WPMU DEV's 2024 Annual Recap: Transforming Hosting for a New Age

🎉 2024 has come to a close, and what an incredible year it was!

We’ve revolutionized hosting with our High-Frequency plans and introduced transformative features like Domain Reseller and Webmail, working relentlessly to enhance your WordPress experience like never before.

Pour yourself a cup of coffee (or whatever energizes you), and let’s embark on a recap of a year filled with innovations, advancements, and thrilling developments that have made WPMU DEV even more outstanding for you!

Continue reading, or skip ahead using these links:

A Message from Our Founder, James Farmer

“2024 has been a landmark year for WPMU DEV, characterized by bold innovations and strategic growth that have redefined possibilities in WordPress management and hosting.

Our launch of High-Frequency Hosting plans, utilizing high-speed 3GHz+ Intel Xeon processors, has established a new benchmark for performance in the industry. We’ve broadened our global presence with 12 new hosting locations, ensuring rapid speeds for users globally.

The introduction of our Domain Reseller program and Webmail service reflects our goal of becoming your complete WordPress solution. These additions, coupled with our Expert Services, showcase our transformation from a plugin provider to a comprehensive web services platform.

The Hub remains the foundation of our ecosystem, now enriched with functionalities like Tickets for enhanced client communication and the innovative Broken Backlinks Checker. Our plugins have also received significant enhancements, such as Forminator’s new PDF capabilities and Defender’s improved malware detection.

As we look to 2025, we’re not hitting the brakes. We’re already developing exciting features like the Bot Pool for better performance, advanced static cache options, and heightened monitoring capabilities for external sites.

Thank you for being a key part of our evolution. Your insights and trust inspire our innovation, and we eagerly anticipate what lies ahead.”

Curious to hear more from James? Watch this Post Status interview from the Product Founder Series: WordPress in the Long View with James Farmer.

Now, let’s explore the individual products and services, starting with…

🛠 Modifications in The Hub & Hub Client for 2024

If managing multiple WordPress sites has felt like a hassle, 2024 was the year The Hub declared, “Hold my drink!” and evolved into a more powerful command center to simplify your agency operations.

🌐 Hosting Reseller Program: Extra Revenue Stream

We kicked off the year with a massive update — the Hosting Reseller Program. It’s the perfect side venture for agency owners looking to sell domains and earn extra income while enjoying some beach time (why not?).

We even launched a million-dollar giveaway💸 to kick things off. (Seriously, a million dollars. Who do we think we are? Oprah?).

👉 Explore the Domain Reseller Program — and start raining down domains! 🌐

📧 Webmail: It’s Like Email, But Cooler (No Joking)

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had to email a client from your personal email account (no judgment, but, yikes). With Webmail, you and your clients can send emails professionally — right from your WPMU DEV dashboard.

It integrates flawlessly with our platform because, let’s be honest, if you’re not managing your hosting and emails from one location, are you truly hosting? 🧐

Furthermore, we’ve also boosted the storage capacity up to 50GB!

👉 Discover Webmail — email has never looked so good.

🧑‍💻 Expert Services: Because Sometimes You Need a Developer

Humorous meme depicting a cartoon character tired from numerous client updates

 
It’s 2 AM. Your client’s website just went down. What’s your move? Panic? No. You call in an expert… but there’s no need to hire an expensive freelancer or bring someone in-house.

We launched Expert Services — a premium suite of offerings to make your life as easy as ordering takeout on a Friday night (and nearly as affordable too!), including:

  • On-Demand Development: For that unique feature you needed yesterday.
  • Proactive Monitoring: So you can rest easy while we do the hard work, monitoring and swiftly addressing issues 24/7 for your hosted websites.
  • Speed Optimization: To supercharge your site and enhance your PageSpeed scores to 90+ on desktop and 75+ on mobile.
  • Malware Removal: Nobody wants to tackle hackers at midnight.

It’s like having a superhero team on standby all year round (without the spandex).

👉 Don’t wait for an emergency — explore Expert Services.

📈 Annual Hosting Plans: Sweet Deals and Free Swag? Yes, Please!

Who doesn’t love a fantastic offer? In 2024, we introduced Annual Hosting Plans (excluding Quantum) that not only feature remarkable rates but also come with a free .com domain and Webmail.

👉 Ready to save and snag free goodies? Get your Annual Hosting Plan here.

🚩 Client Tickets for Agencies: Seriously, Who Has Time for Disparate Communication?

Humorous meme depicting a cartoon character dealing with client requests in a burning room

 
We know you’ve been there — trying to juggle numerous client inquiries like a circus performer.

