Lucky Numbers and Lessons Learned Along the Way: WP Rocket Turns 7!

In many cultures, the number 7 is associated with good fortune or magical symbolism.

Moreover, in France, the country where WP Rocket was born, number 7, is usually associated with the age of reason.

Whether you want to interpret it as good luck, magic, or reason, we all agree on one thing: the number 7 has a unique charm. 

And this year, we’re super excited to celebrate the seventh anniversary of WP Rocket. 

Towards the end of the article, we will talk in more detail about the party we have organized. ?

If you are a long-time reader of our blog, you already know that on this occasion, we like to create a list with as many items as the years of WP Rocket (hello, list lovers!).
Read the list we created for our sixth and fifth anniversaries.

In this article, therefore, we will retrace seven lessons we have learned in these first seven years of life and see how WP Rocket has evolved during this period.

7 lessons learned in 7 years of WP Rocket

Seven years is a special time frame. WP Rocket is no longer a start-up product but is still a young, dynamic plugin that continues to innovate and grow. 

That’s also how we feel about being part of the WP Rocket team. We have learned many lessons over the years; we have somehow reached our “age of reason,” but we continue to look to the future with optimism and a desire to improve.

Are you curious about the seven lessons we’ve learned over the years?
Here is our path to the age of reason. ?

1. Know Who You Are

Defining your business identity can sometimes be a steep path. But it’s important to focus on this right away and to determine the values on which your economic activity is based.

At WP Rocket, our core values were clear from the start: ease of use, efficiency, and support. With these values in mind, we have walked these seven years of our plugin.

Having a robust value system does not mean that our visual identity has always remained the same: on the contrary! We have experienced a lot.

You don’t believe it? Here’s the proof!

The first WP Rocket website was born in 2013 and was only in French.

A few months after that, the team started to dream about exploring other markets.

In 2014, a multilingual crew got on board the rocket for a second launch: our website was now translated in French, English, German, Spanish and Italian. We also introduced our new logo!

2017 marked the third launch of the rocket. We updated our logo and our brand identity, opting for colors and patterns that would focus on performance and speed. 

The website you all know was born!

A little spoiler: since we never stop learning and firmly believe in constant improvement, we have something new in store for our visual identity. ?

Then there’s something else that we have inaugurated in this seventh year.

We have expanded the scope of WP Rocket to include a new service: RocketCDN.

RocketCDN is our premium optimized CDN with a dedicated CNAME. We directly integrated it into WP Rocket, thanks to the Stackpath API. Thanks to this service, our customers can now make their websites faster for their end-users, no matter where they are in the world!

We introduced RocketCDN in version 3.5 of WP Rocket, which was also the fourth major release in a year. 

And for these anniversary celebrations (from June 30 to July 7, 2020), you can try RocketCDN at $6.99 per month per domain instead of $7.99 per month per domain.

Our goal is to do better and better, publish more major releases, and offer richer features so that our customers can enjoy blazing-fast websites for years to come. ⚡️

2. Be Kind

As a company that operates in the WordPress world, we care about giving back to the community.

The WordPress community has been moving forward thanks to the invaluable contribution of thousands of people who work for this open-source project every day.

Here at WP Rocket, we’ve always encouraged our people to participate in the WordPress community actively.

Many of our team members volunteer and speak at WordCamps or have an active role in their local WordPress community. Also, news of a few weeks ago, our CTO, Tonya Mork, will be one of the co-leaders of the 5.6 WordPress release as a Triage PM. ?

The desire to be at the community service is also reflected in the service we provide to our customers: we put kindness into everything we do.

Besides, the excellent reputation of WP Rocket is also due to our fantastic Customer Support team, who has been answering the most diverse technical questions with competence and empathy every day for years.

Moreover, given our excellent revenue results, we have decided to go one step further: starting this year, we will be donating a portion of our revenue to several charitable causes.

WP Media—the company behind WP Rocket—will redistribute 1% of its revenue to charitable causes chosen by our team members.

