WP Engine: 2020 in Review

This year, we’re extra thankful for all you’ve done to make us who we are!

Throughout 2020, we’ve been inspired by your ability to adapt and your unswerving commitment to digital innovation, and we’ve been proud to serve as your digital engine as you’ve tapped into creative solutions that unlock the power and versatility of WordPress.

We enter a new year focused on helping you push your digital breakthroughs even further, and we hope you’ll draw inspiration from some of the ways you and your fellow customers rose to the challenges of a digital-first world in 2020, as well as the ways we improved our platform and grew as a company, all in support of your hard work and perseverance.

2020 drove home a simple but powerful point for businesses of all shapes and sizes: your website is your new front door. 

With a surge in online activity and higher-than-ever demand for digital-first everything, you built nearly 150,000 new websites on our platform this year, joining the now 1.2 million digital experiences powered by WP Engine, all optimized for that “front door” experience.

40% of those new sites were built by the more than 30,000 new customers we welcomed in 2020, taking our number of global customers to more than 150,000 and adding to the number of overall sites that benefit from WP Engine’s industry-leading performance, security, and award-winning support.

Beyond the sheer number of you that pressed ahead in 2020, it’s also worth noting how you did it, and some of the tools and features you used along the way.

Nearly 15,000 sites began using Smart Plugin Manager in 2020, which safely and automatically made more than 1M plugin updates throughout the year.

We also blocked more than 109M attacks daily for you using technologies like Global Edge Security, and nearly 900,000 sites around the world used Local—now available for all WP Engine sites—for development projects this year, driving home its well-earned reputation as the most popular local development tool for WordPress. 

Across all of the creators, builders, and entrepreneurs who power their business with WordPress, you partnered with us to build amazing digital experiences when the world needed them most. Here’s a look at just a few:

• Entertainment company Medium Rare used our platform for one of the largest virtual parties of the year (featuring two of the biggest names in sports, Shaquille O’Neal and Rob Gronkowski), which reached millions of viewers around the world and raised money for charity. 

• Digital agency Springbox spun up a site for the OOSA brand of the U.S. Women’s National Team Players Association with pages that load in milliseconds, and a nearly 10% better bounce rate than benchmark against other sports websites in the United States. A world-class digital experience to go alongside world-class players.

• Metcash, Australia’s largest wholesale food distributor, worked with our team to build a headless WordPress site integrated with WooCommerce in order to support online sales and schedule contactless deliveries. They built the platform almost overnight, providing at-risk populations with safe access to food in the early days of the pandemic.

No matter what your digital project is, powering it on the best platform for WordPress is our number priority, and that starts with providing industry-leading performance and security.

We’re proud to report that WP Engine hosts the fastest platform on desktop and mobile for WordPress. We also host the highest percentage of sites that load in less than 200ms (pulled from the HTTP Archive), which means your visitors are able to get to your site content faster than competitors on other platforms. 

On the security side of things, we completed a SOC 2 Type II examination this year for our customer environment and User Portal, ensuring your business and your brand are protected and meet the highest, independent standards of security, availability, and privacy of customer data.

We upgraded more than 264,000 customer sites to PHP 7.4 (which offers both speed and security benefits), as well as made the latest Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol available to all customers for free, which improved performance and protected you against unwanted DDoS attacks. 

We also made powerful cloud infrastructure from Google and AWS more widely available to you, we enabled Global Edge Security with Argo Smart Routing for better application performance, and we added a slew of new features to Smart Plugin Manager to make it even more effective and easier to use. 

This too was a theme with our major Genesis releases in 2020: Genesis Blocks, Genesis Custom Blocks, and Genesis Pro, all of which centered around new ways to bring additional block editor-focused tools to site creators and developers, and enable them with a greater mastery of modern WordPress.

Finally, to make sure you’re able to utilize all of our tools and features seamlessly, we made multiple rounds of improvements to our User Portal, including enabling Single Sign-On from WP Engine into WordPress, all with a focus on giving you more flexibility and control while providing you with an effortless user experience.

When our core values were first enshrined in 2013, we were a three-year-old company with 40 employees. Today, we’re a global organization with customers in 50 countries and nearly 1,000 employees across the U.S., Europe, and Australia.

This year also marked WP Engine’s 10th anniversary. In honor of this significant milestone, we refreshed our Core Values to reflect the company we have grown into, inclusive of our friends from StudioPress, Local, and Flywheel. This new set of shared values will inform our sense of direction, and solidify our guiding principles as we head into the future.

Our refreshed Core Values are:

• Do the Right Thing
• Customer Inspired
• Design Matters
• Committed to Give Back 
• Built for Growth 

While Committed to Give Back was one of our original values, and one our employees have taken to heart year after year, 2020 saw a huge uptick when it came to employee-led giving, and we’re exceedingly proud of the way all of our employees leaned in during a challenging year to give back to those in need. 

Throughout 2020, employees and WP Engine have donated more than $265,000 globally through our corporate social responsibility program, Engine for Good, to more than 20 organizations, including Black Girls Code, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Central Texas Food Bank, and Rize Up.

None of it would have been possible without you and the trust you put in us every day. 

Thank you to all of our customers, partners, and employees, who provided their inspiration and ingenuity during a challenging year. Here’s to pressing ahead, and to all the good things to come as we enter 2021!