Exactly a year ago, I sat at this very same keyboard to write an article that’s not too different from this one. While a lot has happened since then, the year has all but flown past. I am told that this is due to my getting older – the older you get, the smaller of a percentage a year is of your lived life; hence it seems like less time has passed.
In last year’s recap (covering 2021), we were starting to free ourselves from the clutches of the pandemic. Today, we are better equipped to deal with its ramifications, but 2022 brought its own set of challenges and wins.
In this post, we will be looking at some of the highlights from last year, a celebration of sorts of how far we’ve come.
WP White Security goes jet-setting
2022 was the year travel returned to some semblance of normality. This has given the team at WP White Security ample opportunities to meet in person – for some, for the very first time.
Headlining this was WCEU. As one of the WCEU event’s sponsors, we got to meet many of our customers and attend talks and workshops on all things WordPress. We also got to spend some time together as a team, doing fun activities around the beautiful city of Porto and collaborating on projects. Needless to say, we are very much looking forward to this year’s WCEU, which will be taking place in Athens.
New year, new faces
In 2022, we said goodbye to team members and welcomed new ones. The team grew by one – we are now a team of seven full-timers, all working hard to provide WordPress administrators and website owners with a solid set of plugins to effectively manage and secure their websites.
The new team members we welcomed in 2022 are (drumroll, please)
Analise Fenech
Analise is our Junior Marketer and a rising star within the team. While still new to the industry, she has become a valuable member of our team in a very short time, and we feel lucky to have her on board.
Nadeem Muhammad
Nadeem brings with him a wealth of experience in marketing and the digital space. He has been instrumental in helping us improve numerous internal processes and getting new tools on up-and-running.
Lucian Pădureanu
Lucian hit the ground running, helping us implement QA processes and taking over the helpdesk. One of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, he has helped us get updates out faster with more in-depth testing than ever before.
Plugin updates
In 2022, we continued to solidify our existing plugin portfolio, ensuring that all plugins have a stable and solid foundation. To this end, we released 27 updates throughout the year, covering all of our plugins.
Number of updates by plugin
WP Activity Log – 7
WP 2FA – 4
CAPTCHA4WP – 8
WPassword – 3
File Changes Monitor – 2
Admin notices manager – 1
Activity Logs for MainWP – 2
Some of 2022’s best highlights
November
In November, we held our second survey of the year. This survey looked at WordPress administration practices and procedures, with the results, published a month later in December. During this month, we also ran our annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday promo deals, offering 50% off all new subscriptions. Newsletter subscribers
September
In September, we released WP 2FA 2.30. This update added a number of customization options, including an additional fully-customizable wizard screen, white labeling options, and a CSS importer, among other things. We also published the much-awaited results from our WordPress security survey.
July
During the month of July, we held our first WordPress security survey. We are aiming to make this a yearly event as we managed to gather some great insights into how WordPress administrators and website owners manage theory day-to-day security tasks.
June
In June, we released CAPTCHA 4WP version 7.1.0, which added out-of-the-box support for Gravity Forms and WPForms. These two plugins enjoy a wide customer base, making sure this update helps even more people deploy CAPTCHA faster than ever before.
May
May saw the release of WPassword version 2.6, which included password policy validation during the registration process. This helps administrators ensure that account passwords are protected from the get-go, ensuring any password policies are met straight away.
February
February was an important month for WP Activity Log, marking the launch of version 4.4.0. Among the many new features, improvements, and bug fixes packed in the update, we also made a change to the database schema. We also moved third-party libraries to a helper plugin, ensuring WP Activity Log continues to perform optimally, even under heavy loads.
Supporting customers
Throughout 2022, we continued to offer email support for all premium and free plans, with the average response time being just under 24 hours. While this falls well within our promised SLA, we aim to reduce this time even further this year, thanks to more streamlined QA and support processes.
The best is yet to come
We have some big changes planned for 2023. The team is currently working very hard to make these changes a reality, and we cannot wait to share all of these updates with you.
2022 has unequivocally taught us that we are far stronger together. While we face a different set of challenges now than we did last year, we are confident that by working together, we’ll be able to weather the storm and emerge far stronger than we ever were.
