A look back at WPMarmite in 2024

Happy 2025! Here we are, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Kind of crazy, huh?

As I do every year, today I’m taking a look back at the last 12 months with WPMarmite.

In passing, I encourage you to take stock of your own current projects and to set objectives for the new year.

Whether you have a business or not, it’s always a good idea to look in the rear-view mirror to adjust your future actions.

In any case, for your projects, remember: give it your all and don’t give up.🫸🤛

Note: For a bigger perspective, you can check out our annual reviews for 2023, 2022, and 2021.

WPMarmite’s year in review: 2024

To look back on 2024, we’ll break down the project part by part.

This will help you to better understand WPMarmite as a whole.

Free content

Most visitors know WPMarmite from its free content.

Blog articles, guides, newsletters, YouTube videos (in French), and social networking posts: there’s something for everyone.

Blog content

On the articles side, we published and updated 37 articles out of a total of 398 available on the blog.

That’s a smaller number than usual, but only in appearance, because we’ve continued to publish content… in the form of pages!

These include:

• Launching WordPress plugin comparison pages to collect the best resources in one place, conveniently organized by categories.
• The development of our “WordPress silo,” in particular by developing our hub dedicated to WordPress agencies (in French only at the moment) and hosting providers.

We’ve even turned some articles into pages, as we felt this would be more relevant to users (and to Google, to be honest). This was the case, for example, with our tutorial on Gutenberg.

It was a big job, but as usual, Aurore (our content manager) orchestrated the whole thing fantastically.

The videos

In terms of videos, we uploaded 25 new videos to our YouTube channel (in French only) in 2024. That’s a little less than last year, but we’re now at a rate of one video every two weeks.

We launched a format that I’d like to continue this year: a live comparison of plugins. In particular, we compared WordPress backup plugins to see what they had in common.

Newsletters

As for our newsletter (the best way to keep up with us), I’m delighted to see that we’re still at a 40% opening rate!

In fact, take a look at what one of our French readers, Marion, recently told us:

Just a quick note to thank you for your newsletter, which I always keep up with. It’s an essential tool for keeping up to date on WordPress topics when you run a WP e-commerce site.

Marion – Les extra-ordinaires

(yes, Marion wins a nice backlink to her site 🥰)

Now let’s talk about WPMarmite News, our second newsletter dedicated to WordPress monitoring (in French only).

Thanks to Thibaut, we’ve remained faithful to bring you new content every 15 days. And you’ve returned the favor by keeping the opening rate at 45%.

WPMarmite on social networks

Let’s end on the social side with our profiles on the various platforms.

I’m delighted to see that we’re keeping up the pace thanks to our collaboration with Julia.

She creates beautiful visuals (with WPMarmite’s signature bubbles) to share news, impart knowledge, and entertain you as you wander the web.

In addition, we launched a Discord server (in French) to bring together as many WordPress users and WPMarmite fans as possible.

International development

Wow, it’s been 5 years since WPMarmite started speaking English!

The number of articles in English has risen to 247, with 32 new publications and updates in 2024.

We also translated our comparison pages and other strategic pages.

In terms of traffic, we receive around 20k English-speaking visitors every month, which represents a quarter of our overall traffic.

Premium content

I’d better warn you, we’re tackling the part that had the most upheaval in 2024.

Up until now, WPMarmite was mainly monetized through the sale of online WordPress training courses (in French only).

Over 4,500 people have been trained on WPMarmite Pro, but after more than 10 years of designing training courses, I’ve grown a little weary.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk about it in detail on LinkedIn, but in short:

• Creating training courses is time-consuming
• The returns aren’t great, which is demotivating
• The tools we cover are evolving super fast (and our courses are going out of date)
• I don’t want to sell dreams
• I don’t want to become a WordPress coach or mentor

For all these reasons, in September I decided to put the production and updating of our training courses on hold.

Since the beginning of 2024, however, we’ve tried just about everything to find a sustainable alternative model. We have:

• Launched WordPress site audits
• Launched the Super Malter workshop with partner trainer Maxime
• Concentrated on SEO training (with the launch of the Keyword Challenge)
• Launched our SEO support package

Except that this world of support doesn’t suit me at all. I think I’m too focused on WPMarmite to devote myself to other people’s projects over such a long period of time.

What’s more, this kind of business requires the implementation of marketing strategies that I’m not at all aligned with. I tested it and… no thanks. 🙂‍↔️

This radical change led us to start creating products to better help WordPress users. Let’s talk about it.

WPMarmite products

Halting the promotion of our WordPress training courses had one unfortunate consequence: a drop in our sales.

