Also, there are some important things we’ve been working on, that haven’t been released yet. Each one of them will contribute significantly to the future growth of TranslatePress.

I’d like to share some details about each below. Welcome to the 2019 Year in Review for TranslatePress.

Revenue & User Growth

TranslatePress saw growth in both revenue and user adoption.

The plugin is now used on over 60K active websites, which is more than double than where it was 12 months ago.

An even more impressive growth happened revenue wise from our premium versions.

Our yearly revenue grew by 500% in 2019.

This is not something we take for granted and are extremely grateful for. It’s also a solid indicator that our efforts were put in the right places.

Since TranslatePress is a bootstrapped product, built using the resources of Cozmoslabs, this made it easier for us to focus on what we thought was really important for our users.

I would attribute the majority of this growth to our focus on making TranslatePress the most easy to use WordPress translation plugin on the market.

In 2019, there was a lot of development work aimed towards improving the overall user experience and attaining out of the box compatibility with other tools (plugins, themes etc.).

Besides this, it was the first year when we had a clear marketing strategy in place and stuck with it. More on that later.

We saw more and more people migrate from other translation solutions over to TranslatePress, due to it’s ease of use, speed and out of the box compatibility (especially when it comes to popular tools like WooCommerce or page builders).

Let’s have a look at some of the most important features and improvements added last year to TranslatePress.

New Features and Improvements in TranslatePress

Development wise, a significant amount of work revolved around improving user experience.

Here are the most important things added to TranslatePress last year:

• Image Translation – the ability to translate images, sliders and other media using the visual translation interface (directly from the front-end). This makes translating images with text integrated in the intuitive front-end translation flow and is a huge increase in the overall translation experience.
• DeepL integration for automatic translation – we added support for DeepL, which is a powerful machine translation tool backed by artificial intelligence and neural networks.
• Added support for keyboard shortcuts. This together with highlighting translation boxes with unsaved changes helped speed up the translation process.
• Translation Memory – suggest similar translated strings from which users can choose when entering a translation
• Ongoing compatibility with other plugins or themes. This varied from adding a few css tweaks and make sure the translation interface displays beautifully to managing conflicts with other plugins. Our promise is that TranslatePress should work out of the box with every WordPress tool used to build or add functionality to your site. Of course, this is not something we can control 100% every time, but all this compatibility work will benefit the end user and remove friction.
• Redesigned the Automatic Translation interface – since a significant amount of our users set up automatic translation to speed up the translation process, it made sense to make this simpler. We are however far from being done here and in 2020 we’ll looking to make the process of automatically translating your site friction-less.
• Speed optimizations – last but not least, we continued to add speed improvements to TranslatePress, making sure your website speed is not sacrificed when going multilingual (check out this comparison). Small page load times is another critical thing that separates us from other translation solutions on the market.

Upcoming New Features

Besides the above, there are some highly requested features that have been in the works for some time now and which will be launched soon.

I will list them here since most of their development happened in 2019:

• Multilingual Search – we’ll add support for multilingual search, the ability to search and display valid results in a certain language.
• String Translation – imagine having an interface for translating any string added by a theme or a plugin, independently of whether or not it’s displayed in the front-end. Looking to modify or translate WooCommerce emails without messing around with templates? The new String Translation interface from TranslatePress will make this easier than ever. You’ll have filtering options that will make it simple to translate any string coming from a plugin or theme.The same goes for url slug translation. Whether you’re looking to translate all post/page slugs at once, or things like taxonomies & terms, you’ll be able to do this from one place and make sure you don’t miss any.

Both of these features will be released soon.

Marketing and Content

Another key factor behind the growth of TranslatePress in 2019 has been a consistent marketing strategy.

A good product is not enough anymore in an overly crowded WordPress plugin ecosystem. Even a great product can fall short and not get noticed, without the consistent efforts to spread the word and educate.

As developers and engineers at core, marketing has never come naturally to us. It’s more fun to solve a technical challenge behind a new features than to write, focusing on a pain your potential customer is facing and teaching him ways to overcome it. Some of which include using your product, of course. In order to be noticed, this needs to become a habit.

It’s no secret that content marketing done right and consistent leads to results. Our monthly traffic doubled in 2019, mostly due to our content marketing efforts.

We published regularly on our blog, as well as continued to add support pages to our documentation. For example, if you’re using a page builder to build a multilingual site, you can find step by step tutorials for all major page builders ( like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Visual Composer or Brizy).

To take our content marketing to the next level, we’re actively looking for a marketing manager to oversee and coordinate all the marketing activities behind TranslatePress. If you’re interested, drop us a line.

We’ve also set up an affiliate system since more and more users wanted to recommend TranslatePress. If you found our plugin useful and think it can help others, make sure to sign up and earn up to 30% for each sale.