Presenting Client Tickets, our white-labeled ticketing system that allows you to manage client requests like a true professional (instead of being that over-caffeinated person on their fourth double-shot latte).

No more lost emails and overlooked requests. Now, everything will be neatly organized while you’re pretending to be “busy” with your other tasks. 🙃

👉 Discover more about Client Tickets here.

Nothing torpedoes your SEO like broken backlinks. Thankfully, we introduced the Broken Backlinks Checker to rescue you from that SEO disaster.

It scans your site for dead links and allows you to rectify them before Google starts penalizing your site’s credibility. It’s like having a dedicated SEO bodyguard for every website.

👉 Repair Your Broken Backlinks — and keep your SEO flourishing.

⚡Hub Speed Enhancements

Substantial upgrades were made to The Hub, ensuring your site listings load much quicker than before.

Here’s a glimpse of the average loading time for your sites, pre-and post-2 rounds of performance enhancements:

An example of Hub speed improvement
An average of 300% faster across the board!

⏩ What’s Ahead for 2025: The Hub’s Next Chapter

We’re starting 2025 with major improvements to The Hub that’ll make managing your WordPress empire even simpler. Here’s what’s on the horizon:

⌚ Proactive Monitoring for All Sites

Ever wished you could monitor your third-party hosted sites like our own? Well, that’s exactly what we’re launching.

Our 24/7 monitoring service will extend to cover WPMU DEV-hosted sites, allowing you to catch and solve problems before your clients notice.

💵 Enhanced Client Management and Billing

We’re enhancing the client management experience with features that you’ve requested:

  • Flexible coupon generation for your services
  • Scheduled invoicing for better payment organization
  • Support for multiple clients per site (ideal for complex projects)

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 Experience Improvements in The Hub

The Hub itself will receive some attention too. We’re working on:

  • Centralized white-label controls for a more unified brand experience
  • Streamlined WP Users Management with Multi-user SSO
  • A completely revamped Reports 2.0 system for improved insights
  • Email-based Tickets enabling clients to create and respond to tickets without logging into The Hub
  • White-labeled support via Tickets
  • ccTLD Domains
  • Hub Folders for better website organization
  • Notes across various Hub sections to add notes to sites, domains, webmail, etc.
  • Further performance enhancements, particularly for specific service pages

Moreover, we’re committed to significant progress on overall Hub performance improvements—because nobody appreciates waiting for pages to load.

Next, let’s cover the substantial changes we’ve made to hosting…

🛠 Updates in Premium Hosting for 2024

This year saw the launch of our High-Frequency hosting plans, offering performance exceeding that of our already robust standard plans, making regular hosting feel incredibly sluggish. Here’s a brief look at the next-gen technology steering our HF plans.

📣 High-Frequency Hosting: The Next Evolution (Gen Beta)

Lightning-Fast 3GHz+ Intel Xeon CPUs

  • Designed specifically for high-demand sites
  • Dramatically outperforms typical 2GHz CPUs

Advanced Storage Solutions

  • NVMe SSD storage for peak throughput
  • Perfectly optimized for the heightened CPU performance
  • Significantly faster than conventional SSD storage

Unmatched Value

  • Market-leading rates for the performance provided
  • Excellent margins for resellers
  • Top-quality features at competitive prices

👉 Switch to a high-frequency hosting plan today.

🌎 Global Reach: 12 New Regions

But we didn’t stop there — we expanded globally with 12 new regions, ensuring that your sites operate at lightning speed regardless of where your clients are located (for both HF and standard hosting plans). We added new data centers in:

  • Asia Pacific: Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Osaka, Melbourne
  • Europe: Madrid, Manchester, Stockholm, Warsaw
  • Middle East & Africa: Tel Aviv, Johannesburg
  • Americas: Mexico City, Santiago

😎 Additional Upgrades for Tech Enthusiasts

  • Custom SFTP/SSH pathways — now you can specify the exact destination for your SFTP/SSH access
  • XML-RPC blocking for increased security
  • PHP 8.3 compatibility to keep your sites modern
  • Integration of Fail2ban with Antibot for enhanced protection

⏩ What’s Next for 2025: Premium Hosting Elevated?

Our development team is launching into 2025 with significant server-side enhancements.

🔙 Redirect Management

Redirect Management is coming soon — a robust system for managing traffic flow at the server level. This will lead to cleaner redirects, better SEO, and a well-organized method to avert those pesky 404 errors that can harm your search rankings.🙌

🤖 The Auto Bot Pool

The Bot Pool is our solution for intelligently managing automated traffic. By directing bots to a separate PHP pool, your server resources are preserved for actual visitors, resulting in improved Core Web Vitals scores and a smoother user journey.

