2020 is and was a difficult year for many. We are glad that Raidboxes was still able to grow. And that we can give some of this success back to society. Thank you to our customers and our employees, without whom none of this would have been possible.

If you wanted to survive as a small or medium-sized business in 2020, you had to increasingly rely on a professional website or a new online store. This is another reason why the WordPress and hosting market is still doing well.

We support our customers who have not been so lucky. Among other things, with our #supportyourlocals program or with our Corona help, more on that later. But first, what did 2020 mean for Raidboxes? And what is our outlook for 2021?

Yippee! 10,000 customers

In mid-November, we were able to celebrate, first of all virtually due to Corona: more than 10,000 customers now trust our services! The demand for managed hosting for WordPress and WooCommerce continues to rise significantly. There are several reasons for this:

• Almost 40 percent of the world's web currently runs on WordPress (according to W3Techs)
• If only websites with a recognizable CMS are taken into account, then this proportion rises to almost 64 percent
• Up to 18 percent of WordPress installations also use WooCommerce as an online store or booking system
• Other content management and store systems such as Joomla, Drupal, Shopify or Magento, on the other hand, are clearly lagging behind
• This trend has been gaining momentum in recent years

Of course, not all WordPress hosting is the same - our customers know that. Raidboxes is also so successful because we significantly speed up the processes of agencies and freelancers. With our central WordPress management and a dashboard that is specially developed for the leading CMS.

No matter whether you manage 5, 50 or 500 WordPress projects. And whether you're doing it for yourself or on behalf of a client, you'll love our features.

Raidboxes continues to grow

More customers mean more support, technology, marketing, sales and administration. In other words, more human resources. We are proud to be growing at home and with permanent employees, not via virtual or low-cost solutions from overseas. The Raidboxes team already made a huge leap in 2019. Here are the key figures for 2020:

• Grown from 20 to 31: Our team now has a total of 31 employees. We also have additional staff and freelancers, for example for translations.
• Diversity: Ten of the 31 employees are female. We are still nowhere near where we want to be, which is why we will work even harder on our diversity in the future.
• Remote work: In addition to Münster and the surrounding area, our colleagues also work from Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Potsdam, Berlin, Hanover, Wuppertal and Freiburg.
• Holacracy Reloaded: Self-determined work with flat hierarchies is a high priority at Raidboxes. This is precisely why we use the role concept, based on the principle of holacracy. In 2021, we will adapt this to the growing team - and report on it here in the magazine.

Raidboxes deliberately invests in specialists from the WordPress environment. This is the only way we can make you satisfied as a customer. With a "mass hoster", it's a simple calculation: If a web space only costs a double-digit amount per year, how is the web hoster supposed to pay for good supporters? Who also have in-depth knowledge of WordPress? And who can be reached within minutes, not hours or even days?

These are the eleven new Raidboxes faces in 2020, in support and beyond:

• Birgit supports us in administration and team assistance
• Marten and Niklas strengthen product development
• Christian and Chris help our customers with support
• Laura and Navid are new to Sales
• Jacob started as a Product Owner
• Caspar takes care of internationalization and our cooperation partners
• Lucy and Elise strengthen marketing in the International Content division
• Tim starts this month as a working student in the field of sustainability

Social commitment

Not all companies fared as well as we did in 2020. Raidboxes' mission is generally geared towards making a contribution - to our customers, to our team (more on this in a moment) and also to society. We don't want to be a soulless and interchangeable web hosting company that doesn't live up to its responsibilities.

Corona is a crisis for local retailers, while platforms such as Amazon are making huge profits. This is another reason why we are supporting the #supportyourlocals campaign with free hosting for portals that digitally connect local businesses. One example of our campaign is Rheinkreishelden from Neuss. Read our interview to find out how they specifically help local businesses. In it, we tell you what each and every one of us can do to ensure that city centers and diversity do not die out.

Another example is the coronavirus aid from Raidboxes. We have to stick together during the crisis. That's why we are supporting our customers from industries that are particularly hard hit by the consequences of the pandemic: Culture, gastronomy, hotels and events. Find out more about our program.

