Our conclusion for 2021: Change! A lot has happened at Raidboxes in the last twelve months: New office, many new and wonderful staff members and our relaunch is still pending for the beginning of the coming year.
We've grown – and strongly at that. This growth has set off profound changes in the team and within the company itself. We want to take a look back at 2021 with you – our customers – without whom we wouldn't be where we are now. Your feedback, especially for our support team, has blown us away. A huge thank you from everyone at RAIDBOXES to a great community!
2021 in numbers
14,000 customers: we couldn't believe it ourselves when we hit that milestone! The long spring lockdown continued to highlight the importance of having a suitable online presence. This urgency was clear in the growing demand for our managed WordPress hosting and WooCommerce solutions.
A few more facts and figures:
- Worldwide, about 43 per cent of all sites use WordPress as part of their overall online presence (W3Techs).
- If you only consider websites with a relevant content management system (CMS), this proportion rises to approx. 65 percent.
- In addition, about 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 lagging far 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 specially developed for WordPress Dashboard.
Raidboxes is getting bigger
Our team has grown tremendously this year as well. We've hired some great professionals to ensure our products are constantly improving and our support maintains its top quality. We want to live up to our claim of being the best managed WordPress host in Europe.
A quick overview:
- We've grown from 31 to 42 employees – plus freelancers and translators.
- Expertise: Especially in the technical area, we have recruited people with years of experience.
- Remote work: As in 2020, the ongoing pandemic has meant more remote work. In the spring, we were nearly all working from home (WFH) but in the summer we got to enjoy our new office. Unfortunately, the current situation is pushing us back into our own four walls.
- holacracy Reloaded: Self-determined work with flat hierarchies has a high priority at Raidboxes\. This is precisely why we use the role concept, according to the principle of the 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 on our face or sit down at our computer at home. That's why the well-being of all our employees, whether they are working students or in a lead position, is important to us.
This year, the following staff members have joined us:
- René is our new Product Owner
- Thomas G. is our new Head of Development
- Elise is responsible for website migrations
- Ralf is new in Sales
- Frederike and Julia strengthen the Customer Success Team
- Niko, Nikos, Daniel and Robin provide support
- Maik and Matthias grew our development team
- Pascal and Patrick support the Content Marketing Team
Together at Raidboxes
The togetherness at Raidboxes is something special. We, the authors of this annual review, Pascal and Patrick, only joined Raidboxes in the course of the year. Pascal half in the office/home office and Patrick completely remote. We are both in the middle of our studies and are employed as working students.
But what makes us both feel comfortable? Clearly, it's the open and warm welcome we receive 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 received several days of onboarding, during which he got to know his close colleagues and was introduced to the internal structures at Raidboxes. The mixture of open, funny and sometimes crazy colleagues, a phenomenal office and a goal-oriented way of working, all this together is very motivating to work.
As working students, we're not the end of the line as we've experienced with previous employers. Instead, we're actively involved in the team and decision-making processes. We're asked for our opinion or assessment on topics.
In summary, the nice working environment, challenging projects and a company with character and a social mission make Raidboxes stand out.
Jobs with Raidboxes
Did you like our insights? Can you imagine working at Raidboxes? We are always looking for new faces to enrich our team! If you are interested, take a look here to see if there is a suitable offer. We look forward to receiving your application.
COVID-19
First closed, then open and now somewhere in between. 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 now, just before Christmas, the infection rates have never been higher.
At Raidboxes, we've been monitoring the pandemic and political situation and adhering to the regulatory requirements. At the beginning of the year, we were 100 per cent home office. Meanwhile, about 55 percent of the Raidboxes team works remotely, from all parts of Germany. When the incidence dropped in the spring, we opened up our office capacities - but only with daily negative rapid tests and an upper limit on the number of people. Now most of our colleagues are working from home again.
The current situation can gnaw away at our substance. That's why the mental health of our employees is more important to us than ever. You can read about how we deal with this at Raidboxes here.
New office
One of the hotly anticipated events this year and certainly the first major milestone of fundamental changes at Raidboxes. In the middle of Mai we moved into our new office including our own roof terrace in the heart of Münster - not far from the main station and not far from the old office. In short: It is a dream! Each Circle - see holacracy - has its own area, there is a huge kitchen for a nice chat or a meal with your dearest colleagues and a simple, open interior design.
A few more facts about our office:
- Each workstation has a height-adjustable desk.
- There's a fridge full of everything your heart could desire.
- We have room for different purposed: a quiet room for concentrated work or a meeting room with good acoustics and projector.
- We've got a beautiful view across Münster.
Some photos from our new office:
An absolute highlight is our roof terrace. In summer, we had the opportunity to inaugurate our roof terrace with some colleagues and customers. Of course, we followed all the official rules and 3G was enforced for all participants.
Our product
Our Dashboard is the heart of our infrastructure. In the Dashboard, you have an overview of your BOXES and can manage them. We've laid the foundations already to release even more efficient features for our customers in the coming year.
Features we introduced in 2021:
- User Agent Blocking now allows you to block bots from your site.
- Security is important to us: users can enable two-factor authentication.
- We've updated our system to 25,000 BOXES.
Outlook for 2022:
2022 is all about change again. We've already started to modernize our internal services this year and will continue to do so in the new year. Without giving too much away, we'll be working on our cache in 2022 and trying to offer our customers more modularity. That's the plan on the product side. On the platform side, we also want to become more dynamic to offer more flexibility and stability.
The structure of our development teams has also changed. They're now divided according to product lines. This allows them to work more intensively on individual products and, depending on the project status, to adjust resources and schedules more flexibly.
Sustainability
This year we've initiated major steps to improve our sustainability ourselves, which will be completed in 2022. In addition to our reforestation efforts through our partnership with Eden Reforestation Projects, we've supported the Greenspark initiative since 2020. This initiative invests in climate-positive projects. In this way, we've offset 566 tonnes of CO2 so far.
