ThemeWinter Year in Review 2021: A Year of Innovation & Achievements

Life is full of surprises and challenges, and that’s exactly what keeps us going. But ever since the whole pandemic started, things haven’t been the same. The challenges and hurdles kept piling up. We, at ThemeWinter, a concern of XpeedStudio, also had to go through several of them. We had to adjust to the remote working situation and deal with our personal lives, while the company goal from the previous year remained intact. But there’s something that kept us on track amongst everything happening — the ThemeWinter spirit!

We have 3 unique brands working under the umbrella of XpeedStudio. Themewinter brand is a household name for WordPress themes. But, recently it has also ventured into plugins and released a cross-platform mobile app! On the other hand, the Wpmet is the wing dedicated to building WordPress plugins, which recently got extended to SaaS products. Last but not least, the XpeedStudio brand, focuses solely on themes and templates.

From each of the above brands, we’ve hit some phenomenal milestones in terms of product growth, human resources, innovation, and making our mark in the tech landscape throughout the globe. And guess what, all these achievements didn’t stop us from engaging in fun activities and making memories as a family. Without further ado, let’s jump into the details!

Achievements in 2021 as per resolutions

We can address 2021 as a year of pandemics and hardship. This year we have gone through many ups and downs. But, we are very proud to announce to you that in 2021, we completed all resolutions that we have taken at the start of this year.

Those resolutions seem very tough to accomplish due to this pandemic. But, because of our excellent XpeedStudio team members, we have overcome all the obstacles that we have faced in this year of crisis. 

Now, you might want to know what those resolutions are. Don’t worry, we will include all resolutions in this XpeedStudio year in review 2021 blog. Take a look at those and see how much we have succeeded to accomplish:

• Introduced a new WooCommerce builder that is a complete WooCommerce solution: In 2021, we have introduced a completely new plugin ShopEngine that we are dreaming to launch from 2019. This plugin offers everything you need to build an eCommerce site. If we talk about the user experience of this plugin then its performance says everything. It has won back-to-back two awards that are very famous in the WordPress community. One is the Template Monster award and another one is the WP Weekly award. Besides, its active users are drastically increasing with each passing day.
• Launched lots of new themes: Lots of themes have been released this year such as Bajaar, Evenex, Bascart, Qoxag, Courselog and many more. We have gotten a huge shoutout from you guys through these themes.
• More training sessions for our team members: Training is an essential part of self-growth. This year we have successfully performed training classes every Wednesday that sharpened our skills more than before.
• Lots of indoor and outdoor recreational activities: We also participated in many fun activities this year such as the indoor TT tournament, yearly tour, day-long tour, monthly buffet, etc.
• Build a strong support system: The support system we have now is 10 times better than what we had back in 2020. This credit goes to our excellent support team.
• A motivated team: We have participated in lots of training and after working hard for one year now we have successfully built a self-motivated team who selects and completes their work on their own.
• Worked on SaaS product: At the end 2020, we have taken resolution to launch new saas products for our customers. This year we have worked on that. Our developers are still working hard to launch a new AI tool that will make content creation super easy. Hopefully, we will complete this project in 2022.
• In-house gym setup: Healthy health comes from maintaining a healthy life-style. That’s why we have built an in-house gym for our employees so that our employees can maintain a healthy lifestyle.
• Released Devmonsta: We have successfully released Devmonsta this year that is a theme option plugin.
• A new booking plugin: Our developers have worked hard to provide you a new booking plugin. We have almost wrapped this resolution. Good news is we are going to launch it in 2022. 
• Flexible Working hours: We XpeedStudio team always focus on our Employees health and desires. That’s we have taken an oath to give flexible Working hours from 2021. We made it happen this year.
• New office decoration: In 2021 we decorated our office to provide a friendly working environment to our employees. We will decorate our office even more in 2022.

How we made our customers’ life easier

We don’t just design and develop products; we make our customers’ lives easier. All our products are intended to help both technical and non-technical people. Our customers can get the most from WordPress with our plugins.

If you go through the reviews and ratings of our products. You will be highly satisfied without a doubt.

