uses an outdated PHP version? Site owners often don’t care, Agencies avoid risky changes and Hosters reject the responsibility - a dead end! But here is the solution: next quarter, Smart PHP Updates will be available, enabling compatibility tests of websites against multiple PHP versions on safe test environments to allow our users to easily stay updated without any risk. Another highlight is our upcoming eCommerce Toolkit for Plesk - Site Reports allows agencies to easily generate reports about all changes for their clients, - and with static site generation users offload WP sites into incredibly fast static file caches - for maximum speed.
• #19: Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m absolutely thrilled to announce our two latest acquisitions: First Nixstats - the easiest to use and most complete server monitoring solution out there. It is designed for Builders. Easy to use, but also very powerful. You can soon expect seamless monitoring integrations into cPanel, Plesk, WHMCS, and SolusIO delivering great value to all our users.
• #20: And second: koality.io which is focused on securing online shops and websites against problems, falling sales, technical errors, bad SEO and much more by providing a state-of-the-art website testing and health monitoring.
• #21: And we are working on a professional SEO solution enabling you to improve your search engine rankings and benchmark your sites against competitors, Our SEO solution will allow whitelabeling and is built for reselling. Stay tuned!
• #22: And this all plus much more is integrated with our innovative Smart Server Technology with Auto-Pilot. It’s the preferred solution for Builders to build powerful and successful applications and websites.
• #23: Why should you use or sell Plesk & WordPress Toolkit - or even better partner with us? We are incredibly proud of our Net-Promoter-Score of 70 which shows our true commitment to customer experience. WordPress Toolkit is the most popular platform for WordPress by Service Providers worldwide. Our Smart Server Technology integrates the best tools for Web Developers! I want you to...
• #24: I want you to take away at least the following 3 things: A great WordPress product increases your ARPU but needs to be done right and advertised properly using the customer’s language Plesk Obsidian with Smart Server Technology is a true milestone of Hosting Platforms and allows you and your customers to innovate Plesk is your trusted partner providing you with a platform that fuels your growth through innovation and data insights for all the products you would like to sell Now Start Building!
• #25: Reach out to me and my team to listen to secrets from behind the scenes or chat about future trends. Come and speak to us. My team and I are thrilled to share more insights with you and discuss your personalized go-to-market plans and how we can support you. We are your trusted partner to enable you [next slide] to help those ...