3. Be a Good Friend and Ally

Team spirit is one of the strengths of our work at WP Rocket. We started our journey as a start-up with less than ten teammates, but now we are more than thirty people.

Seeing a company grow in such a short time is a great satisfaction but also brings new challenges: first of all, to maintain the spirit of unity that characterized the early days of the plugin.

We are committed to ensuring that the daily work of those who work for WP Rocket is enjoyable, rich in challenges, and supported by a team that, first and foremost, has great respect for each other.

For some years now, we have adopted the “Best Friend at Work” initiative.
Every new teammate is flanked by a colleague with more experience to accompany them in their early days, making them feel welcome and responding to any organizational doubts or questions about the rules of living together in our remote workspace.

4. It’s Okay to Ask

We work in a complex technical market segment. Web performance is a vast world, continually evolving and often not easy to keep up with. The people who work at WP Rocket are committed to improving the code, developing new features, and answering a wide range of technical questions from our customers.

All this needs constant preparation and study. But also humility.

That’s why one of the phrases we repeat most often to new people joining the WP Rocket team is: it’s okay to ask.

We don’t expect people who work for WP Rocket to be gifted with web performance infused knowledge. We prefer to give space to their previous experiences, to the set of values that distinguish them and, no less important, to all their questions.

We also apply the same philosophy to everyday life in the company. When you start working in a new company, it’s easy to feel lost. 

This also applies to communication with our customers. We know that WP Rocket is a very technical product, and that it could scare those who are not familiar with web performance.
To extend the principle of ease of use, which has always guided the development of our plugin, we expanded the resources available to our customers by publishing our first video tutorials on the WP Rocket YouTube channel.

With our videos we want to convey the message that it is always good to ask and look for answers to even the most seemingly trivial questions.

5. Playing Is an Important Part of Learning

Precisely because we work remotely and cannot communicate face to face, we need to carve out moments of leisure during our workflow.

This is why our Slack workspace also hosts a #random channel, dedicated to sharing anything not strictly related to work.

#random is the channel where we announce the arrival of new family members…

…or where we talk about our hobbies (yes, some of our team members definitely got quite a green thumb!):

Other important moments of playfulness occur during our annual retreats. Once a year, we come out of our remote-only-bubble and gather somewhere around the world to spend some time together.

During our company retreats, we take the opportunity to talk about the company and how it’s going, we brainstorm, but we also have a lot of fun!

6. Sharing is Caring

Since our company is remote-only and has welcomed people from all over the world, we strongly believe in transparency. 

Our daily communication takes place on Slack and on an internal blog where we continually update our colleagues on the objectives achieved, on the company’s projects for the future, and the results of the individual teams.

Sharing what happens inside our company is an act of responsibility towards our teammates. This also helps create the right expectations for people who apply for our job offers: our public salary grid is a concrete example of this philosophy.

7. People Love You

Without people’s love and support, we won’t get far.

This idea has accompanied us during these seven years of developing, designing, launching and marketing dozens of major, and minor WP Rocket releases.

We have also been supported during our bad times and mistakes, and we consider ourselves very lucky.

As proof of our luck, in these seven years, we have celebrated one of our most important milestones: WP Rocket is now installed in more than 1,000,000 websites around the world (1,141,216 at the time of writing this article).

This means that thousands of people continue to believe in us and our product.

And over 700 reviews on TrustPilot confirm it:

That’s why the biggest thanks of these seven years go to you.

Want to Celebrate With Us? 

Seven years should be celebrated properly, so we launched a fantastic anniversary promotion! 

If you are already a WP Rocket customer, you will have access to stellar discounts on the renewal or upgrade of your license. The offer is valid even if your license has expired and you want to renew it. ?

And as if that wasn’t enough, until July 7th, you can enter our prize draw, which includes extra months of license subscription and an iPhone XR 64GB! ?

Not a WP Rocket client yet? The offer also applies to you: This is the perfect time to join our mission to make the web faster and get a 25% right away! Check out our site for more info about the promo.