As 2025 comes to an end, I’ve decided to write my first “year in review”, to look back at what I’ve achieved this year running my small WordPress business, RelyWP, as a solo developer.
It’s been a busy year with some big milestones, a major change in how I run my business, and a new plugin launch.
Here is a look at what I’ve been up to, with a few interesting statistics included.
A Big Change for RelyWP
I made a big decision this year regarding my business, RelyWP.
For a long time, I offered a mix of client services like hosting, care plans, and building websites.
However, as my plugins got more popular and now make up a majority of my income, I wanted to spend all my time on them.
Because of that, I decided to stop offering those other services to new customers, and slowly started helping some of my existing care plan customers transition to alternative providers.
RelyWP is now 100% focused on my WordPress plugins. It was a big step to move away from the service side of things, but it’s great to be able to focus 100% on making my plugins the best they can be.
Statistics:
- Income from plugin sales now accounts for over 90% of my businesses total revenue. Just 5 years ago this was at less than 10%.
- Total revenue increased by around 14% this year.
- Main portfolio now consists of 8 plugins, 2 of which are 100% free.
10 Years of Coupon Affiliates
One of the biggest highlights for me was reaching 10 years of Coupon Affiliates.
Building a plugin and keeping it going for a decade is something I’m quite proud of, and it has now become my main focus and biggest source of income.
It’s gone through many updates and changes over the years, and I’m thankful for all the users who have provided feedback, and helped it grow into what it is today.
A key lesson I learned over the years from this plugin is that sometimes growth can take time. The first 3 years of this plugin gained essentially no revenue. The 4th and 5th years are when it started to generate a small amount of revenue, then it rapidly grew from 2021.
Each year the plugin has seen continued growth, with 2024 being the best year so far, and 2025 being a slight decrease in growth in comparison, but still going strong.
Statistics:
- Revenue for Coupon Affiliates increased by around 11% in 2025.
- MRR increased by 6.4%, and churn reduced by 9% in 2025.
- Around 3.7% of revenue lost to refunds or chargebacks in 2025.
- 42 total updates were released in 2025, with 2 major, 9 large, and 31 small.
- Received over 1000 new support tickets in 2025, averaging over 2.7 per day.
Simple Cloudflare Turnstile: 3 Years Old + 100k Installs
A free plugin of mine, “Simple Cloudflare Turnstile”, became 3 years old in 2025.
This plugin has grown much faster than I expected.
In July, it reached a huge milestone of 100,000 active installs, and is continuing to grow at a rapid rate (over 5.8k per month), with it likely to reach 200,000 by the end of 2026 if this kind of growth continues.
It actually started as just a quick weekend project, but has now consumed many hours of work, so seeing it become one of the most popular plugins for WordPress sites to stop spam is nice.
It’s been a lot of work and can be difficult to keep up with the support and updates, especially when its completely free, but it’s definitely been worth it for the most part.
Unfortunately a name change was required this year for the plugin, due to trademark concerns, so the new official name on the directory is: Simple CAPTCHA Alternative with Cloudflare Turnstile
Statistics:
- The plugin is now gaining around 5800+ new active installs per month.
- There were 17 total updates released, with 9 large, and 8 small in 2025.
- 61 new 5 star reviews, and 8 donations were received in 2025.
- Over 280 new support threads were created on the forums, and 17 on GitHub.
- The “setup guide” post for this plugin, which is linked in the settings page, now receives an average of around 800 visits per month.
reCAPTCHA for WooCommerce: 40k Installs
My other free plugin “reCAPTCHA for WooCommerce“, which was also launched in 2022, also recently hit 40k active installs in November 2025.
As expected, growth for this plugin is slowing down due to Cloudflare Turnstile being the new preferred choice by many users, however it does still seem to still be growing at a reasonable rate, likely due to Google still holding a large and loyal user base.
Statistics:
- There were 7 updates released in 2025.
- The “setup guide” post for this plugin, which is linked in the settings page, now receives an average of around 240 visits per month.
Launched Simple Points and Rewards
With the extra time I gained from focusing on plugins, I was able to build and launch a brand new one this year: Simple Points and Rewards
I wanted to create a loyalty plugin for WooCommerce that was easy to use, didn’t have a bunch of unnecessary features, but still extremely powerful and visually appealing.
The launch went even better than I expected. I’ve already had some great feedback and positive reviews, which is great to see when putting something new out there.
Statistics:
- In the first month after launch, the plugin gained around 30+ active installs and two 5 star reviews. Although it may not be huge numbers yet, this is a great start considering I’ve done little marketing so far.
- In the first month, around 30%-40% purchases were by existing customers from my other plugins, finding it through the newsletter announcement.
16 Years of WordPress
The end of this year marks 16 years since I first started using WordPress.
I began using it back in 2009, and it’s great to see how much it has changed since then. It’s been a huge part of my life for a long time now and looking forward to many more years ahead.
If interested, I recently wrote about my history with WordPress here.
Looking Ahead to 2026… WordCamp?
In 2026, my main goal is to keep improving and growing the plugins I already have. I have several ideas for new features and improvements that I’m excited to start working on over the next year.
I’m also finally planning to hopefully go to my first ever WordCamp Europe in 2026, which will be in Poland. Even though I’ve been using WordPress for 16 years, I’ve actually never been to one of the events in person. It’ll be my first one, so I’m a little nervous about the unknown, but looking forward to meeting other people from the WordPress community. Maybe I’ll see you there?
Thanks for reading, and happy new year!
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