I also did a couple of interviews (for Kinsta, Themeisle and WPLeaders) as well as podcast appearances, trying to share the leanings of our journey as a WordPress product company.

I always found reading other people stories inspiring and insightful, so this is something I meant to do for quite some time.

WordCamps and the WordPress community

No doubt, one of the best things about WordPress is the community built around it. And WordCamps are probably the easiest way to meet people that are part of this community.

Last year, almost all of our team attended WordCamp Europe in Berlin. It’s the biggest WordPress event on the globe, where you can pretty much meet face to face all the people that you just know of or heard of from the internet. We also wanted to be sponsors, but due to some bad planning this didn’t happen.

However, it was a great event, where I almost lost my voice in the two days of intense networking. It was great to meet old friends, as well as new people some of whom I’ve already exchanged emails with.

For us attending a WordCamp is also a great team building opportunity. Even though we share the same office, it’s incredible what travelling together and spending time outside the “default” work environment can do to the team spirit.

This year we’re going to sponsor multiple WordCamps, WordCamp Europe in Porto being one of them.

Also, it will be our third year sponsoring WordCamp Bucharest, a local WordCamp really close to our hearths.

If you’re planning to attend, make sure to drop by the TranslatePress booth and say hi!

What’s next in 2020?

I’ve already drafted a 2020 roadmap for TranslatePress and it’s exciting, to say the least.

Here are some of the things that will receive our focus this year:

• Redesign our website – this has been long overdue and I’m quite happy it will happen soon.
• Improve the value proposition of the plugin – there will be some highly requested features coming to TranslatePress this year, so stay tuned.
• Grow our team and delegate more – sustaining growth requires extra resources, so we’re already looking to expand our support, development and marketing teams.
• Attend and sponsor multiple WordCamps – this for us has been a great way to build relationships with users and creators in the WordPress space, get face to face feedback as well as give back to the WordPress community.

2019 has been a rewarding year for TranslatePress. We’re extremely grateful for each one of you, our users, and excited for what’s yet to come. Here’s to a great 2020!

P.S. If you’re new to TranslatePress, it’s the easiest way to turn your WordPress site multilingual. Grab the free version or upgrade to a premium plan (for extended functionality) and start translating your site today.

The post 2019 Year in Review: Growth, Marketing, WordCamps & Upcoming Features! appeared first on TranslatePress.

Then, in the last month of 2018, TranslatePress sales passed the 10000$ monthly recurring revenue mark.

This is HUGE for us and a solid confirmation that our efforts are focused in the right direction.

Besides this, the free version active installs grew to 30K.

Below we’re going to go into what happened in the last 4 months, the things we focused on as well as a detailed revenue breakdown. Welcome to Transparency Report #2.

Development, Better Processes, and Speed Improvements

Development wise the last period was focused on two main things: (more) speed improvements as well as getting TranslatePress to work for a lot of edge cases.

Speed is critical, so we’re constantly looking to make TranslatePress as fast as possible. To achieve this we are caching operations that are intensive.

Less load on your multilingual site means more traffic (due to better SEO) and an increase in your conversion rate. 

Apart from this, new features were put on hold in order to fix edge case bugs, making sure TranslatePress works out of the box for everyone.

For this, when fixing a certain bug we wanted to make sure we don’t create a new one (this actually happened a few times in the past months).

So Madalin started to write specific unit tests that make sure each piece of code we write solves more problems than it creates. I’m exaggerating a bit here, but you get the point.

Also, we took steps to make sure the plugin never fails silently, so we can quickly identify the problem, and spend less time on debugging and more on coming up with a solution for it.

Since we’re offering 100% WooCommerce compatibility – the ability to translate all strings (even from AJAX), product slugs, detecting and translating gettext strings – this is a big deal for us.

WordPress 5.0 is out. What this means for TranslatePress

WordPress 5.0 came out at the end of November and with it, the new block-based editor known as Gutenberg.

Gutenberg introduces a whole new approach to the way content is created. The entire editing experience has been rebuilt for media-rich pages and posts. Gutenberg blocks are a great visual tool for building and styling different types of content, without having to write a single line of code.

So, what does this mean for TranslatePress? 

TranslatePress continues to work out of the box and is 100% Gutenberg compatible.

The reason for that is that TranslatePress deals with the content of your website on the front-end, after it has been generated as HTML. So it doesn’t matter what type of editor you use for creating the content.

Make sure to check out this tutorial on how to translate Gutenberg blocks.

Sponsoring our second WordCamp

After last year’s experience sponsoring our first WordCamp, we knew we had to do it again. 

This year was a bit different, most people already knew about TranslatePress and we even met some of our paying users face to face. Some of them wanted to hear about the things that we worked on in the past 12 months. Others provided feedback.

