2024: WooCommerce Agency Year in Review

HappyKite had a mixed year in 2024, we achieved many of our core goals but nearly everything took longer to achieve than planned and this has stifled growth and hit team morale a little.

Overall, I am exceptionally proud of the work we have done and the ongoing relationships we continue to forge with our clients. For 2025, we are left with questions about re-focusing our positioning, growing the team and improving our processes and SOPs.

The key numbers

Our financial year runs April to March, but my brain runs with the calendar year – so I’ll use those figures for this report. In 2024, gross revenue was around £325,000 or $404,000 USD, this is around the same level as 2023. Rising costs meant this squeezed our profit margins, but we are still just about profitable and a healthy business.

I am not too disappointed with these figures; we’ve seen a number of our clients struggle in the current economic environment and this year’s agency BenchPress report cited 56% of UK agencies with revenue under £1million making a loss or breaking even. So, whilst it is disappointing not to have grown revenue, I am proud that we’re in the 44% that were still profitable.

However, we want to better reward (and grow!) our awesome team and so we will be targeting significant growth in 2025.

Recurring retainers vs one off projects

We’re very fortunate to have a high level of recurring revenue with strong long-term partnerships with many of our WooCommerce clients. I like to think we’re really good at what we do, and this is most evident in our ridiculously low client churn rate. Once we have taken on a client it is near unheard of for us to stop working with them.

However, this year we did sadly lose one of our clients, the lovely people at Premier Performance. They moved away from WooCommerce and onto a proprietary tool that would also become their warehouse management software. We would usually discourage mixing the customer-facing store and an ERP system – but for their use case and budget, I can see the logic and we worked with their new supplier to ensure everything went smoothly. They sent us a lovely hamper and thank you note at Christmas too!

Despite that loss, more than 80% of our income was from ongoing retainers – this is up 7% on last year.

So, the good news is we’re growing our baseline recurring revenue and doing great work for our existing clients. However, the time taken to service those clients has meant that our income from one-off projects and new clients has reduced. We’ve actually turned away a number of projects this year, instead prioritising the needs of our existing clients.

Atomic Smash have been an agency that I have admired for some time and I saw that this past year they have really focused on their ‘Always Evolving’ offering, now even stating that they don’t do new website builds – but evolve what you already have. I do wonder if this is the business model we’ve unintentionally been running for the past few years as well.

Support ticket volume and performance

This was only the second year that we had a comprehensive support ticketing system for the agency. Prior to that, clients would email their account manager or other members of the team directly. However things would get missed this way. When we first introduced a ticketing system, some clients did have reservations but it’s been hugely successful to have one shared inbox where we can keep track of any issues, support or requests.

We resolved more than 650 support tickets in 2024, averaging 2.5 per day. This is 12% up on 2023 but tracks with our growth in retainers and growing adoption to use the ticketing system amongst our legacy clients. The day of the week with the highest volume of tickets was Tuesday, despite the team anecdotally feeling like it was always Fridays that got the busiest!

Our average response time to tickets was 2h 29m and our average resolution time was 1 day 10hrs 56m. I am really pleased with these numbers as our ticketing system is used by our clients as much for minor feature requests as it is for general support. So whilst some tickets are just to offer assistance with updating something, others are to build out new pages or functionality.

Our response times and resolution times met our SLA targets 96.4% of the time. Next year, we will get that number to 100%!

We will also work more to respond more promptly to tickets, there are many examples of tickets where the first response was the resolution because a member of the team was able to fix the issue in only an hour or two. We’ve learnt that with support, you cannot really over-communicate and in 2025 we will aim to reduce the first response to well below 2 hours.

Time tracking

I would love to include a breakdown of our time-tracking as an agency, to show how much of our time went on supporting our clients vs project management or sales and marketing work. Unfortunately, this was our poorest year yet for time tracking.

We usually get around 80% of our time tracked as a team and can gain some really useful data from this. This year we switched tools and, whilst we thought it was a good move, it lead to the team only tracking 53% of their time. I cannot complain, I was one of the worst culprits.

Unfortunately we cannot really draw too many conclusions from this data, especially as one member of the team (go Bex!) managed to track over 95% of their time so any reports would skew things negatively against the client accounts they worked on the most.

Recapping our Goals for 2024

Status: Achieved!

