The Raidboxes review of 2021

Our conclusion for 2021: Change! A lot has happened at Raidboxes in the last twelve months: New office, many new and wonderful employees and our relaunch is still pending for the beginning of next year.

We have grown – and we have grown a lot. This has triggered far-reaching changes in the team and in the company. We want to take a look back at 2021 with you, our customers – without whom we would never be where we are now. First things first: your feedback, especially for our support, has blown us away. A huge thank you from the entire team to a great community!

2021 in figures

14,000 customers. We couldn’t believe it ourselves when we cracked this figure. The long (partial) lockdown in spring further emphasised the urgency of having a suitable online presence. We see this in the demand for managed WordPress hosting and our WooCommerce solutions.

A few more figures:

• Around 43 per cent of all websites worldwide use WordPress as part of their overall online presence (W3Techs).
• If only websites with a relevant content management system (CMS) are taken into account, the figure rises to around 65 per cent.
• In addition, around 20 per cent of WordPress installations also use WooCommerce as an online shop or booking system.
• Joomla, Draft, Shopify and other content management and shop systems are clearly lagging behind.

The trend continues: WordPress and WooCommerce are the most popular content management systems. Not all WordPress hosting is the same. Raidboxes wants to offer you professional hosting. We know how to improve the performance of your site. Not least through our highly acclaimed support and a dashboard specially developed for WordPress.

Raidboxes gets bigger

Our team has also grown enormously this year. To ensure that our products are constantly improving and our support remains top quality, we have hired great specialists. We want to live up to our claim of being the best managed WordPress host in Germany.

A brief overview:

• We have grown from 31 to 42 employees, plus freelancers and translators.
• Expertise: We have recruited people with many years of experience, particularly in the technical field.
• Remote work: As in 2020, Corona has increased remote work. Almost 100 per cent home office in spring, we enjoyed our new office in summer. Unfortunately, the current situation is forcing us back into our own four walls.
• 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.

At Raidboxes, we make a conscious decision to offer our employees a positive and safe working environment. Because we can only offer you a unique service if we drive to work in the morning with a smile or sit down at our computer at home. That’s why the well-being of all employees, whether they are working students or in a lead position, is important to us.

The following employees have joined us this year:

• René is our new Product Owner
• Thomas G. is our new Head of Development
• Elise is responsible for our migration
• Ralf is new in Sales
• Frederike and Julia strengthen the Customer Success Team
• Niko, Nikos, Daniel and Robin provide support
• Maik and Matthias strengthen our development team
• Pascal and Patrick support the content marketing team

Together at Raidboxes

Working together at Raidboxes is something special. We authors of this annual review, Pascal and Patrick, only joined Raidboxes during the course of the year. Pascal works half-time in the office/home office and Patrick completely remotely. We are both in the middle of our studies and are employed as working students.

But why do we both feel so comfortable? Clearly the open and warm welcome we received from all employees at the company. When Pascal entered the office for the first time in June 2021, he was greeted by everyone, personally welcomed and given several days of onboarding, during which he mainly got to know his close colleagues and was introduced to the internal structure at Raidboxes. The mixture of open, funny and sometimes crazy colleagues, a phenomenal office and a goal-oriented way of working, all of this together motivates a lot to work.

As working students, we are not the end of the line, as we experienced with previous employers, but are actively involved in the team and decision-making processes. We are asked for our opinion or assessment of issues.

To summarise: the pleasant working environment, challenging projects and a company with character and a social mission make Raidboxes stand out.

Corona…

Closed, open and now vague. This describes the second year of the pandemic quite well. A lockdown with a slow opening at the beginning of 2021, a largely carefree summer and, just before Christmas, incidences have never been higher.

We at Raidboxes have been monitoring the pandemic and political situation and complying with the official guidelines. At the beginning of the year, we were 100 per cent working from home. Today, around 55 per cent of the Raidboxes team is working remotely from all parts of Germany. When incidences fell in the spring, we opened up capacity in the office – but only with a daily negative rapid test and a maximum number of people. Most of our colleagues are now working from home again.

The current situation can be very draining. That’s why the mental health of our employees is more important to us than ever. You can read about how we at Raidboxes are dealing with this here.