Most of the ones who haven’t heard about TranslatePress before were quite impressed after showing them the demo.

I also got asked if sponsoring a WordCamp is a good investment. If your short-term goal is to bring in new business that’s a multiplier of your sponsorship package, you may be disappointed.

Sponsoring a WordCamp is a great way to give back to the WordPress community and develop relationships. Some of these relationships, if properly nurtured, might take your business to the next level. If you look at it this way, it’s a no brainier.

I’m constantly amazed by the openness to help and share things among the WordPress community. 

That being said this was a great team-building experience for us, a tradition I would like to keep in 2019 as well.

Revenue breakdown (details)

This is a breakdown of the sales that came in last month (December) :

Normally, December is not a great month in terms of sales. However it was our best month to date, and it brought in 9130€ (that’s around 10400$).

Now let’s look at the past 4 months in terms of revenue, since our last report.

As you notice September and October were quite steady, around 5000-5500$, then the sales grew to 8500$ in November and passed 10K in December.

While I’m fully aware these monthly sales may have fluctuations, the overall trend is healthy. And it will be interesting to see what the next 4 months will look like since we’ll also have the automatic renewals coming in beginning this year.

What didn’t go as planned

As mentioned before, improving our processes, creating unit tests and our speed obsession took a lot of development time.

This meant some of our most requested features were put on hold. We didn’t get to ship our new Media Translation add-on, even though we had a working prototype at the end of October.

However frustrating this is, these steps were necessary and we learned from them.

[UPDATE] Image translation is now part of TranslatePress core. Check it out!

Apart from that, we did hit the majority of the goals set in our past report These were:

• Power 30K+ websites before the end of the year ✔
• Get to 7000+$/month revenue by December ✔
• Stick to our development roadmap (here we came a little short)
• Write more, improve our docs, publish more resources  ✔

What’s next?

Moving forward, our key focus will be on acceleration in feature development.

Let’s have a look at our goals for the next 4 months:

• Launch Media/Image Translation (this module offers the ability to translate images, links, and any type of media in a very intuitive UI)
• DeepL integration (a very high quality automatic translation service) [Update] Done
• Taxonomy translations
• Publish an email course on building multilingual sites
• Grow our site traffic by 50%
• Write 2-3 useful tutorials each month
• Get to 14000$ MRR
• Power 50K websites

Looking back, 2018 has been a really good year for TranslatePress. The plugin has matured, gained in complexity, while also maintaining its simplicity and ease of use.

All of this wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of a great team as well as constant feedback from you, TranslatePress users.

Thank you all and here’s to a great 2019!

The post Passing 10000$ Monthly Recurring Revenue Transparency Report #2 appeared first on TranslatePress.

The WordPress plugin ecosystem is quickly becoming a very crowded space. It’s getting harder and harder to get noticed and build something people will use, even more so pay for.

Over the course of 12 months, TranslatePress grew to over 20K active installs on wp.org and closed last month with over 4500$ in revenue from its premium versions.

This article is meant to cover the lessons learned while launching a new WordPress multilingual plugin, as well as challenges faced along the way.

Why build a new WordPress multilingual plugin?

To give you a little context, before we switched completely to plugin development, we were a custom development agency, so we had to deal with translation plugins from day one. Our projects varied from simple presentation sites with a few pages to complex multilingual setups that needed ongoing development and maintenance.

We did not like the translation workflow of almost all of the existing multilingual solutions on the market (non-visual, out of context, found in multiple places).

While as developers we could make it work, there was always a lot of friction for the end client. This resulted in broken things when the client tried to modify translations, repeated emails and requests on how to change specific things which should have been straightforward (but weren’t), and so on.

There had to be a better way of dealing with WordPress in more languages.

So, we asked ourselves:

• Wouldn’t it be great to be able to translate your WordPress site using a dead simple user interface, that anyone can use?
• Where it works out of the box with ANY theme or plugin, without having to add support?
• Where the translations are stored locally, on your own site, not on someone’s else server?

And this is how TranslatePress was born.

One year after its launch, I’m happy to say:

• • it powers more than 20K websites
  • people find it really easy to use
  • it’s GPL and self-hosted, meaning you’ll own your translations, forever.
  • works with any theme or plugin (including WooCommerce and site builders) in 99.6% of the cases (yup, I made that number up)

Nothing is perfect and while there have been a few reported glitches between TranslatePress and a certain theme or plugin in the past 12 months, our support team is always there to help you overcome them. If it turns out it’s something we can do to prevent and eliminate them, it’s going to be added to the core of our plugin.

• • it’s fast and cache-able by all WordPress caching plugins.
  • the premium version made over 4500$ last month and has been steadily growing

While this doesn’t seem much and is by no means a positive ROI on all the time and work invested in developing and maintaining this plugin, I’m positive there’s a lot of room for growth and this is only the beginning. More on that later.

