🎉 2024 is officially in the rearview mirror, and what a year it’s been!
From revolutionizing hosting with our High-Frequency plans to launching game-changing features like Domain Reseller and Webmail, we’ve been working tirelessly to make your WordPress experience smoother than ever.
Grab a cup of coffee (or whatever fuels your hustle), and join us for a journey through a year packed with innovations, improvements, and exciting developments that have made WPMU DEV even better for you!
Keep reading, or jump ahead with these links:
Executive Summary from Our Founder, James Farmer
“2024 has been a transformative year for WPMU DEV, marked by bold innovations and strategic expansions that have redefined what’s possible in WordPress management and hosting.
Our introduction of High-Frequency Hosting plans, powered by blazing-fast 3GHz+ Intel Xeon processors, has set a new industry standard for performance. We’ve expanded our global footprint with 12 new hosting regions, ensuring lightning-fast speeds for users worldwide.
The launch of our Domain Reseller program and Webmail service marks our commitment to being your complete WordPress solution. These additions, combined with our new Expert Services, demonstrate our evolution from a plugin provider to a comprehensive web services platform.
The Hub continues to be the cornerstone of our ecosystem, now enhanced with features like Tickets for improved client communication and our innovative Broken Backlinks Checker. Our plugins have seen significant updates too, from Forminator’s new PDF capabilities to Defender’s enhanced malware detection.
Looking ahead to 2025, we’re not slowing down. We’re already working on exciting features like the Bot Pool for improved performance, advanced static cache features, and expanded monitoring capabilities for third-party sites.
Thank you for being part of our journey. Your feedback and trust continue to drive our innovation, and we’re excited about the road ahead.”
Want to hear more from James? Check out this Post Status interview from the Product Founder Series: WordPress in the Long View with James Farmer.
All right, off to explore the individual products and services. Starting with…
🛠 What Changed in The Hub & Hub Client in 2024
If you find managing multiple WordPress sites a total nightmare, 2024 was the year The Hub said “hold my beer” and transformed into an even more powerful command center to make your agency life even easier.
🌐 Hosting Reseller Program: For that Extra Moolah
We kicked off the year with a huge update — the Hosting Reseller Program. It’s the side hustle of dreams for all those agency owners who want to sell domains and make extra cash while lounging on the beach (because why not?).
We even gave away a million dollars💸 to kick things off. (No, seriously. A million dollars. Who are we? Oprah?).
👉 Check out the Domain Reseller Program — and start making it rain domains! 🌐
📧 Webmail: It’s Like Email, But Cooler (No, Seriously)
Raise your hand if you’ve ever had to email a client from your personal email address (no judgment, but, yikes). With Webmail, you and your clients can send emails like a true professional — right from your WPMU DEV dashboard.
It integrates seamlessly with our platform because, let’s face it, if you’re not running your hosting and emails from one place, are you even really hosting? 🧐
Plus, we also increased the storage space up to 50GB!
👉 Get to know Webmail — email never looked this good.
🧑💻 Expert Services: Because Sometimes You Just Need A Dev
It’s 2 AM. Your client’s site just went down. What do you do? Panic? No. You call in an expert… but there’s no need for you to hire an expensive freelancer or bring one in-house.
We launched Expert Services — a premium suite of services to make your life as easy as ordering takeout on a Friday night (and almost as cheap too!), including:
- On-Demand Development: For that custom feature you needed yesterday.
- Proactive Monitoring: So you can sleep while we do the heavy lifting, monitoring and implementing quick fixes 24/7 for your hosted sites.
- Speed Optimization: To turbocharge your site and ramp up your PageSpeed scores to 90+ on desktop and 75+ on mobile.
- Malware Removal: No one wants to deal with hackers at midnight.
It’s like having a superhero squad on call all year round (without the spandex).
👉 Don’t wait for a crisis — check out Expert Services.
📈 Annual Hosting Plans: Sweet Deals and Free Stuff? Yes, Please!
Who doesn’t love a good deal? In 2024, we launched Annual Hosting Plans (excluding Quantum) that come with not only awesome rates but also a free .com domain and Webmail.
👉 Ready to save and get free goodies? Snag your Annual Hosting Plan here.
🚩 Client Tickets for Agencies: Seriously, Who Has Time to Juggle Emails, WhatsApp, SMS, etc?
We know you’ve been there — juggling multiple client requests like a performer on stilts.
Enter Client Tickets, our white-labeled ticketing system that helps you manage client inquiries like an actual pro (instead of that over-caffeinated person on their third double-shot latte).