We have kept a roadmap section for each plugin so that customers can request new features according to their needs. Based on customers’ requests, we have added tons of new features to our plugins and released new versions throughout the year.

For stunning layouts in WordPress websites, we have released a bunch of WordPress themes that our customers have found very useful in designing responsive and user-friendly websites.

After the end of the year, when we look back at our customers’ happiness, we feel pride and the joy of helping the WordPress community.

Growth & Innovation in Products

Let’s take a look at some of the most noteworthy XpeedStudio year in review stats and highlights from the past year:

We also got 700+ 5-Star reviews on our products in 2021!

Apart from the tough pandemic situation, 2021 has been quite astonishing and full of achievements for ThemeWinter 🔥 Now, let’s look back at all our products achievements in detail: 

✨ Reached four thousand active installations: WPCafe

In the year 2021, WPCafe got more stability and brought addons for the community. WPCafe Multivendor Restaurant Addon for Dokan has been published on WordPress.org this April. The addons got 100+ already and are counting more every day. WPCafe Restaurant Addon for Oxygen Builder was also added to the addon list this December.

✨ Launching WPCafe Mobile Application

Based on community demand, we released a mobile application for WPCafe mobile application for both android and IOS platforms. The WPCafe android mobile app is available and ready to roll out. The WPCafe mobile app IOS version will be available soon. With the WPCafe mobile app, restaurant owners can reach mobile users and increase their profit.

✨  Reached four thousand active installations: WP Eventin

This year our plugin WP Eventin got 4000+ active installations and huge community responses. WP Eventin has been selected as 2nd best ‘Booking & Appointment Plugin’ in Monster Award 2021. Apart from this, WP Eventin brought a lot of big features like recurring features, calendar modules, and so on. This year, WP Eventin update different templates and override options for a better user experience.

Other achievements and Highlights

Apart from that, our other brand Wpmet’s ElementsKit cracked its BIGGEST breakthrough of all time with 500,000 active installations in November 2021. And the best part is with over 7,000+ active installations ShopEngine has got Two Respective Best WooCommerce WordPress Awards 🏆 (Template Monster and WP Weekly)

Remarkable Contributions by the Developers

2021 was a very successful year for the developer team. Not only we had released multiple new flagship products, but we also improved the internal infrastructure of the dev team.

The team completely adapted the “Git WorkFlow” process to contribute more to the company’s growth.

Dev team took in a total of 10 milestones in 2021 with a combination of more than 22+ sprints and completed 98% user stories as expected.

Our developers have released 248 plugin updates in total for all our brands. All these updates helped our customers to integrate new features into their websites.

Breakdown of ThemeWinter Development Efforts

Plugin	No. of release	No. of PR	No. of Commits
WPCafe (Free+Pro)	60	–	2118
WP Eventin  (Free+Pro)	51	–	1038

For the first time, our development team has developed a mobile app – WPCafe. It is a restaurant management app.

In the last quarter of 2021, we, for the first time, ran the internship program officially. The developer internship program has its own weight, as we trained them with production projects. We assigned multiple well-experienced engineers to help them achieve their goals.

Milestones Achieved by The Theme Team

Like every other team and department of Xpeedstudio, our theme team also has achieved new heights with multiple new theme releases while making sure to update all the existing themes so there is no compatibility issue with the latest version of PHP, editors, and more.

	Themewinter
New Theme Release	4
Existing Theme Update	19
Speed Optimization	3
Codestar Migration	1 (Continue)

If we talk about new themes, our theme team has released a total of 6 new themes out of which 4 were released in Themewinter and two on Xpeedstudio. The newly released themes in 2021 are

• Bascart – WooCommerce WordPress Theme.
• Qoxag – News Magazine Theme.
• Courselog – Education WordPress Theme.
• Cafesio – Restaurant WordPress Theme.
• Evenex – Event Conference WordPress Theme
• Bajaar – WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Apart from releasing these new themes, 45+ existing themes have been updated last year. Some themes were updated for better speed, while some were updated to make them compatible with WordPress 5.8 and PHP 8.

Marketo and Digiqole themes took the top spot in the most sold copies competition last year. And one of the biggest achievements of our theme team is releasing a theme from Themewinter (usually, we release our themes on Themeforest). 