⚡ Lightning-Fast Caching

We’re elevating static caching with two exciting features:

  • Lightning Mode transforms your entire site by caching all GET requests (excluding wp-admin and logged-in users), removing query strings, and extending cache life. Ideal for corporate blogs and static sites that require rapid speed.
  • Lightning Pages applies that same capability to specific high-traffic areas like your homepage or landing pages, providing careful control over which sections speed up.

And because we always strive for improvement, we’re adding PHP 8.4 support and implementing significant SSL enhancements… because security shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Next up, let’s discuss our plugins!

🛠 Updates in Our Plugins for 2024

Our plugins received notable enhancements in 2024 (and they didn’t even need a gym membership).

From Forminator enhancing its functionality with new payment options and cloud templates, to Smush becoming even more adept at WebP optimization, each plugin in our toolkit underwent significant upgrades that simplify your WordPress experience.

Let’s dive into what each of these powerhouses contributed this year.

📜 Forminator: Finally, Forms That Look Great!

The era of dull, basic forms is over. This year Forminator embraced its creative flair with features that make building forms genuinely enjoyable (yes, seriously).

💳 Payment Boost

Increase your conversions with our new Stripe Dynamic Payment Method. Now your forms can manage transactions as seamlessly as butter. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Klarna—if it’s a payment method your clients appreciate, we likely included it.

✨ Fresh Fields & Features

We didn’t stop at payments. The fresh Rating field allows your users to share their ratings in style, while the Range slider adds user engagement to offer more detailed data input.

Moreover, our new Basic Style mode integrates beautifully with your theme—because no one enjoys a form that clashes with their site design.

If you need to create a form quickly, our new Preset and Cloud Form Templates have you covered. And if you’re enthusiastic about email marketing (who isn’t?), our MailerLite integration simplifies your list growth.

📄PDF Capability

Creating professional invoices has become simpler with our new PDF template feature. Generate an unlimited number of PDFs from your forms and submissions—ideal for presenting your business professionally.

⏩ Preview of Forminator in 2025

Next year is looking even brighter:

  • A sleek new Product Field to streamline sales processes
  • Professional PDF Quote templates
  • More ready-made templates (starting from square one is so 2024)
  • New integrations beginning with Constant Contact—because your marketing tools should seamlessly interact

👉 Begin crafting powerful forms today.

👊 Smush: Merging Speed and Style — 2024 Edition

2024 revolved around making image optimization a breeze. Our development team amplified Smush’s already potent compression tools with some seriously clever updates.

🤕 WebP Without the Hassle

The new Direct WebP feature is a game-changer. One click and you’re serving WebP images to your visitors — no server tweaks or CDN necessary. It’s the kind of simplicity we adore, and your site speed will appreciate it.

💪 Bulk Smush Gets Stronger

We completely revamped our Image Optimization Engine from the ground up. For you, that means a more efficient Smush that uses less memory while optimizing even more images. Your server resources can take a sigh of relief as your images shrink.

⏩ Anticipated Features for Smush in 2025

We have an abundance of enhancements in store for Smush:

  • AVIF compatibility is on the way — think of it as WebP’s cooler cousin with even superior compression
  • Smart LCP Image optimization to elevate those Core Web Vitals scores
  • Video lazy loading with facades — because why should images have all the excitement?
  • Automatic generation of missing image sizes to resolve those annoying gaps
  • A fresh UI that makes optimization feel effortless
  • Enhanced PNG compression for even tinier file sizes
  • Improved analytics to showcase your optimization victories

👉 Start Smushing your images here.

🐦‍⬛ Hummingbird: Performance That Packs a Punch

This year, Hummingbird focused on ensuring your sites maintain exceptional speeds with meaningful updates. We moved away from obsolete metrics and embraced the future of performance measurement — keeping current not just optional, but necessary.

🚘 Speed Fundamentals

Performance testing has undergone a substantial refresh. We’ve included INP (Interaction to Next Paint) while bidding farewell to FID and TTI. It’s not just about meeting Google’s standards — it’s about delivering metrics that genuinely impact your site’s success.

📱 Mobile Functionality

Mobile optimization has reached new heights with separate cache preloading, mobile-specific Critical CSS, optimized viewport meta handling, and font improvements. We also enhanced Critical CSS across the board with delay-until-interaction for above-the-fold content. The outcome? Major advantages for mobile users.

🎮 Smart Controls

Got specific performance requirements? Our new detailed controls for Delay JS and Critical CSS let you customize what’s optimized exactly. Target specific files, post types, post URLs, plugins, themes, and keywords.