Gone are the days of lost emails and forgotten requests. Now, you’ll have everything neatly organized, even while you’re pretending to be “busy” with your other tasks. 🙃
👉 Get the lowdown on Client Tickets here.
⛓ Broken Backlinks Checker: Fixing the SEO You Didn’t Know You Needed
Nothing kills your SEO game like broken backlinks. Luckily, we launched the Broken Backlinks Checker to save you from that SEO nightmare.
It scans your site for dead links and lets you fix them before Google starts docking your site’s reputation. It’s like having a personal SEO bodyguard for every site.
👉 Fix Your Broken Backlinks — and keep your SEO in the green.
⚡Hub Speed Improvements
Significant improvements were made to The Hub so your site lists load much faster than before.
Here’s an example of the average number of seconds needed to load your sites, before and after 2 rounds of performance enhancements:
⏩ What’s Coming in 2025: The Hub’s Next Chapter
We’re kicking off 2025 with some serious upgrades to The Hub that’ll make managing your WordPress empire even smoother. Here’s what’s cooking:
⌚ Proactive Monitoring for ALL Sites
Ever wished you could keep tabs on your third-party hosted sites just like our hosted ones? Well, that’s exactly what we’re rolling out.
Our 24/7 monitoring service is expanding beyond WPMU DEV-hosted sites, so you can catch and fix issues before your clients even notice them.
💵 Clients & Billing Gets a Power-Up
We’re supercharging the client management experience with features you’ve been asking for:
- Flexible coupon creation for your services
- Schedule invoices for better payment planning
- Support for multiple clients per site (perfect for those complex projects)
👨👩👧👧 Hub Experience Improvements
The Hub itself is getting some love too. We’re working on:
- Centralized white-labeling controls for a more consistent brand experience
- Streamlined WP Users Management with Multi-user SSO
- A completely redesigned Reports 2.0 system for better insights
- Email-based Tickets so your clients can create tickets and reply to them without even logging into The Hub
- White labeled support via Tickets
- ccTLD Domains
- Hub Folders for better organization of your sites
- Notes across various parts of The Hub so you can add notes to sites, domains, webmail, etc.
- Even more performance enhancements, focusing on individual service pages
Plus, we’re putting the pedal to the metal on overall Hub performance improvements—because nobody likes waiting around for pages to load.
Next up, the crazy changes we made to hosting…
🛠 What Changed for our Premium Hosting in 2024
2024 saw the launch of our High-Frequency hosting plans for even better performance than our supercharged regular plans. which makes regular hosting feel soooo sloooooooowwwww. Here’s a quick overview at the next-generation technology behind our HF plans.
📣 High-Frequency Hosting: The Next Generation (Gen Beta?)
Blazing-Fast 3GHz+ Intel Xeon CPUs
- Purpose-built for high-performance sites
- Significantly outperforms standard 2GHz CPUs
Next-Level Storage
- NVMe SSD storage for maximum throughput
- Perfectly matched to the increased CPU power
- Dramatically faster than traditional SSD storage
Unbeatable Value
- Industry-leading pricing for the performance
- Excellent margins for resellers
- Top-tier features at competitive rates
👉 Upgrade to a high frequency hosting plan today.
🌎 Going Global: 12 New Regions
But we didn’t stop there—we went global with 12 new regions, ensuring your sites are lightning-fast wherever your clients call home (for both HF and regular 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
😎 Plus Some Neat Upgrades for the Tech-Savvy Crowd
- Custom SFTP/SSH paths — you can now specify exactly where you want your SFTP/SSH access
- XML-RPC blocking for enhanced security
- PHP 8.3 support to keep your sites on the cutting edge
- Fail2ban integration with Antibot for better security
⏩ What’s Coming in 2025: Premium Hosting Gets Even More… Premium?
Our development team is kicking off 2025 with some serious server-side improvements.
🔙 Redirect Management
Redirect Management is landing first—a powerful system that handles traffic flow at the server level. This means cleaner redirects, better SEO, and a proper system to prevent those pesky 404 errors that can hurt your search rankings.🙌
🤖 The Auto Bot Pool
The Bot Pool is our answer to handling automated traffic intelligently. By directing bots to a separate PHP pool, your server resources stay focused on real visitors, leading to better Core Web Vitals scores and smoother user experience.
⚡ Lightning Fast Caching
We’re taking static caching to the next level with two new features:
- Lightning Mode transforms your entire site by caching all GET requests (except wp-admin and logged-in users), dropping query strings, and setting extended cache lifetimes. Perfect for company blogs and static sites that need blazing speed.
