2016 Year in Review

We’re already in 2017! I hope you enjoyed 2016 and that the celebrations for the new year were full of happiness. For us at Nelio, it’s time to look back and analyze everything we have done during the last year. That’s why we’ve made a review of 2016 including everything that has been achieved during these past 12 months, as we did for 2015.

Without further ado, here I leave you with the summary of 2016—a year of hard work, news, and changes. I hope you like it ?

The Blog in Numbers

Let’s start by reviewing the data from Nelio’s blog. First of all, do you remember we unified all our blogs? Maintaining a successful blog requires a lot of work, and that’s why in June we decided to merge all our blogs to optimize resources and be more productive. This meant the death of WPrincipiante ? (a pretty successful Spanish blog we had) and the combination of all our English blogs into the blog of Nelio? If you missed the details, we explained them here.

Soon, we will dedicate a new post to analyze in detail if the blog merge was as successful as we expected… but for now I will only say that after 6 months we are quite happy ?

So going back to the blog numbers in English (remember that we also have the Spanish version), during 2016 we have published 59 new posts. That means an average of 1 blog post per week. If we compare these numbers with the ones we had the previous year, where we published 85 entries, you may think we reduced the pace. Not at all! In fact, we raised our publication rate to twice a week after the blog merge. Now that we only have one blog we can do it. And I think you should be satisfied with the current publication rate. And we will continue with this pace for 2017 ?

And regarding the number of comments we received on the blog, this year we’ve received 65 new comments. That’s a little less than in 2015, but remember that the main cause was the decrease of new publications during the first half of the year, before the merge. We are happy to continue answering your doubts and reading your opinions. This encourages us a lot to keep evolving every day. I hope this year you’ll participate more than ever. Thank you all!

Most-read Articles

Following the analysis, here is the top-10 ranking of the most visited posts during 2016. Do not miss them:

It is clear that you like lists and WordPress-related posts ?, but also marketing-related content. In addition to it, let me highlight the article on position 5, which was the most shared content we had in Facebook—clearly, controversial topics work!

We’ll keep that in mind to continue improving during 2017 and bring new quality content to the blog. Stay tuned!

Nelio A/B Testing

I was very impressed by the quality of this plugin, how easy it was to set up, and the outstanding support Nelio provides. I highly recommend Nelio A/B Testing.

Josette Millar

WordPress.org

View Plans

Interviews with WordPress professionals

The star section in the Spanish version of our blog are the interviews with WordPress professionals. That’s why we’ve brought this section to the English version too. We’ve chased every month a new member of the community to ask them interesting questions. Believe me when I tell you it’s a hard job, but we’re happy to do it—it’s a great way to learn more about our beloved CMS, and we hope we help our interviewees to gain some visibility.

Many thanks to all participants this past year for their patience and time. You rock!

July: Fernando Tellado
August: Laura Sacco
September: Petya Raykovska
October: Taco Verdonschot
November: Ángeles Portillo
December: Luis Rull

Don’t think that this ends here, we have already prepared new interviews for 2017, so stay tuned because you’ll read very interesting things in the upcoming months ?

Events We Attended To

This year we have not attended as much events as 2015 due to the high workload we had creating Nelio Content. But we’ve attended a few, nonetheless! Personally, I was able to visit Bilbao (northern Spain) again because Dani Reguera and his team invited me to give a talk about the WordPress REST API in WordPress Day Euskadi. As always, it was the perfect excuse to meet a few good friends, including SiloCreativo.

My colleague David also had the opportunity to attend to one of the most important web design events, the SmashingConf 2016, at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona. He was delighted with the presentations—I recommend you read the summary he wrote about it.

Herewe are at the CosmoCaixa, during a break from the WordCamp Barcelona 2016. — Here we are at the CosmoCaixa, during a break from the WordCamp Barcelona 2016.

At the end of the year, all the Nelio team attended the WordCamp Barcelona 2016. We made a great effort to be speakers and present 3 interesting topics to the attendees, and I think we nailed it. In addition, we put our little contribution helping in the organization, specifically with the speakers’ management and the schedule of the presentations. It was very interesting (and a pleasure) to see from within how an event like that was organized. It was an incredible experience that taught us a lot!

The WordPress community in Spain continues to grow and I’m sure the number of WordCamps in 2017 will also be important. We’ll try to find some time to participate in as many as possible ☺

Business Status

Now it’s time to review the most important aspect of the year: the results we achieved from a business point of view (after all, this is what pays the bills ?). I don’t want you to get dizzy with KPIs and other performance indicators, but the summary is that the business has not gone wrong.

2016 has been the first year in which we have not done any WordPress migration projects or custom development projects—all revenues have come entirely from selling premium plugins (Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content). Leaving aside migration projects wasn’t an easy decision—we had to let go an important source of income, and that was quite scary at first.

Fortunately, we’ve been able to achieve the same level of income as in 2015—without doing any migrations! Therefore, we are much happier (selling plugins is what we want to do) and we are not poorer ? Yes, we’re not millionaires yet, but we had the time to develop, release, and promote Nelio Content and learn a lot in the process. And our plugin downloads and subscriptions continue growing! ?

What We Expect From 2017

In 2017 we’ll face new challenges. One of the most important points in our agenda is moving to a new office. Next summer we’ll have to leave our current office in Barcelona Activa (a business incubator here in Barcelona) and fly to a new nest. So, deciding where we go will definitely be very interesting ☺

Another major challenge will be to continue growing our services—Nelio A/B Testing and Nelio Content. We’ll continue with the development of both projects and we’ll add new features to make them even more appealing to you. Stay tuned, because a lot of very interesting things will be happening ?

And if there is something we ask for in 2017, it is continue learning with what we do. One of the best things to own your own company (apart from becoming a millionaire) is the opportunity to face new challenges and grow as you overcome them. So get ready 2017, because we are ready for more! And I hope you’ll be here reading and supporting us like in 2016. Let’s do it!

Featured image by Annie Spratt.