Additionally, we refined the Autoloader to minimize database queries — every millisecond counts, after all.

⏩ What to Look Forward to in 2025 for Hummingbird

Hummingbird is poised for exciting improvements in 2025:

  • Asset optimization is getting a comprehensive revamp for speedier, smarter, and safer enhancements
  • No cache downtime to maintain high hit rates
  • Font subsetting for ultrafast text rendering
  • Speculative link preloading for immediate site navigation
  • Global Safe mode to preview optimizations prior to going live

👉 Experience Hummingbird’s performance for yourself here.

🛡 Defender: Security That Never Rests

Security isn’t solely about blocking threats — it’s about implementing intelligent measures to protect your sites. This year, Defender elevated its capabilities with enhanced security features.

🔍 Malware Detection 2.0

Our scanning engine received a major overhaul. Now Defender delves deep into your site’s root directory, catching malicious code that other scanners might overlook. We’ve also optimized our malware detection rules to stay ahead of rising threats.

🎯 Intelligent IP Protection

Bid farewell to uncertainty in IP detection. Defender’s Smart IP Detection is your ultimate security gatekeeper, employing the most reliable methods to ascertain users’ IP addresses. It’s designed to block unwanted actors while allowing legitimate users and admins to pass through effortlessly. It’s compatible with most sites and expertly prevents spoofing — your site deserves no less.

🔐 Self-Service Security

And if you ever find yourself locked out, we’ve added the convenient “Unlock Me” feature. Admins can now verify their identity via email and regain access to their work without waiting for customer support. No more locking yourself out!

⏩ What’s Ahead for Defender in 2025

Brace yourself for some MAJOR upgrades for Defender, including:

  • AntiBot Global Firewall — leveraging security intelligence from over 500,000 sites to automatically block harmful IPs
  • Advanced Malware Scanner that doesn’t stop at core files, checking JavaScript files and database tables (because it’s well-known that malware loves to hide in unexpected places)
  • User Session Management to safeguard against stolen session cookies and maintain session security

👉 Protect your sites with ultimate defense against any threats.

Links are the arteries of your website, and this year we ensured they’re smoother than ever. Our team rolled out intelligent updates that make discovering and fixing broken links feel less like a labor and more like a superpower.

No more Dashboard plugins required — connect directly to BLC Cloud from The Hub. It’s akin to discovering a shortcut you never knew existed.

Those pesky URLs with query parameters? Yes, we now scan those as well. BLC Cloud ensures no URL is left unchecked, keeping every part of your site interconnected.

Introducing the “Broken Backlink Checker”! Now, you can locate and mend dead backlinks that might be harming your SEO juice. Because good SEO isn’t just about your site’s content — it also involves who’s linking to you.

We listened to your feedback regarding those ignored links cluttering your reports. Now you can hide them and concentrate solely on the links that genuinely require your attention.

We’ve got a few tweaks on the way (and they’re powerful):

  • Bulk editing actions to alter, unlink, and ignore broken links all at once
  • Advanced URL exclusions for more accurate link supervision
  • Fewer false positives for even more dependable results

👉 Verify your links now with just one click.

💾 Snapshot: Backups You Can Depend On

People rarely get excited about backups until they really need them. That’s why we made Snapshot more intelligent in how it secures your site’s data, introducing features that function before you even realize you need them.

🧠 Pre-Backup Analysis

The new Preflight Check acts as an assistant for your backups. It checks your server resources, large files, and database tables before the backup begins, ensuring everything goes smoothly.

💡 Selective Restoration Capability

Sometimes, you only need to restore a part of the puzzle. Now, you can download and restore either your database or files individually—no need to restore everything when you only need a specific section.

For multisite users, we’ve introduced the capacity to restore individual subsites from a full backup.

🧰 Cloud Storage Options

This year, Azure joined our roster of backup destinations. More options translate to more ways to secure your backups.

⏩ What’s Coming in 2025 for Snapshot

We’re broadening our cloud storage capabilities with iDrive and Cloudflare R2 as new S3-compatible backup destinations — because your backups deserve choices.

👉 Never be caught off guard again — automate your backups!

Wrapping It Up!

Phew. We’ve navigated through another extraordinary year.

Thank you for being a valued member of the WPMU DEV family and for all your fantastic feedback, bug reports (we’re aware!), and appreciation for our platform. We can’t wait to make 2025 even more remarkable, quicker, and just a tad crazier.

🎉 Cheers to 2025 from WPMU DEV — where hosting is never dull, and client tickets get resolved faster than your New Year’s resolutions! 😜

Share your thoughts in the comments about which upgrades excite you the most!