- Lightning Pages brings that same power to specific high-traffic pages like your homepage or landing pages, giving you precise control over what gets the turbo treatment.
And since we never stop improving, we’re adding PHP 8.4 support and some serious SSL improvements… because security should never be an afterthought.
Next up, our plugins!
🛠 What Changed for our Plugins in 2024
Our plugins got some serious gains in 2024 (and they didn’t even need a gym membership).
From Forminator flexing its muscles with new payment options and cloud templates, to Smush getting even smarter about WebP optimization, each plugin in our arsenal received meaningful upgrades that make your WordPress life easier.
Let’s dive into what each of these powerhouses brought to the table this year.
📜 Forminator: Forms That Actually Look Good (Finally)
Gone are the days of boring, basic forms. This year Forminator embraced its creative side with features that make form-building actually fun (yes, really).
💳 Payment Power-Up
Boost your conversions with our shiny new Stripe Dynamic Payment Method. Now your forms handle payments as smoothly as butter. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Klarna—if it’s a payment method your customers love, we’ve probably added it.
✨ Fresh Fields & Features
We didn’t stop at payments. The new Rating field lets your users share their thoughts with style, while the Range slider adds some sliding satisfaction to provide more nuanced data capabilities.
Plus, our new Basic Style mode plays nice with your theme—because nobody likes a form that clashes with their design.
Finally, if you need to whip up a form fast, our new Preset and Cloud Form Templates have your back. And if you’re into email marketing (who isn’t?), our MailerLite integration makes growing your list a breeze.
📄PDF Power
Creating professional receipts just got easier with our new PDF template system. Generate unlimited PDFs from your forms and submissions—perfect for making your business look polished and professional.
⏩ What’s Coming in 2025 for Forminator
Next year’s going to be even better:
- A sleek new Product Field that makes selling stuff simple
- Professional PDF Quote templates
- More ready-to-roll templates (starting from scratch is so 2024)
- New integrations starting with Constant Contact—because your marketing tools should play nice together
👉 Start creating powerful forms today.
👊 Smush: Speed Meets Style — 2024 Edition
2024 was all about making image optimization effortless. Our dev team took Smush’s already powerful compression tools and cranked them up to eleven with some seriously smart updates.
🤕 WebP Without the Headache
The new Direct WebP method is a game-changer. One click and you’re serving WebP images to your visitors — no server configuration or CDN required. It’s the kind of simple we love, and your site speed will thank you for it.
💪 Bulk Smush Gets Buff
We completely rebuilt our Image Optimization Engine from the ground up. For you that means a leaner, meaner Smush that uses less memory while crushing more images. Your server resources can breathe easy while your images get smaller.
⏩ What’s Coming in 2025 for Smush
We’ve got a TON of upgrades planned for Smush:
- AVIF support is landing — think WebP’s cooler cousin with even better compression
- Smart LCP Image optimization to boost those Core Web Vitals scores
- Video lazy loading with facades because why should images have all the fun?
- Automatic missing image size generation to fill those pesky gaps
- A fresh UI that makes optimization feel like a breeze
- Supercharged PNG compression for even smaller file sizes
- Better stats to show off your optimization wins
👉 Start Smushing your images here.
🐦⬛ Hummingbird: Performance That Packs a Punch
This year Hummingbird got serious about keeping your sites blazing fast with updates that matter. We ditched the old metrics and embraced the future of performance measurement — staying current isn’t just nice, it’s necessary.
🚘 Speed Essentials
Performance testing got a major refresh. We’ve added INP (Interaction to Next Paint) while saying goodbye to FID and TTI. It’s not just about keeping up with Google — it’s about giving you the metrics that actually matter for your site’s success.
📱 Mobile Magic
Mobile optimization leveled up with separate cache preloading, mobile-specific Critical CSS, and smarter viewport meta handling, as well as font optimization. We also boosted Critical CSS across the board with delay-until-interaction for above-the-fold content. The result? Major gains for mobile users.
🎮 Smart Controls
Got specific performance needs? Our new granular controls for Delay JS and Critical CSS let you fine-tune exactly what gets optimized. Target specific files, post types, post URLS, plugins, themes and keywords.
Plus, we optimized the Autoloader to cut down database queries — because every millisecond counts.