New office

One of the most eagerly awaited events of this year and certainly the first major milestone of fundamental change at Raidboxes. In mid-May, we moved into our new office in the heart of Münster – not far from the main railway station and not far from the old office – including our own roof terrace. In short: it’s a dream! Each circle – see Holacracy – has its own area, there is a huge kitchen for a nice chat or a meal with your favourite colleagues and a simple, open interior design.

A few more facts about our office:

• Each workstation has a height-adjustable desk.
• A full fridge with everything your heart desires.
• Rooms with different functions: A quiet room for concentrated work or a meeting room with good acoustics and a projector.
• A wonderful view over Münster.

Pictures of our office:

Our roof terrace is an absolute highlight. In summer, we had the opportunity to inaugurate our roof terrace with some of our colleagues and customers. Of course, everything was subject to the official requirements and 3G in force at the time.

Our product

Our dashboard is the heart of our infrastructure. Here you have an overview of your BOXES and can manage them. This year, we have set the course to release efficient features for our customers next year.

Features 2021:

• You can block bots from your site with user agent blocking.
• Security is important to us: users can activate two-factor authentication.
• We have updated the system to 25,000 BOXES.

Outlook 2022:

2022 is all about change. We have already started to modernise our internal services this year and will continue to do so in the new year. Without giving too much away, we will be working on our cache in 2022 and trying to offer our customers more modularity. So much for the product side. On the platform side, we also want to become more dynamic in order to offer more flexibility and stability.

The structure of our development teams has also changed. They are now organised by product line. This allows them to work more intensively on individual products and adapt resources and schedules more flexibly depending on the project status.

Sustainability

This year, we have initiated major steps to improve our sustainability ourselves, which will be completed in 2022. In addition to our reforestation through Eden Reforesteration Projects, we have been supporting the Greenspark initiative since 2020. It invests in climate-positive projects. So far, we have offset 566 tonnes of CO2.

B Corp Certification

Since the beginning of this year, we have been endeavouring to achieve B Corp certification. This is more than just “simple” certification according to certain standards. Rather, a B Corporation is a company that is committed to social added value and ecological sustainability in its articles of association. It is particularly important for us to include the stakeholder approach in our company statutes. We have decided to prioritise the needs of everyone involved in Raidboxes (employees, shareholders, etc.) rather than maximising profits.

We started this process at the beginning of the year with an evaluation of our company. We used the B Impact Assessment to take stock in the five categories of corporate governance, employees, community, environment and customers. Our result: 65 points. To be approved for the next certification process, a company must achieve at least 80 out of 200 points.

This resulted in a number of measures. Particularly important was the move of our accounts to the sustainable GLS Bank and a CO2 balancing of Raidboxes with the help of Climate Partner. We also carried out a supplier analysis in IT purchasing in order to pay more attention to sustainability.

Economy for the common good

Another important step is our Economy for the Common Good accounting report. The Economy for the Common Good approach means that we are in favour of an economic system that puts the common good at the centre. In doing so, we take a deep look into the existing structures at Raidboxes. The balance sheet is a self-critical look that entails changes.

Solidarity enterprises Münsterland

We are a member of Solidarische Unternehmen Münsterland – a network of companies interested in the common good. The network offers space for dialogue, meetings and keynote speeches. We have made our premises available for the meeting at the end of October and are actively involved. We are also interested in upcoming meetings, if this is currently possible.

Green Friday instead of Black Friday

We made a conscious decision not to offer discounts on Black Friday this year. Instead, we planted 10,000 trees with our partner Eden Reforesteration Projects. If you are more interested in this topic, we recommend our blog posts on ethical marketing and conscious consumption.