B Corp Certification
Since the beginning of this year, we have been striving to achieve B Corp certification. This is more than "simple" certification according to certain standards. Much more, a B Corporation is a company that commits to social added value and environmental sustainability in its Articles of Association. It is particularly important for us to include the stakeholder approach in our corporate statutes. We thus decide to look primarily at the needs of all those involved in Raidboxes (employees, shareholders, etc.) instead of 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 eligible for the next certification process, a company must score at least 80 out of 200 points.
This resulted in a number of measures. Particularly important was the migration of our accounts to the sustainable GLS Bank and a CO2 balance of Raidboxes with the help of Climate Partner. We also conducted a supplier analysis in IT purchasing to pay more attention to their sustainability.
'Economy for the Common Good'
Another important step is our Economy for the Common Good report. The approach of Economy for the Common Goodmeans that we stand for an economic system that puts the common good at the centre. In doing so, we take a deep look into the structures that have existed up to now at Raidboxes. The balance sheet is a self-critical look that entails changes.
Solidarische Unternehmen Münsterland (Solidarity Businesses Münsterland)
We're a member of the Solidarisches Unternehmen Münsterland – a network of companies interested in the common good. The network offers space for exchange, meetings and motivating lectures. We made our office available for the meeting at the end of October and are actively involved in the network. We're also interested in future in-person meetings, if the pandemic situation allows.
Green Friday instead of Black Friday
We made a conscious decision not to offer Black Friday discounts this year. Instead, we planted 10,000 trees with our partner Eden Reforestation Projects. If you're more interested in this topic, we recommend you read our blog posts on ethical marketing and conscious consumption.
The best blog posts 2021
This year we've also have published countless articles on our blog wp unboxed. We'd now like to present you with what we consider to be the ten best new or updated blog posts of 2021:
- The Best Free WordPress Themes 2021: Here you'll find the best 15 Gutenberg WordPress themes to offer your content not only in a visually appealing way but also make sure it's optimized for search engines.
- 16 Popular WordPress Page Builders in Comparison: Do you not have any programming skills and want to build your site with a construction kit instead? Here are the most popular page builders to get you started.
- How to Optimize Images for WordPress: Images can be large in size and increase page load time. In this blog post, we give you tips on how to improve performance. A classic article we update with the most current advice every year.
- WordPress Hosting Comparison 2021: With results from 250+ web PageSpeed Insights. Read more recommendations surrounding WordPress performance, time saving, security and support.
- GDPR plugins: Data protection is important! If you don't take care of your cookie banners, you could end up with a legal warning. Here are five tools to help you implement your cookie banners properly.
- Sustainability in web hosting: Raidboxes is a green web host. Here we tell you more about it and give you tips on how to make your hosting climate neutral.
- Ice Breaker Methods: Online meetings, webinars and digital team conferences have become an integral part of the working world. Here are ten methods for a break in between.
- 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.
- Project Management Tools: Do you want to improve your team communication or make documents available to everyone at the same time? We introduce you to useful tools for project management.
- Do we Still Need Web Designers?: We discuss this pointed question in our blog post. What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts with us.
Articles from the community? Yes, please!
We'd love to have more content from WP professionals - whether you're a user or a developer. And also from an even more diverse team. Write now for Raidboxes and receive fair compensation for your posts. Including the opportunity to introduce yourself to an international audience. See our info on Become an author now.
Our ebooks
We published two e-books this year. These were mainly designed for WordPress agencies but they're also an interesting read for anyone working with WordPress and WooCommerce.
Client acquisition for WordPress agencies
This ebook is perfect for agencies and freelancers looking to acquire new client projects. In the 70-page ebook, you'll find sustainable strategies for approaching, convincing and retaining clients. The ebook covers:
- Which methods and tools should you know for acquisition?
- What online marketing strategies can you use?
- How do you up-sell and cross-sell most profitably?
- Referral 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 clients are satisfied.
In this ebook, we give you an insight into techniques and tools to always get the best out of your projects.
- What are the basics for good project management with WordPress?
- How do I plan and organize 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
This year, the WCEU 2021 took place online again. It's a pity, because we miss the personal exchange and the in-person event. Let's hope that it can take place again as a face-to-face event in 2022!
This year we were one of the main sponsors and had great conversations with different people from the community, from other WordPress enthusiasts to 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 also give something back to it. Based on the interview, an interesting blog post was created, which we highly recommend.
Relaunch 2022
After working a lot on our inner values this year, we will launch 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 be excited - the announcement is coming soon! (Update: Here it is - our new corporate identity!)
Outlook for 2022
The coming year 2022 will be an important one for us and we have a lot planned. Starting with the overhaul of our Dashboard, we want to release more useful features for our customers and achieve even more in the area of green web hosting and a fairer society together with you.
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 convince more freelancers, developersand agencies with our WordPress hosting. To achieve this, we are looking for people who can help us. That's why you are welcome to join the Raidboxes team, no matter where in the world you want to work! We offer remote work, flat hierarchies through the concept of holacracy, high flexibility and a wonderful team.
The community gives us a lot and we also want to give something back. That's why we're striving for a GWÖ certificate to underline our commitment to the common good. To achieve this, there's still a lot to do. We think there's a lot of potential in the area of product development and new helpful features that save even more time and money for our customers. We want to get stuck right in here in 2022.
Our Dashboard in particular is an essential part of achieving this goal. It's a bit outdated and deserves a new look. We'll also be adding more data centers with state-of-the-art infrastructure and latest technology so we can offer tierless services with larger packages.
Goodbye 2021 👋 - Welcome 2022 ✨
Your questions to Raidboxes
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