⏩ What’s Coming in 2025 for Hummingbird
Hummingbird is set to take flight in 2025:
- Asset optimization is getting a major overhaul for faster, smarter, safer improvements
- Zero cache downtime to keep your hit rates high
- Font subsetting for lightning-fast text loading
- Speculative link preloading for instant site navigation
- Global Safe mode to preview optimizations before they go live
👉 Experience Hummingbird’s performance for yourself here.
🛡 Defender: Security that Never Sleeps
Security isn’t just about blocking bad guys — it’s about being smart with how we protect your sites. This year, Defender stepped up its game with some serious security muscle.
🔍 Malware Detection 2.0
Our scanning engine got a major upgrade. Now Defender dives deep into your site’s root directory, catching nasty code that other scanners might miss. We’ve also fine-tuned our malware detection rules to stay ahead of evolving threats.
🎯 Smart IP Protection
Say goodbye to IP detection guesswork. Defender’s Smart IP Detection is your ultimate security gatekeeper, using the most secure and reliable method to identify users’ IP addresses. It’s designed to block bad actors while ensuring real users and admins sail through without a hitch. Compatible with most sites and a pro at preventing spoofing — because your site deserves nothing less.
🔐 Self-Service Security
And if you do manage to get locked out, we added the super convenient “Unlock Me” feature. Admins can now verify their identity through email and get back to work without waiting for support. No more locking the door and leaving the keys inside!
⏩ What’s Coming in 2025 for Defender
Get ready for some HUGE upgrades for Defender including:
- AntiBot Global Firewall — tapping into security intelligence from 500,000+ sites to block malicious IPs automatically
- Advanced Malware Scanner that goes beyond core files and checks JavaScript files and database tables (because we all know malware loves to hide in unexpected places)
- User Session Management to protect against stolen session cookies and keep browsing sessions secure
👉 Cover your sites with ultimate defense against any attack.
🔗 Link Checker: Breaking Up with Broken Links
Links are the highways of your website, and this year we made sure they’re smoother than ever. Our team rolled out some smart updates that make finding and fixing broken links feel less like a chore and more like a superpower.
☁️ Cloud Connection Made Simple
No more Dashboard plugin required — connect straight to BLC Cloud from The Hub. It’s like taking the scenic route and finding a shortcut you never knew existed.
🕵️♀️ Query Parameter Scanning
Those tricky URLs with query parameters? Yeah, we scan those now. BLC Cloud leaves no URL unturned, making sure every corner of your site stays connected.
🪄 Backlink Magic
Introducing our “Broken Backlink Checker”! Now you can find and fix dead backlinks that might be hurting your SEO juice. Because good SEO isn’t just about what’s on your site — it’s about who’s linking to you too.
📊 Cleaner Reports
We heard you about those ignored links cluttering up your reports. Now you can hide them and focus on the links that actually need your attention.
⏩ What’s Coming in 2025 for Link Checker
We’ve got a couple little (but powerful) tweaks coming up:
- Bulk actions to edit, unlink, and ignore broken links in one go
- Advanced URL exclusions for more precise link monitoring
- Fewer false positives for even more reliable results
👉 Check your links now with one click.
💾 Snapshot: Backups That Actually Have Your Back
Nobody gets excited about backups until they need one. That’s why we made Snapshot smarter about how it protects your site data, with features that work before you know you need them.
🧠 Pre-Backup Intelligence
The new Preflight Check is like having a co-pilot for your backups. It scans your server resources, large files, and database tables before takeoff, making sure your backup journey goes smoothly.
💡 Selective Restore Power
Sometimes you just need to restore one piece of the puzzle. Now you can download and restore your database or files separately — no need to restore everything when you only need a portion.
For multisite users, we’ve added the ability to restore individual subsites from a full backup.
🧰 Cloud Storage Options
Azure joined our backup destination family this year. More options mean more ways to keep your backups safe and sound.
⏩ What’s Coming in 2025 for Snapshot
We’re expanding our cloud storage horizons with iDrive and Cloudflare R2 as new S3-compatible destinations — because your backups deserve options.
👉 Never get caught out again — keep your backups automated!
And that’s a wrap, folks!
Phew. We made it through another wild ride of a year.
Thank you for being part of the WPMU DEV family and for all your amazing feedback, bug reports (we see you!), and love for our platform. We can’t wait to make 2025 even better, faster, and just a little bit wilder.
🎉 Here’s to 2025 from WPMU DEV — where hosting is never boring, and client tickets get sorted faster than your New Year’s resolutions! 😜
Let us know in the comments what upgrades you’re most excited about!
