Acquisitions Galore.

Welcome back to WP Trends. I was blown away by the nice feedback after last month's email. Thanks for being here. 🙏

Acquisitions

In last month’s newsletter I noted that both the Astra and Kadence themes were finding success, and just this month Kadence (the team, Kadence Blocks and the theme) has been acquired by iThemes, which is part of Liquid Web.

The Kadence theme is great, and their blocks plugin is extremely important in a Gutenberg world, but what I found most interesting in the announcement post was this plan for Kadence Cloud:

Kadence Cloud is going to allow you to create your own cloud of prebuilt content that you can use on any website and you will even be able to give out or sell access to your cloud. 

The intersection of crafting content, cloud functionality, and the block editor (not to mention Full Site Editing) is going to make for an interesting few years. A period that could create real possibilities for folks to create some serious revenue.

A point that was noted by Mike McAlister in his recent tweet thread about building blocks:

In other acquisition news, WP Media, the parent company of WP Rocket and Imagify, has been acquired by the Danish hosting company group.one. I’m super excited for the team and impressed by their stellar growth. 

I’m a little sad that another independent plugin company is getting swept up by a large host. Is this what plugin companies can expect when they reach a certain size?

Trends

Last month I chatted to Jakob Greenfeld about opportunities in the WordPress ecosystem and he did an excellent write-up of what we discussed and more.

If you missed it back in February, Alex Denning took a deep dive into WordPress search trends from 2020. Unsurprisingly, WooCommerce saw a significant bump with related keyword searches rising by 44.3%.

WooCommerce has its own hefty ecosystem around it. It has 26 themes and 582 plugins on its own marketplace, and a large number of third-party plugin shops and developers dedicated to developing WooCommerce addons.

One of the largest of these shops, SkyVerge was acquired by host GoDaddy last year which shows there’s enormous potential in developing products for WooCommerce.

But just how saturated is the WooCommerce addon market? It’s hard to get a feeling for the whole ecosystem of premium extensions and freemium plugins, but with the help of the Plugin Rank database, I can shine a light on the number of plugins on the WordPress.org repository.

Out of 55,576 plugins, there are 3,952 tagged with ‘woocommerce’.

49 WooCommerce plugins were added to the repo in 2012. In contrast to the 738 plugins in 2020.

There have already been 215 new plugins added this year.

Here’s a look at the rise of WooCommerce addons in the repo since 2011:

Acquisition Opportunities

Here are the WordPress businesses for sale at the moment:

1. WordPress Plugin company - $197k TTM
2. WordPress Plugin company (3 plugins) - $57K TTM
3. Infusionsoft forms on WordPress - $16k TTM
4. SMTP SaaS and WordPress plugin email service - $7.4k TTM 
5. Full Screen Background Images plugin
6. SaaS and WordPress plugin for installing favourite plugins - $163 MRR

(All figures are revenue based. TTM = Trailing 12 months)

Of course, checking marketplaces to find businesses for sale is only one way to find a good opportunity. Another way is to actively search out plugins that aren’t up for sale right now, but present a potential opportunity to grow.

For example, find a free plugin on the WordPress.org repository that has a good user base but hasn’t yet been monetized. Acquire it, improve it and add a premium offering. It’s right out of the Syed Balkhi playbook.

But the problem is finding these plugins. Yes, you can trawl through the repo, but their search isn’t set up for the filtering needed for this. I was thinking about this recently and realised that, after tracking keyword positions and data about 55,000 plugins for almost 10 months, the Plugin Rank database is an untapped resource for finding opportunities.

So I’ve started working on a new acquisition analytics feature for Plugin Rank, which you can learn more about and subscribe to keep up to date here.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading. If you have any feedback about the newsletter or want to chat about the WordPress ecosystem, I'd love to hear from you - just hit reply.

Till next time 👋

Cheers,

Iain Poulson Founder of WP Trends