Last but not least, we thought about how we ourselves deal with online giants such as Facebook, Google & Co. Raidboxes is to a large extent dependent on Facebook, a platform that is heavily criticized when it comes to data protection. After all, our ads convert amazingly well on the social network. In other words: without Facebook, we would probably not have reached the 10,000 customers.

Nevertheless, we don't want to simply accept this conflict of interest. That's why Raidboxes is donating a large part of the budget that we would normally have spent on marketing activities at the end of the year. A total of 10,000 euros will be donated in equal parts to the following organizations before Christmas:

• atmosfair: The initiative actively protects the climate, among other things by offsetting greenhouse gases with renewable energies. This fits in perfectly with our green hosting.
• Step by Step e. V. Münster: The association from our home town supports social projects at home and abroad that are not on the radar of government agencies or large aid organizations. Currently, these are mainly projects for people and groups in need due to the coronavirus.

You are welcome to follow our example and donate part of your online marketing budget to social or ecological causes.

Working together at Raidboxes

A positive side effect of these difficult times: More and more companies are promoting the mental and physical health of their employees. At Raidboxes, several roles take care of this. One of them is the "Mental Health" team, which we expanded in 2020 - with the support of our managing directors Torben and Johannes.

There's no question that a lot of things at Raidboxes are going very well. Thanks to the holacracy, everyone in the team can look for areas of work that they find particularly meaningful - and that suit their individual strengths. And yet we are aware that stress factors are present in every company. The Mental Health team has the following tasks, among others:

• Contact person in the event of overload due to professional or private challenges.
• Training in mindfulness towards a diverse team and new colleagues.
• Establishing a mindful and open communication culture in the office and in Slack (as we work remotely to a large extent).
• Respect introverted needs and ensure opportunities for retreat, for example for concentrated work.
• Support in achieving a good work-life balance.

We achieve these goals, for example, through internal training, an anonymous contact point, employee surveys and conflict resolution services such as mediation. At the same time, we strengthen personal responsibility and personal growth. By motivating everyone in the team to speak up as soon as a conflict arises. Among colleagues, but also towards managers.

An additional building block that Raidboxes promotes with monthly training sessions is non-violent communication (NVC) - a methodical approach to jointly resolving conflicts in teams. Trainer Marianne Oshege regularly comes to the Münster office (currently remotely) to introduce us to the model.

For some of the team, this approach is unfamiliar because the specific approach requires a lot of openness and courage. And this applies to both the more introverted personalities who work for us and the more outspoken employees. In the sessions, we use specific examples from everyday working life to learn how conflicts can be identified more quickly using NVC, how we can best address them and how we can resolve them.

Sustainability and green hosting

Raidboxes has been a pioneer in "green" WordPress hosting for many years - not just climate-neutral, but climate-positive. Our competitors are currently increasingly jumping on this bandwagon, which of course pleases us. Because we can only master the challenges of climate change together.

In 2020, we were able to increase our contribution to the environment once again thanks to our 10,000 customers. Here are the latest figures:

• For every new WordPress site or WooCommerce store that you host with us, we plant a tree for you. Through various campaigns (such as our fall campaign, five trees planted for new contracts), we have significantly increased this number once again. In 2020, we will therefore donate over 100,000 trees!
• The target for 2021 is ambitious, but together with you we can achieve it: 200,000 trees from Raidboxes for the climate.
• In addition to reforestation, we have been supporting the Get Mads initiative since 2020. It invests in climate-positive projects that are selected according to strict criteria. Through the partnership alone, Raidboxes has offset over 320 tons of CO2 in 2020 , in addition to the trees.

So our team is already making a difference in terms of sustainability and social commitment. And yet there are areas where we want to do even better. For example, we pay attention to suppliers who work sustainably themselves and stand by their corporate responsibility.

But what about issues such as precarious working models and employee monitoring? For example, with the many online delivery services that are currently springing up and being criticized? Or at Amazon with its employee monitoring programs, as recently documented in VICE magazine?

