10up Turns 12

Jake Goldman on February 23, 2023 • 1 Comment

This February, 10up celebrates our twelfth anniversary — a year of team and revenue growth, innovation in our solutions, and continued contributions to the open web and greater community. Our work continued to be recognized around the web, earning 10up nods as WordPress VIP’s Inaugural Gold Partner of the Quarter and 2022 Partner of the Year, garnering another Webby Award for our work on Democracy Docket, and an Innovation SABRE Award for our work on Stories From Hilton, among other recognitions. Our clients agreed: we’re honored to exceed a 70+ net promoter score (NPS) from our clients in both halves of 2022, the threshold of a “world-class” service partner.

Revenue and Team Growth

10up’s revenue and team continued to grow for the 12th consecutive year. We saw a 16.8% growth in revenue, crossing the $40 million threshold for the first time in 10up history, while also showing gains across several other financial metrics, including EBITDA. Our Europe, Middle East, and Asia (EMEA) division saw 60% revenue growth in 2022.

This milestone came with 43 new clients, and with 10 clients surpassing 7 figures of spend on our services. With more business came more 10uppers: our global fully dedicated team now spans 39 states and 37 countries.

Managed Services

Sitewatch website, launched in 2022. 

10up’s Managed Services division — who maintains our productized services and provides cloud infrastructure expertise — saw growth in revenue and offerings. Our proactive website maintenance and support product, SiteWatch, launched an overview website while expanding its client roster by more than 20%. 10up’s popular hosted Elasticsearch service, ElasticPress.io, deepened its partnership with WP Engine and launched key new features like Instant Results.

Growing Our Partnerships

In our twelfth year, 10up’s partnerships with industry leaders continued to fuel our success. 10up was honored as WordPress VIP’s Inaugural Gold Partner of the Quarter in the first quarter of the year, and closed the year as WordPress VIP’s sole Partner of the Year.

Channeling our commitment to leveraging the most effective technical solutions for each client’s unique needs, we cemented formal partnerships with Vercel and Sanity.io — two leading innovators in the Jamstack ecosystem — among other new partnerships.

We also continued to foster our partnership with Google through Site Kit, the WordPress Performance Initiative, and the Google News Initiative (GNI) Ad Revenue Lab, where we model how local and diverse publications can augment their advertising revenue.

Improvement and Innovation

From new base website frameworks to tools that keep client sites running with ease, 10uppers crafted new ways to make a better web. Here are a few highlights:

• Informed by our long-time work in the space and partnership with industry leaders, 10up continued to iterate on and more formally began to sell and market our Storytelling Framework for Businesses & Newsrooms: an opinionated platform built on top of WordPress for corporate news and content marketing. Several high profile brands are now running, or in the process of migrating, to the platform, including the already-award winning Stories From Hilton.
• In keeping with our dedication to sharing our expert domain knowledge, we released our Gutenberg Best Practices — a detailed resource for building on the WordPress block editor in the “10up Way”, now available to the public.
• Following the announcement of Google’s Privacy Sandbox Initiative, 10up helped to convene a roundtable with Google and WP Engine exploring the effects on the web. This resulted in the creation of the Privacy Sandbox Community Group, a community to foster transparency, trust, and user-centered solutions.
• We continued to invest across our Internal Tools that help us ensure our clients’ sites stay secure and performant, in keeping with current standards – investing over 1,000 hours in custom-built monitoring solutions that ensure sites and plugins stay up to date and continue to meet Core Web Vitals (CWV) and Page Speed targets.

Open Source

Contributions to WordPress 6.1, as seen in our blog: “Twenty-six 10uppers Contribute to WordPress 6.1 Release.” (graphic courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Audras, Twitter @audrasjb)

We deepened our investment in the open source ecosystem that underpins our work, with over 8,400 hours contributed by our team to open source projects. Our dedicated Open Source Practice alone counted 8,115 commits and 141 releases across 63 projects. We released 63 new major versions of our publicly available open source solutions, including ClassifAI, Distributor, and the inaugural release of our Gutenberg Best Practices. 34 10uppers contributed directly to WordPress core versions 5.9, 6.0, and 6.1. Alongside our code contributions, 10uppers shared their expertise at major industry events like Confab and WordCamp US.

Culture & Team

Our team of 10uppers made all of this possible, which is why we empower our team members to live a prosperous, impassioned, and balanced life — inside and outside of work. This past year, we continued to see adoption of our flexible schedules program: empowering our team to work when and how they work best.

View of the northern light from the city center in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Since executing a large global summit wasn’t feasible in 2022 due to continued uncertainty around the pandemic at the time of planning, 10up made investments in both remote team building activities and local meetups throughout the world, where team members in closer proximity got a chance to get to know one another IRL. Toward the end of the year, we announced a company-wide 2023 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, where 10uppers from all around the world are excited to gather, many for the first time.

Throughout our eleventh year, we also rolled out incentives for employees to spend more time volunteering by offering 10uppers the option to allocate their professional development budget to volunteer opportunities that apply and stretch the skills they hone at 10up, providing an opportunity to give back to the community they live and work in.

10up enters 2023 and its thirteenth year in a strong position with much to look forward to.

If you want to consider becoming a part of our growing team, we are hiring. If you’re interested in learning how 10up can help your organization create finely crafted websites and tools in 2023, reach out – we can’t wait to hear from you.