At Wordfence we are intensely customer focused. A few years ago when we made our first non-founder hires, we hired two amazing people: Matt Barry and Tim Cantrell. Matt is a spectacular engineer and immediately took ownership of the Wordfence code base and eventually wrote the core of what is the Wordfence Firewall today. Matt is also amazing to work with – one of the smartest and nicest people you’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting.
Tim is a customer service engineer, and since day 1, he has done a spectacular job. He is also just a super nice guy. We have all worked closely together since then, and today we are a team of almost 30 people including a much larger engineering organization and a sizable customer service team. Our core focus still reflects those early hiring decisions: Great engineering and excellent customer service – and Tim and Matt have driven much of that ethos from early on.
In our organization, we behave very much like most commercial software companies. We focus on code quality, stability and innovation. We have a constant feedback loop from our customer service team that feeds your wisdom and insights back into Wordfence. But the one thing that makes us a bit different from many large software organizations is that only 6% of the websites who use our product are paying customers. Or put differently, 94% of our users use the free Wordfence product.
When I published our post last week describing how we turn malware into new detection capability in Wordfence Scan, I included a chart that shows the number of malware signatures we have added over time in the past 5 months:
One thing that struck me when looking at this chart is how clear it is that our Premium Wordfence customers are powering an incredible free product for the community. The chart above really shows just one of the final products of the organization’s work: scan signatures that continuously improve the malware detection capability that Wordfence has.
As you can see in the chart, all malware signatures eventually, after 30 days become available to everyone in the community. That big jump in Premium signatures recently will also be reflected in the free signatures in a couple of weeks, and those signatures are not going away. They are gradually accumulating over time. The same is true for our firewall rules.
As we grow the Wordfence engineering team, customer service team, QA team and other areas, our free customers are all benefiting because most of Wordfence’s features are available to the community completely free. These free features include:
- The best malware scanner for WordPress in the business – which includes the ability to help clean hacked sites.
- A powerful web application firewall that blocks a huge number of attack variants.
- The ability to view your website traffic, web crawlers like Google and attacks on a live dashboard and react to them in real-time.
- Brute force attack prevention.
- A rate limiting firewall to help protect your content.
- A range of other tools like whois lookup, diagnostic tools and much more.
Our Wordfence Premium customers are the ones that are powering all these features and the team behind them. Our Premium customers also power the free support you receive on the WordPress.org support forums from our team.
Our Premium customers have also powered the incredible free WordPress Security Learning Center that we have created with tons of content, including professionally produced videos. It’s all free and exists to help secure the WordPress community.
And finally our Premium customers are the ones who power our ability to produce and publish ground-breaking research here, on this blog. We are also able to help our team attain new security certifications and maintain existing certifications. In addition our team can attend security conferences like RSA and DefCon to share insights with other security professionals.
Our Premium customers also empower us to continue to maintain and build a team of security professionals that are the best in the business when it comes to WordPress security.
So today I would like to extend a sincere and heartfelt thank you from our team and from all our community Wordfence users to our Premium customers for your support. Your decision to upgrade to the Premium version of Wordfence has empowered our team and the Wordfence product, and by extension your decision has helped secure the WordPress community and the 94% of our customers who use the free version.
Thank you!
From Mark Maunder, Wordfence Founder & CEO and the whole Wordfence Team.
The post A Big Thank You to our Premium Customers for Powering Wordfence and Helping Secure the Community appeared first on Wordfence.