Check out this post on Instagram

A post shared by raidboxes® (@raidboxes)

The best blog posts of 2021

Once again this year, we have published countless articles on our blog wp unboxed. We would like to present what we consider to be the ten best blog posts of 2021, or those that we have completely revised in 2021:

1. The best free WordPress themes 2021: Here you will find the best 15 Gutenberg WordPress themes to make your content not only visually appealing, but also optimised for search engines.
2. 16 popular WordPress page builders compared: Don’t have any programming skills? Want to build your site with the help of a modular system? These are the most popular page builders.
3. Optimise images for WordPress: Images can quickly become large and increase the page load time. In this blog post, we give you tips on how to improve performance. A classic that we update every year.
4. WordPress hosting comparison 2021: With results from 250+ Web PageSpeed Insights. Read more about our best tips for WordPress performance, time savings, security and support.
5. GDPR plugins: data protection is important! If you don’t take care of your cookie banners, you risk a warning. Here are five tools to help you with implementation.
6. Sustainability in web hosting: Raidboxes is a climate-positive web host. Here we tell you more about it and give you tips on how to make your hosting climate-neutral.
7. Ice breaker methods: Online meetings, webinars and digital team conferences have become an integral part of the working world. Here are ten methods for loosening up in between.
8. Good storytelling: Are you still missing the perfect story to promote your products or your shop? This article is about the basics of good storytelling.
9. Project management tools: Do you want to improve your team communication or make documents available to everyone at the same time? We present useful tools for project management.
10. Do we still need web designers? This provocative question is discussed in this blog post. What do you think? Please let us know.

Our e-books

This year, we published two e-books. We have specialised these primarily for agencies, but they are also interesting for all other customers who work with WordPress and WooCommerce.

Customer acquisition for WordPress agencies

This e-book is perfect for agencies and freelancers looking to acquire new client projects. In the 70-page e-book, you will find sustainable strategies for approaching, convincing and retaining clients.

• Which methods and tools should you know for acquisition?
• Which online marketing strategies can you use?
• What is the most profitable way to upsell and cross-sell?
• Recommendation marketing as a lever

Project management for agencies

Do you want to plan projects more efficiently and keep to the schedule? Proper project management determines whether your customers are satisfied.

In this e-book, we give you an insight into techniques and tools to always get the best out of your projects.

• What are the basics of good project management with WordPress?
• How do I plan and organise workflows?
• How does good communication work in a team?
• Which tools make it easier for me to plan and implement my projects?

Raidboxes and the WordPress community

The WCEU 2021 took place online again this year. What a pity, as we miss the personal exchange and the event. Let’s hope that it can take place as an in-person event again in 2022.

This year we were one of the main sponsors and had great and nice conversations with different people from the scene, with other WordPress enthusiasts and potential customers in the Digital Booth.

On the evening of the second day, our Internationalisation Lead Caspar Hübinger conducted an interview with the organisers. The interview was about how we as Raidboxes want to support the WordPress community and give something back to it. The interview resulted in an interesting blog post, which we highly recommend.

Track 1: @casparhubinger, from RaidBoxes, is a amazing conversationalist and he is going to have a conversation on #WCEU2021 #WCEU. You can't miss it. pic.twitter.com/DFWT8pEUCZ

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 8, 2021

Relaunch: Everything new in 2022

After working a lot on our inner values this year, we will be launching a new website and a new corporate design at the beginning of 2022. Raidboxes has developed massively in recent years. We want to communicate this to the outside world. So stay tuned – the announcement is coming soon! (Update: Here it is – our new corporate identity!)

Outlook 2022

The coming year 2022 will be an important year for us. After all, we have big plans – starting with the overhaul of our dashboard, we want to release more useful features for our customers and work with you to achieve even more in the area of climate-positive hosting and a fairer society.

An important step for us will be to provide other countries in Europe with first-class managed WordPress hosting. We are convinced that we can win over more freelancers, developers and agencies with our WordPress hosting. To achieve this, we are looking for people to help us. That’s why you are welcome to join the Raidboxes team, no matter where in the world you want to work from! We offer remote work, flat hierarchies through the concept of holacracy, high flexibility and a wonderful team.

The community gives us a lot – we also want to give something back to it. That is why we are striving for an ECG certificate to emphasise our good will. There is still a lot to do to achieve this. We think there is a lot of potential in the area of product development and new helpful features that will save our customers even more time and money. We want to tackle this in 2022.

Our dashboard in particular plays an essential part in achieving this goal. It has become a little outdated and deserves a new look. We will also be adding more data centres with a state-of-the-art infrastructure. The latest technology – so we can offer seamless services with larger packages.

Goodbye 2021 👋 – Welcome 2022 ✨