They’re still available for purchase (for our French audience), but we’ll only be releasing them a few times a year.

Since we’re not a government-subsidized media platform, we need to find other sources of revenue to continue our development.

WPMarmite Start

In June, we launched WPMarmite Start: pre-configured WordPress site templates that save over 10 hours on each installation (the counter has since climbed to 17 hours).

The promise is to help any site creator get up and running in less than an hour, while avoiding technical headaches.

We currently offer a generalist site template (to create a showcase site in most sectors) and a site template dedicated to therapists.

Other templates will soon be available for new niches. (Currently only available in French.)

WPMarmite Pay

In September, we launched the WPMarmite Pay plugin to sell digital products and online services quickly and easily.

With WPMarmite Start, we were once again faced with the challenge of implementing an overly complicated system to use WooCommerce to market our templates.

We needed a system that was simpler and less expensive to set up. So we made one.

At the beginning of December, we decided to dedicate our focus to WPMarmite Start, as it corresponds more closely to WPMarmite’s natural audience. We are nevertheless continuing to develop WPMarmite Pay in parallel.

The WPMarmite network

WPMarmite is also a large family made up of several WordPress sites.

These are mainly projects we’ve launched in the past and which have gained a certain level of popularity. Not to the level of WPMarmite, but not insignificant either. They include:

• WPTurbo
• BeautifulPress
• WPSitter

The aforementioned WPMarmite News, Start, and Pay are also part of this family.

We have other projects in the pipeline to expand the family, but one thing at a time.

Team evolution

Over the past year, the team has remained relatively stable.

We have, however, reviewed the terms of certain collaborations to move from subscription services to task-based services in order to further control our costs.

In April, Clément joined our team to develop the sales and advertising side of the business.

The partnership was perfect! Clément’s actions have been truly game-changing for WPMarmite. I can’t thank him enough. 🙏

In 2024, we also worked more with freelancers on the Upwork platform. It’s a great way of collaborating with talent all over the world to move our projects forward.

On another note, 2024 was also the year of another change of accountant. This time, I think we’ve found the right one! Hopefully that lasts.

My only regret this year was that we weren’t able to get the team together for the traditional “Marmite Summit.” We’re hopeful of organizing one in early 2025.

WPMarmite’s goals for 2025

Last year was a year of experimentation to move away from a model based on selling training to something else.

Finding that “something else” took a lot of trial and error. It hasn’t always been pleasant, but we’re still here!

For 2025, we’re now focusing on WPMarmite Start to help beginners get their sites up and running quickly, without getting bogged down in the technicalities.

This choice therefore has an impact on our list of objectives (which is a good thing):

• Generate 100 sales per month automatically with:
  • Publicity (SEA and SMA)
  • SEO
  • Affiliation
  • Partnerships
  • Social media
• Improve our products:
  • Create 10 new site templates
  • Simplify the template implementation process
  • Integrate AI as much as possible in our templates
  • Offer ready-to-use page templates
• Further the development of WPMarmite with:
  • SEO
  • Partnerships
  • Sponsored content
• Relaunching our network sites
• Reach $50k in monthly sales

As I regularly say on my personal networks: give it your all and never give up.🫸🤛

Conclusion

Like 2023, WPMarmite continued to stagnate. Our revenues fluctuated between $16 and $40k per month, with an average of $22k (we were already at $22k/month the previous year).

If we keep up the momentum, WPMarmite’s financial year should see sales of $260–270k (we close at the end of March).

Though we have to bear in mind that we haven’t yet triggered a virtuous circle, this is a very good performance.

Now we need to find the right formula to help as many customers as possible launch their sites. When we do, we’ll have a much brighter outlook. 🤠

In any case, I still have a lot of energy for WPMarmite!

The boat has gotten rocked, but that’s part of entrepreneurship. We have to find solutions and adapt to the market.

If you want to help us, here’s what you can do:

• View and interact with our content (articles and posts on social media)
• Click on our affiliate links to equip your sites
• Use WPMarmite Pay to sell online on WordPress
• Link to WPMarmite from your website
• Recommend WPMarmite to anyone wishing to create a WordPress site

That’s it, you’ve reached the end of this review of 2024. Thank you for reading it in its entirety! Once again, thank you for following and trusting WPMarmite for all these years. 🙏

On that note, I’ll see you next year for the next review! Let me know what you thought in the comments. 😉

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About the author

Alex Borto

Creator of WPMarmite and co-founder of WPChef, he is dedicated to providing you with quality resources to help you create, customize and promote websites with WordPress.