Releasing Cafesio Theme on Themewinter was a very proud moment for us. We are extremely proud of the milestone we achieved last year. And we hope to beat last year’s achievement to create new themes and gain the newer heights of success.

Big Shout Out to Our Support Team

As we all are aware, having a larger team means more contributions and efforts. On the other hand, thriving products lead to more complex customers and technical problems. However, our 24/7 professional support team has successfully maintained all the pressure, passionately! 

The entire growth of our support personnel has nearly doubled from the previous years. Take a look at the screenshots below to see some of our states.

✅ Here’s a quick number of support teams 2021 performance:

One of the best and proud moments that we endure in 2021 is maintaining 5-star reviews from you guys! 💪 And we’re focused on continuing the milestone in 2022 by creating an ecosystem in which we can make our users work easier and stand beside them whenever they need. 

We believe that customer happiness is not only crucial, but it is also a key to every business’s success. In today’s competitive business world, it’s nearly impossible to succeed if your consumers are unhappy. And with our thriving support and dedication, we’re maintaining it thoroughly.

Extensive Development in Design

We all know that contents are nothing without a good user interface (UI); it also encompasses things like design, idea generation, sharing, and implementation. Let’s have a look at our design team’s efforts.

The year 2021 was quite remarkable for our design team as well. We’ve attained success in multiple sites, plugins, themes, and apps. 

With proper commitment and creativity, XpeedStudio’s super professional design team has worked on Eventin, WpCafe, WpCafe App, ShopEngine, multiple themes, and social content.

Content & Marketing Growth and Team Contributions

We create content only by maintaining one motto and that is “Create content for readers not for search engines”. Maybe that’s why you always love our content this much. You would be amazed to know that this year our 7 members consisting of a content team have published 103 blogs and through these blogs, we have increased our website traffic by 107.48%.

“We have gained 5.67M organic impressions along with 167000 clicks through these contents.”

We are very delighted to inform you that this has only become possible because of the hard work of our small content team members and the support of the users like you who stand beside us all the time.

Now it’s time to disclose our marketing team effort and achievement. What will we say about them? They broke all the previous records. They have:

• Posted almost 600 social posts.
• Ran 148 social ads.
• Sent 41 newsletters and published 40 Youtube videos.

Not only these but also marketing team members successfully performed partnerships with 19 big companies such as Elementor, ElementHow, WPTuts, LearnWoo, Astra, WPExplorer, and so on.

Growing & Thriving Human Resources

We have expanded our product list and our team as well in the last year. We are happy to announce that we have doubled our team members in 2021.

• Dev team: Our development team almost tripled in the last year
• Design team: Design team has expanded 200% in the previous year
• Marketing Team: Xpeedstudio now has a fully functional marketing team with 13 members
• Theme Team: Compared to the previous year, our theme team doubled in 2021.

More than 30 members have joined in the last year. We now have a full-fledged team of coders, designers, marketers, and content creators. The team is growing with the super-fast growth of our company. And guess what, the members get additional perks like marriage bonuses, project-based incentives, personal iMacs, and lots more!

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We arrange regular training sessions for skill development and the growth of the team. The team is adapting to the advanced skills very quickly and contributing to the growth of the company.

Fun Activities & Team Culture

In 2021, we went through a 4-month-long WFH situation and other obvious restrictions due to the COVID outbreak. But surprisingly enough, the XpeedStudio spirit didn’t take the slightest dip — credited to the amazing workforce at play here! The cooperative and cordial nature of the team culture practiced here makes it an exemplary workplace functioning like a closely-knit family.

We, at XpeedStudio, engaged in many fun activities throughout the year. While there were annually recurring events, some of the activities were relatively new and received praises from everyone involved. Let’s take a peek at the highlight events of the past year.

Annual Tour – 2021 (Sylhet)

We went to Sylhet this year as part of our annual tour. We explored the place thoroughly over the span of three days. We ate traditional food, resided at luxurious hotels, and traveled to tourist attractions such as Bichanakandi, Jaflong, Bholagong Sada Pathor. Here are some of the snapshots of all the fun we had throughout the tour:

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Table Tennis Tournament – 2021

We abide by the rule of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” — thus the regular table tennis matches at the office premises keep us energized and entertained throughout the day. On top of that, we hold a table tennis tournament every year where 2021 was not an exception! 