Further tasks await us with regard to an end-to-end supplier and sustainability chain. There are already concrete plans for these in 2021, for example as part of a new or expanded sustainability role, into which we are currently investing additional human resources. We are accepting this additional effort in order to do our part for a better working world.

You may also be affected by the question of how fair global online companies can be. Do you want to strengthen your local retail business with an online store? Then we recommend our e-book Online Shops with WooCommerce. It is aimed not only at professionals, but also at users.

Introduction of Scrum

In 2020, our technical team mainly worked on scaling the Raidboxes dashboard and its functions even more specifically in the future. We also added important features such as the BOX status: How high are the CPU utilization and RAM consumption of your site? How much memory is actually still free? Which cron jobs are currently running and what do your log files actually look like? Our advanced website monitoring answers these and other questions.

At the same time, the focus was on making our WordPress hosting even more performant and efficient. After switching to Raidboxes, our customers' WordPress sites run up to 400 percent faster thanks to special WordPress functions and sophisticated technology in the background. And we want to keep it that way in the future.

An important milestone for us internally was the introduction of Scrum. Scrum is a project and product management method that promotes agile software development in particular. This is precisely what strengthens the future scaling of our product development.

Our Product Owner Jacob introduced Scrum at Raidboxes. The reasons for this included a lack of consistent transparency in feature development, unclear priorities due to multiple stakeholders or partially undefined processes, which led to frequent disruptions in the technical team. Looking back, Jacob says:

The biggest challenge when introducing Scrum was setting up the new communication channels - this was a learning process for everyone involved, both for the stakeholders and for the development team. The same applies to the detailed evaluation and description of requirements before they are submitted for development.

And further:

The new communication channels and better quality requirements have significantly increased the efficiency of technology and focused work. On the stakeholder side, we feel this through greater transparency regarding the progress of projects.

The improved prioritization contributes to the fact that we are now implementing the "right" and important topics. We will therefore continue to expand Scrum in the coming year, including by switching to new project management software(Jira).

New magazine and multilingualism

In spring, our new Raidboxes magazine wp unboxed was launched with a completely new design - replacing our old blog. This is what the result looks like:

At the same time as the relaunch, we are now having the articles from the magazine professionally translated into eight languages (gradually including the older content):

• English
• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Dutch
• Polish
• Czech

Danish will follow soon. Swedish has already been added as a language, but is currently still being translated automatically.

Professional translations by our "own" freelancers (not an agency) are a considerable use of resources, which we are happy to provide - quality has priority here. In addition, multilingualism in WordPress is a well-known and so far only partially solved dilemma that also presents us with major challenges. The current solution with Weglot as a tool has caused the team some sleepless nights.

But the efforts have paid off. After an initially hesitant assessment by Google, more and more of our visitors are coming from other European countries and beyond - an important basis for the subsequent internationalization of Raidboxes. We are delighted with the positive feedback from Google, users and in the comments. After all, the entire team, including our guest authors, attaches great importance to content quality. wp unboxed is a milestone not only in terms of design, if you compare the result with our old blog:

Here are the key points of our content strategy with the new magazine wp unboxed:

• Deliberate focus on the magazine format, as opposed to a purely linear blog - even if the two specialist terms overlap in terms of content. By prominently presenting the categories, we achieve even more visibility for the various topics such as WordPress, hosting, security, web design, online marketing or the agency business.
• A fixed rotation of these topics ensures that all target groups are regularly covered. And that no category becomes orphaned over time - as is the case with many corporate blogs.
• Three full-time employees write for the magazine and/or edit the guest articles. Including a workflow for prompt translation into other languages.
• Targeted secondary and third-party use of our content, for example in the Raidboxes newsletter, in our e-books or on social channels (organic and paid). Since then, significantly more readers have become aware of the individual pieces of content.
• Well-known authors outside of Raidboxes, such as Jan Tissler, Sonja Hoffmann, Maddy Osman, Sven Scheuerle, Mario Steinberg and Dominik Stein.
• Contributions directly from the community, for example from Stefan Kremer, Felix Brodbeck, Daniela Sprung, Torsten Landsiedel or Johannes Mairhofer.

