Category: Plugins & Themes

If you want to thrive in the plugin development business, pricing must be at the forefront of your mind. Along with providing stellar plugin features, it is one of the most important aspects of creating a sustainable long-term business. Get it wrong and you’ll constantly be swimming against the tide.

Back in 2010, a developer could release a mass market WordPress theme or plugin and amass thousands of sales within a few months. In today’s market, that sort of success is exceedingly rare, and so, one of the most important decisions product developers must make is whether to go mass market or target a niche.

Is the WordPress plugin repository worth the hassle? If you’re a relatively experienced WordPress plugin developer, you’ve most likely already asked yourself this question – possibly more than once. If you’re a relatively new WordPress plugin developer, you’re probably asking yourself “Wait … why would I not want my plugin in the repository?!” Both questions are valid.

My perception of a lifetime license is very different than the lifetime license WP Rocket or many of the other WordPress plugin businesses are offering. I was actually very surprised, even in shock, learning how much money WordPress plugin developers are leaving on the table with their so-called, “lifetime license”.

I participated in the Prestige Conference in Las Vegas. It was a very memorable experience because I got to meet with businesses thought leaders in the WordPress ecosystem. One of the main panels that I was in, focused on the addressable market of WordPress. Questions like, “How big of an opportunity is WordPress?”, and “How much money can be made from the ecosystem?” were discussed in great length.

This is a deep dive into a very interesting success story with Freemius. You’ll see why it’s interesting in a few paragraphs. This time we are exploring a WordPress plugin called Pootle PageBuilder, talking to its founder & managing director – Jamie Marsland.

We speak with Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains, home of WP Migrate DB. Brad has been through the experience of launching the WP App Store, which included investment from Adii Pienaar at WooThemes and Carl Hancock at Gravity Forms. The WP App Store ultimately failed and Brad has lived to tell the tale.

Learn how Elementor grew their business within a saturated plugin marketplace and discuss what helped their product succeed – from to creating a fun company culture to nurturing their community.

In this post I share the email marketing automation technique we’ve come up with, using tools that are available for everyone. I’ll provide an inside look into our thought process of why we did it, how to set it up from A to Z, as well as try to answer the question – how has it been working for us?

Your plugin’s sales aren’t going to just skyrocket on their own, so as a company that’s focused on helping WordPress product developers explode their sales – we decided it was time to publish an action-oriented business book that focuses on the business and entrepreneurial side of developing and selling WordPress plugins.

Do you sell it via your website with a tool like Freemius? Do you sell it via a marketplace like Envato? Do you offer a freemium version through the WordPress repository? In this interview Vitalii shares his path to success using Freemius.

Phil Derksen has plenty of experience selling a WordPress product business. Here, he shares what the process looked like with his most recent acquisition.

There are many digital products out there. To sell, you’ll need to market yours. Patrick Rauland shares how he codes & promotes his products simultaneously.

When your plugin or theme business reaches a certain maturity, inevitably, you start to explore additional revenue streams. One trendy channel is affiliation. Setting up an Affiliate Program can be a powerful, long-term investment that will make you money, power up your SEO, and improve your brand awareness. Alternatively, if planned or executed incorrectly – become a huge waste of time and money, so it’s important to do it right.

About twenty months ago, while sitting on a couch in Auckland, New Zealand, my team and I flipped the switch to enable automatic renewals for AffiliateWP. Two months later we did the same thing for Easy Digital Downloads and Restrict Content Pro. This was a move that we had been working towards for nearly a year and it’s one that we believed would fundamentally change the position of the company over the next one to two years. Now that it has been twenty months, maybe we can answer the question: were we right? Did it make a significant impact for us or was it all futile hopes?

On December 14, 2016, my team and I pushed a significant change to our Easy Digital Downloads products: we increased the price on all extensions by 50-250%. Yes, you read that right: up to a 250% price increase on certain plugins. This change was done for a number of reasons, which I will get into shortly, and has resulted in a very interesting last three months. Since I have always been very open with my company’s financials, I would like to now share some reflections on the change that we made and to also share some of the aftermath of the change.

This marketing research discusses the importance of Black Friday & Cyber Monday, specifically for WordPress plugins & theme sellers. My goal is to bring forth data to show why not doing anything to increase sales during BFCM means leaving a LOT of money on the table, plain & simple.

If you’re new to WordPress plugin development You might be asking yourself whether you should release a limited, free version of your plugin with an option to upgrade, or maybe just charge money for any access to your product. The answer is a familiar one: It depends. Decisions, Decisions…

To build a winning marketing page that will drive installs, writing good copy is not enough. You need to take this further and optimize your marketing page with elements that leave an impression and drive conversions. Learn how to enrich your WordPress plugin marketing page with GIF animations boost your installs.

Co-founder of MotoPress, Alexander Mat, shares his company’s biggest challenges in today’s saturated and Guten-stirred WordPress products’ market. MotoPress has been a successful WordPress business creating sustainable plugins & themes for small & midsize businesses, so it is interesting to get Alex’s take.

Selling your premium WordPress plugins on CodeCanyon? Is this marketplace the best option in terms of revenue? We dug deep in their numbers to find out.

Envato’s ThemeForest and CodeCanyon are de-facto the leading marketplaces for WordPress plugins and themes. With a growing community of over 7 million subscribers, both marketplaces sound like a lucrative place to start selling your digital products. Are they right for your WordPress business?

In this week’s post, we’ll be taking a look at everything we do to create a new product or WordPress plugin. We don’t adhere strictly to any specific software development process, but the method we’re using currently seems to work well.

Looking at the WordPress plugins market today, the most widely used monetization model is “support + unlimited premium updates”, for a period of a year. And if you want to keep getting updates and support, you’ll have to purchase a license for another year.