Though the tournament got pushed back due to the members working remotely, we held it over the course of 2 weeks. Both the singles and doubles got a handful of enthusiastic participants and we got our worthy champions!

Buffet Dinners

Although we have lunch together at the office every day as a family, eating out and passing some quality time is always crucial to blow off some steam and grow a stronger bond. In that spirit, the entire XpeedStudio team went out for two buffet dinners (the number would’ve been higher if the WFH situation didn’t happen) at renowned restaurants and the buzzes of the town.

Celebrations!

We are always up for celebrating at the XpeedStudio HQ — occasions are merely excuses for that! Be it birthdays, milestones achieved by our products, or anything worth celebrating, we cut cakes, have delicious snacks, and capture those precious moments in celluloid:

Team Culture

Culture is what keeps us afloat in the mundane urban lifestyle. As we spend a significant amount of time at work, it’s essential that the people working together remain on the same page culturally. 

XpeedStudio takes pride in promoting a healthy culture among its peers with the room to sit back and relax. Learning and growing together is a principle we live by. We also enjoy plenty of activities and benefits that keep us entertained and in good shape — both physically and mentally!

Healthy Environment

Whatever keeps us healthy and fit, we’re all for it! That’s why we promote healthy food like veggies, fruits, boiled eggs, etc. in our lunch and evening snacks. On top of that, there’s also a gym room dedicated to workouts and fitness exercises.

Gist Meeting

Transparency and openness are part of our core practices around the office. That’s why we hold a monthly gist meeting along with a yearly one to reflect on our team-wise performances, our achievements, our limitations, and the room for improvement. Moreover, this meeting gives us a peek inside the works and the projects of other teams with the overall vision of the company with real-time progress.

Weekly Learning Sessions

Wednesday evenings are fully dedicated to learning and growing. We hold multiple sessions to learn and share knowledge related to respective domains as well as religious classes for the enlightenment of our souls.

Cricket Matches

It’s tough to stay away from each other when you’re part of a family. That’s why we often meet on weekends (typically Saturdays) and play cricket matches — both internally and against other fellow companies in the neighborhood. This practice helps us stay fit, keep up with our athleticism, and also, make a stronger bond amongst the whole team.

Office Space Expansion

As the team expands, the need for a bigger space ensues. With the addition of a handful of new members to the team, XpeedStudio almost doubled its office space to accommodate them. This way, the cozy vibe remains intact and there’s enough room for everyone to sit & work with comfort.

Team Outing

Apart from the buffet dinners and house parties, we also go out in individual teams to hang out. On these team outings, we either have dinners somewhere nice or do some fun activity as a group. As teams work together to achieve specific goals, these after-work activities influence the much-needed connection among everyone.

Resolutions for 2022

After completing all the targets of 2021, now we have taken an oath to serve you even more in 2022. This year we will not only launch new products but also will focus on your requirements and bring lots of new updates that will include your desired features. 

That’s why we have prepared this year resolution by only focusing on your demand and those resolutions are:

• Unlocking advanced features for ShopEngine like RTL support, Shopify style checkout, fly cart button, product size charts, etc.
• Launching highly demanded themes.
• Focusing more on SaaS product developments i.e. a brand new AI tool for easy content creation.
• Adding advanced features to our plugins according to your demand.
• Working more on building a self-motivated agile team that does not need guidance to complete any task. 
• Decorate our workplace even further making it a fun place to work.
• Arranging more and more resourceful training sessions for our team.

All good things must come to…

No, it’s not the end. For us, it’s merely the beginning. The beginning of new goals for the coming years, new challenges to overcome, and of course, new hopes.

We are wrapping up today by thanking you — our customers, subscribers, well-wishers, and every WordPress enthusiast reading this article. You are the true inspiration that moves us forward in our journey in the technology industry. And it’s you, for whom we’ll work even harder this year so that we can bring changes to the lives of you and countless others with groundbreaking products.

Till next time.

Source: XpeedStudio Year in Review 2021

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