In 2021, we will refine this approach even further, for example by means of an extended success analysis. In future, we want to use this to measure conversions down to the level of individual blog posts.

In terms of design, Annie is constantly bringing wp unboxed magazine up to date with her wonderful illustrations. For example here on PHP 8:

For resource reasons, she can't create them for every post. But we are happy to finally have a more personal alternative to stock photos, but also to Unsplash & Co.

The most popular posts 2020

As we did last year, we analyzed the most popular magazine articles in 2020 based on the number of page views. The results never cease to surprise us. It shows two things: the success of blog posts can only be predicted to a limited extent. And the interests of our main target group (WordPress agencies, WP professionals and developers) are by no means focused solely on technical topics.

Here are the top ten from wp unboxed, from January to December 2020:

1. Web design trends 2020: Which aesthetics will we have to say goodbye to in the future? Which trends, on the other hand, will shape the design world in the coming years? Web designer Sonja Hoffmann's assessment is particularly interesting for many readers.
2. Optimizing images for WordPress: Why is image optimization in WordPress so important? Including five popular WordPress plugins that take all the work out of compressing your images.
3. The 4 most common WordPress errors: We help our customers solve error messages and problems with their WordPress websites every day. This article shows you step by step how to fix four of the most common errors in and with WordPress.
4. WordPress hosting comparison 2020: With results from 250+ Web PageSpeed Insights. Read more about our best tips for WordPress performance, time savings, security and support.
5. Remote leadership: how do you run an agency from anywhere? The best way for digital nomads and agency managers to master the remote trend.
6. Basic principles for harmonious web design: Another article by Sonja Hoffmann. It is infinitely difficult to carry out an objective analysis of your own creations. Fortunately, there are tried and tested design principles that you can use as a guide.
7. Yoast vs Rank Math: The two SEO plugins polarize the community. This can also be seen in the interest that Dominik Stein's comparison has sparked. With an exciting discussion in the comments.
8. Improve WordPress performance: The web is teeming with tips and tricks on how to optimize your WordPress performance. Unfortunately, the relevance of the various levers can quickly fall by the wayside. We'll show you the important starting points and levers. How to achieve success particularly quickly.
9. Create your own WordPress app: These three app builder plugins for WordPress make it possible. But how effective is the App channel?
10. ECJ ruling on the Privacy Shield: The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has declared the Privacy Shield invalid - this affects, among other things, all websites that use the services of US companies. Mario Steinberg explains what you need to do now.

Among the most successful contributions are also some classics from previous years, which we update regularly. What topics would you like to see in the future? Feel free to give us feedback, the comments are open.

New e-books

Last year, we published two major e-books. These provide our customers and agencies with additional tools to optimize their processes with WordPress. Here is an overview of the two e-books:

13 advantages of managed WordPress hosting

The book was published as a "Christmas present" to our customers at the end of 2019, but was updated again in 2020. Managed WordPress hosting gives your website a real boost. It does:

• What do you need to look out for as a freelancer, agency, blogger or company?
• Which WordPress hosting provider is right for you?
• How does shared hosting compare to a virtual private server or managed server?
• What about security, performance, time savings, cost reduction, support, functionality and usability?

With the success of WordPress and WooCommerce, the supply of suitable web hosting is also increasing. Almost every service provider advertises "WordPress hosting". But the packages don't always deliver what they promise. This e-book tells you what you should consider when making your choice.

Click here to download

Manage 5 to 100+ WordPress projects efficiently

Regardless of whether you manage 5, 50 or 500 WordPress projects, and regardless of whether you do this for yourself or on behalf of a client: administrative processes quickly take up a large part of your working time. Such processes - which cost you resources and nerves on a daily basis - include plugin and theme updates for WordPress & WooCommerce, backups, setting up SSL, installing extensions, security settings, etc.

