In 2020 EasyWP HQ was hard at work and despite a turbulent year, we’re proud of our accomplishments. We delivered a whole host of exciting features like free CDN and SSL, made user-friendly updates including the new and improved EasyWP wizard, and most importantly, we made sure to deliver the fixes you asked for.
By listening to our customer’s feedback, we solved your key difficulties. EasyWP is now even faster to set up, responsive for any device (yes, you can now start a WordPress site using EasyWP from your mobile phone), and makes WordPress much easier to manage — all this without significantly raising our prices.
These updates complement our long-term vision; to democratize the WordPress experience. This means offering affordable true Managed Hosting WordPress. We’ve taken away the barriers to putting your words out there or bringing a business to life.
Let’s take a look at what we did in 2020 to make this happen.
Get started in a snap with EasyWP Wizard
Our Design team lead, Igor Pascoal described the motivation before many of our updates last year:
“We want to enable more people to own and manage their websites, have them up and running quickly, on top of fast Cloud hosting. As a design team, we figure out the complicated hosting stuff, design products that are simple to use so you can focus on your business.”
We started by redesigning the EasyWP Wizard, a tool that takes you through all the necessary steps to set up WordPress. Now it’s even more straightforward to the layman. In under 90 seconds, you can go from zero to publishing content. We wanted to create a truly set and forget experience where we take over the heavy lifting. Pascoal put it nicely.
“As a creator, you should be able to take advantage of all of WordPress’s power without needing extensive experience or a technical expert by your side.”
You can do all the things you need to set up a new site. Start with naming your website, adding a domain name, and your desired hosting plan. Then, we get to work creating your site, before you know it, you’re in your WordPress admin, adding plugins, themes, and publishing pages.
Did we mention that we’ll even install some plugins for you during the setup? With one click, you can add the most popular and essential plugins for your WordPress website, including WP101, Yoast, and WooCommerce.
Manage everything from your new dashboard
With a site set up in a snap (under 90 seconds!), fine-tune to your heart’s content via our new and improved dashboard. You can now manage everything, from adding SSL certificates, backups, and access your WordPress database and SFTP, from here. You can also take your website offline if you need to. And we added some smaller things just to make life a bit easier.
We saw that people really like to use EasyWP Dashboard to open wp-admin since they can do it automatically. We also added an option in the settings to reset the WordPress password as this is hard to find on wp-admin.
Delivering the speed you need with CDN
In 2020, we made faster pages possible for a fraction of the usual cost. Our Turbo and Supersonic plans include Supersonic Content Delivery Network (CDN). With added Supersonic CDN, EasyWP is not only the most affordable Managed WordPress hosting available, it’s also the fastest on the market. In fact, we’re twice as fast as Bluehost when it comes to Time to First Byte (TTFB) and 30% faster than Kinsta when it comes to Fully Loaded Time (FLT).
Secure to the core with Positive SSL
Starting in the spring of 2020, EasyWP Turbo and Supersonic plans now come with free Positive SSL security. With Positive SSL from Sectigo, you get trust indicators like a Positive SSL Trust Logo proven to improve visitor engagement. It also removes the insecure website warning Google places on all non-SSL pages, which is a must if you want your site taken seriously.
Improvements to the dashboard made the fiddly process of adding SSL a walk in the park. You can add an SSL certificate in one click from your EasyWP dashboard, so you don’t need to worry about setting up SSL certificates ever again.
Resources to learn WordPress for free
Because so many people lost jobs due to the pandemic, we helped lots of people get their new websites started with lots of educational materials on how to use WordPress. From blogs to business pages, ecommerce sites, and salons, there’s a WordPress site for everyone.
Our content team worked hard at creating blogs and videos covering everything you need to get started with EasyWP. Coupled with these educational resources, we ran several promotions this year to give people that much-needed push to get started with WordPress. Offering a website for free to our first free trials of EasyWP turbo we just a few of our highlights.
Whether you’re an existing customer, or checking us out with a free trial, we provided everything needed to make WordPress work for you, including a plethora of WordPress how-tos on the EasyWP blog.
We also contributed to the Namecheap blog, adding straightforward guides to everything from starting a business from home or making up for lost revenue with a side hustle. And provided the necessary information for existing businesses to navigate 2020 including how to safely reopen with social distancing in place and how to make the pivot online to survive and thrive.
Spreading the Word!
With a host of product improvements, we decided it’s time to put ourselves solidly on the map. 2020 was the year we took to WordPress Wordcamps to spread the message. EasyWP sponsored several in-person and virtual Wordcamps all across the United States and around the world including Mexico, Spain, São Paulo, and Finland — with more in the pipeline for 2021.
Thanks to our hard work on the ground, free trials to give people a taste of what they are missing, and a bunch of rave reviews (TechRadar, Yoast, and across the Reddit community), we saw a surge in customer referrals. The graph below illustrates how interest in EasyWP has grown since we launched in July 2017.
As you can see, we saw a huge uptake in our hosting plans. Our subscribers ranged from first time WordPress users to brick and mortar businesses looking to pivot to online to keep running. Throughout 2020, WordPress deemed the go-to for many taking the leap to online.
Thanks to our improvements this year, EasyWP made sure anyone can get started with the most popular Content Management System WordPress, in a flash — and that’s without the usual technical blocks or sky-high pricing that comes with typical Managed WordPress plans.
During a difficult year, our customers could depend on the fastest WordPress hosting available, with the most premium features at a consistently affordable price — and our commitment to cost, features, and speed will continue well into 2021, and beyond.
Looking ahead to 2021
We’re not ones to rest on our laurels here at EasyWP. We’ve made some significant progress this year, but there’s so much more to come. We’re continually working to bring the latest technology to EasyWP users. Take it from Pascoal, who said,
“Our work does not end here. We’ve got even more in store for you, all to continue making setting up a WordPress website accessible to everyone. We’re working on taking personalization further based on the type of website you want to create, on giving you better support to customize your theme, and on making the EasyWP dashboard more useful and insightful.”
At EasyWP, we look at WordPress as the poster child for freedom and expression. Whether you’re looking to set up your first blog, or a full-blown ecommerce site, anything is possible with WordPress, and no one is excluded. EasyWP exists to make managed WordPress, the kind that makes WordPress easier to run, accessible to everyone.
We’re committed to offering value-driven pricing in the long-term. There are no hidden fees or inflated charges for renewals (our Starter Plan starts at just $3.88 per month with the first month only $1.00) so that everyone, everywhere can experience WordPress with the speed, reliability, and security that EasyWP has to offer.
2020 — that’s a wrap!
That’s a wrap on 2020. It’s been a year like no other. While it’s hard to make concrete plans for 2021, we can guarantee more exciting updates this year from EasyWP. As we continue our commitment to democratize the Internet, we’re continually looking for ways to make WordPress easy work for everyone.
Last year focused on delivering the easiest way to get started with WordPress. This year, we’re on a mission to personalize the process. Expect enhancements to create exactly the type of website that you want. We also hope to get involved with more WordPress events, these distanced events had been a hit last year, and we hope to contribute to another year of helping everyone get acquainted and set up with WordPress.
We hope you join us for our 2021 journey.
And if you haven’t checked out EasyWP lately, what are you waiting for?
You Spoke, We Listened – EasyWP Updates in 2020 .