Key Takeaway: Aim to build something different and (or) better. Don’t settle for less.

Revenue and pricing model

Similar to all our plugins, TranslatePress was built on a freemium pricing model. This worked well for us in the past, so why change it?

The core of the plugin is free and allows you to translate all your WordPress sites into a second language without any limits (like the number of words, theme/plugin compatibility, etc.). It also integrates with Google Translate for automatic translation capability.

The premium versions come with Pro add-ons, like Multiple Languages for adding unlimited translation languages, SEO Pack for enhancing your ranking in each language, plus the newly added: Browse as User Role, Translator Accounts, Navigation Based on Language, or Automatic User Language Detection.

These have all been created due to constant requests by our free plugin users (we’re writing each one of them down).

I strongly believe that without a consistent user base, you cannot build a solid and robust product.

Also, a happy user of your free plugin is more likely to purchase a premium version than a visitor of your website.

Growth and sustainability

If you’re looking to build a reliable product that’s here for the long term, you need to price it accordingly.

For us, this meant being able to sustain its development, support, and marketing costs, while also bringing in profit in the medium/long term.

This translated into having subscription-based pricing, which is billed yearly, and auto renewed annually.

There were 3 premium versions, Personal (79€/year), Business (139€/year), and Developer (199€/year). The main difference is the number of sites you can use the plugin on, as well as which pro addons are included in a certain package.

Here’s a breakdown of the sales that came in last month:

Revenue-wise, August has been our best month to date and judging by the numbers we have until now, it looks like September will be better. August revenue was 3946 euros (a little over 4500$).

You can notice this monthly steady growth (nothing spectacular) for this year in the graphic below:

In the beginning, after launching the premium versions, we hardly had any sales. This wasn’t pleasant, but because we are in it for the long run, we didn’t despair. Also, the big majority of the sales that were coming in were for the Personal version, the one priced the lowest.

In the last couple of months, this changed. The number of sales increased and more and more people are purchasing the Developer and Business licenses, the ones that actually pack the most value. There are also more existing clients that upgrade from a Personal license to these two.

I think this happened because the plugin has matured. Seeing that it powers more than 20K websites, people are more confident to try it out and integrate it into their website, than when seeing it had only several hundred or a thousand active installs. Also, people that have been using it for a while realized it’s a good fit, want more out of it, and are happy to invest in a paid version.

Having so many options in the WordPress multilingual plugin space, it’s only normal that it takes a little time for people to find you and decide to use your product. It’s a sign of a maturing market.

Key Takeaway: If you’re planning to launch anything new and expect it to be successful, you need to be in it for the long run. Approach it like a marathon, not a sprint.

While I know we still have a long way to go, there are clear signs we’re heading in the right direction.

Development and new features

Development-wise our focus was always on keeping TranslatePress as simple as possible. We understand that that’s where its true power lies.

This is something we always keep in mind when adding new features or deciding if something should be part of the plugin core.

Our plugin development direction and new features are mainly influenced by user feedback. The more people use the plugin, the more accurate feedback we can act upon.

The main things currently on our development roadmap are:

• • Add support for displaying different images based on language (DONE);
  • Taxonomy translations;
  • Medium-term, we’re looking to integrate TranslatePress with human translation services.

This means offering our users the ability to send content to professional translators and receive the translated text back directly from the plugin UI.

A lot of ongoing development work goes into compatibility. We need to deliver on our promise that it works out of the box with any theme or plugin, so whenever we bump into weird glitches that need fixing we try to zoom out, get a wider perspective and try to find a more general fix. Not just one that will work for that particular theme or plugin.

Key takeaway: When adding new features always make sure you’re not sacrificing your plugin usability. Don’t give up the reason why they chose you in the first place for the hope of potentially attracting new users with this new amazing feature.

What’s next?

We’ve come a long way in the past 12 months. However, judging by how much we believe in this project and where we want to take it, this is still the beginning of the journey.

Here are our main short-term goals:

• Power 30K+ websites before the end of the year;
• Get to 7000+$/month revenue by December (that’s a 50% increase in monthly revenue);
• Stick to our development roadmap;
• Write more, improve our docs, publish more resources that help our users create awesome multilingual websites.

Long term, with the help of our users, we’re looking to make TranslatePress the best WordPress translation plugin on the market.

This sums up our first TranslatePress Transparency Report. I’m thinking of writing these reports on a regular basis.

If you get any value out of them or want me to address a specific topic in the next one, please let me know in the comments section below.

Update: We’ve now passed 10000$ Monthly Recurring Revenue, make sure to check out Transparency Report #2

The post From 0 to 4500$/month with a new WordPress multilingual plugin appeared first on TranslatePress.