This is just as true for agencies as it is for developers, web designers and other freelancers. And most of the time, we clearly underestimate how much of this is due to mindlessly working through the same tasks over and over again. Our latest e-book - written especially for agencies and freelancers - shows you how to centralize your WordPress management. And which tools and tricks you can use to speed up your processes considerably.

Click here to download

Both books will soon be available as e-books in English. Do you need the content in another language? Or do you prefer to read them as a blog post instead of a PDF? Then you can also find our two new guides here, in German and in nine other languages:

• 13 advantages of managed WordPress hosting
• Manage 5 to 100+ WordPress projects efficiently

Top marks for support

Current ratings - such as the following on Trusted Shops - not only make us proud. They are also a daily incentive for our support heroes:

Since this year alone, four more employees have joined our support team. This is the only reason why we currently have 4.89 out of 5 stars in the ratings.

At Raidboxes, you're dealing with "real" WordPress experts. I emphasize the "real" because it is unfortunately not a matter of course on the hosting market. You can reach us in live chat every day from 8 am to 10 pm. Even at weekends and on public holidays.

New partner program for agencies

We believe that a lot can be achieved when people talk to each other, network and share their resources. For this reason, we have set up a new partner program for agencies in 2020, including our partner directory.

The Raidboxes partner program is aimed at agencies that develop and centrally manage their WordPress projects with us. Our agency partners benefit from exclusive services such as special rates, an agency profile in our partner listing, commissions for referrals, direct and personal contact persons in sales, joint events and a content partnership.

The new partner program gives you direct and transparent access to our hosting know-how. At the same time, you become part of the growing Raidboxes community and can network there:

• Personal contact persons: Your contact in Sales will support you in all matters relating to the partnership. Together with him or her, you will implement measures that will enable you to scale your projects - and make them a success.
• Focus on your customers: Raidboxes itself grew out of an agency business. That's why we know exactly what you need to make your WordPress business even more successful. Saving time is the most important thing for you? We've got your back. With our WordPress features and our advice.
• Advanced dev tools & support services: Our partners don't have to worry about hosting basics like speed, security or easy deployment. We work closely with them - on our dashboard or on requests for new features.

Numerous well-known WordPress agencies are already participating in our partner program. Do you want to be part of it too? Then call us now or book your telephone appointment.

Remote and corona: two challenges

Raidboxes employees have been working from home for some time now. Nine of us work completely remotely, and the proportion is growing. We are coping with difficult phases like COVID-19 much better this way. Tools such as Slack, online meetings, the Google Cloud, project management software and Aircall have been part of our daily work routine right from the start.

We have all become accustomed to the advantages of working from home:

• Flexibility in terms of work-life balance (on the other hand, not everyone likes to bring the office routine into their own four walls)
• Concentrated work, an important factor especially in creative jobs
• No commute to work, quicker to be with family or friends in the evening
• Cost savings, you may save on expensive public transport subscriptions or countless kilometers by car if you work remotely

In addition, the jobs at Raidboxes are suitable for the model, which of course does not apply to all industries. Despite the advantages, the remote times are gradually becoming "too much" for us too. Due to corona, many employees no longer see each other for weeks or even months at a time. This can quickly affect their mood.

This makes mental health measures such as those I mentioned above all the more important. At the same time, we try to keep in touch via online events. For example, through a weekly virtual "after-work beer", where the teams also get together with each other and away from work topics. Or via our first online Christmas party this year. Such events are not a complete substitute for physical meetings, but they do bring us together.

WordPress Community 2020 and 2021

It was a good thing that WordCamp Europe didn't have to be completely canceled in June. Instead, there was an online camp. Nevertheless, the same applies here: the virtual format is no substitute for the all-important on-site meetings. The same applies to the numerous WordPress Meetups, some of which have switched to online meetings. The WordPress community is usually extremely lively - so we miss all the old and new faces at the camps all the more.

We share the hope with many people that we will be able to return to normality in 2021. With first encounters that go beyond the screen. At the same time, we would like to wish all our customers and readers Take care, have a happy holiday season and a good start to the new year. See you soon!