For several years, we had been using Asana for all our task and project management needs, we then added Everhour for time tracking. This past year we decided to move to something more suited to agencies which would give us more business intelligence; in February we moved to Productive.

Whilst we did achieve this goal, we haven’t exactly fallen in love with Productive. On the surface it is a significant improvement, we get much better clarity in terms of which clients and services are most profitable, something which the whole team can see.

However, to do this we need to set up so many budgets, time tracking then becomes more laborious for the team, we have much poorer integration with Freskdesk (our ticketing system), and everything just seems to take more clicks to do.

The end results are that it is a great tool, that most of the team aren’t really using… We’re now looking at trialing Bonsai, ClickUp or returning to Asana but adding something like Make and a bit of magic so we can still keep some of that business intelligence we’ve come to enjoy this year.

Status: Achieved!

We previously launched our website ready for the last WordCamp London. If you’re in the UK WordPress space then you’ll know how long ago that was! All agencies seem to be perpetually rebuilding their website, most of the iterations of which never see the light of day.

So a big goal for this year was to actually design, build and launch an updated version of our website – complete with updated branding. We managed to do that in September and whilst we still have a lot more WooCommerce case studies and other content to add, we’re proud that it now reflects us as a company much better (and it comes in both light and dark modes!).

Status: Failed!

This one is unfortunately a bit of a failure, in fact I consider it to be a personal failure. I have been building sites with WooCommerce for longer than it has existed! I was a big advocate of WordPress but also an eCommerce specialist and jumped on a plugin called JigoShop as soon as it launched. Fast forward 12 months and it was forked to become WooCommerce and I’ve been working with it ever since, building my entire business around it. So why, after all these years, are we not an official WooCommerce partner?!

Well, in the early days, you had to pass quite a few tests and show some really strong portfolio work. I never felt like we had big enough client names and just kept waiting to apply. Further down the line it became a paid program, where you had to pay quite a steep annual fee to be recommended. It later evolved into something which seemed quite ‘closed doors’ and you had to network and know the right people to get in. Then last year at the 2023 WooSesh it became much more open and they encouraged people to sign up. I decided we would apply once our new website launched… which then took us longer than planned as it was never a priority.

Now our shiny new website has launched and I’ve reached out, the Woo Expert program has (of course!) become discontinued – to be replaced by Automattic for Agencies; a new program launched this year, which aligns partners from all the Automattic properties into one program.

We’re now in this program and to qualify for their ‘Agency Partner’ tier, you have to hit a particular revenue figure in income from official WooCommerce plugin licenses, Pressable hosting or Jetpack services. We qualify with plugin licenses alone however these are all on our WooCommerce.com account and it is a requirement that they are moved to the A4A platform, and then connected to Jetpack (or the A4A connection plugin, which is just Jetpack Lite). This is frustrating, we will need to move each plugin over one by one as they come up for renewal and the requirement to have some form of Jetpack active on the client site is disappointing. We’re still deciding if this is worth it or not.

Status: Nearly

I would mark this one down as a ‘close, but not quite’. We have two plugins, we believe both justify being commercial plugins – we’ve run through all the standard testing, have had an external security audit of them from the genius that is Tim Nash and are largely ready to submit one or both of them. The problem arises with just how we do this.

Initially we planned to submit them to WooCommerce.com, the official marketplace. Through this platform, Woo will do most of the marketing for you and for their troubles, they take 30% of revenue. You still handle all support for the plugins.

We thought this was a good approach and offered us more clout as an agency, having approved plugins on the ‘official’ store. However, part of the license agreement with selling through them is that if you decide to move away in the future, they reserve the right to continue selling your plugin and even keep the name. All plugin code is GPL licensed, so whilst you could take your own code with you – if they keep the means of distribution and the name, they essentially keep the plugin.

I didn’t believe this to be much of a concern before, they had never pushed for such a radical step – but this year Matt’s actions with ‘forking’ ACF (until a judge forced him to stop) have me concerned.

Do I really want to put any part of my business into something which is solely controlled by Automattic when Matt is personally waging war with private equity and leaving large parts of the community as collateral damage?

The alternatives are selling direct and using Freemius or Lemon Squeezy to help with subscriptions and licensing. We will have to decide on that this year.

Personal Highlights from 2024

Right at the top of the list has to be our team meet-up, we hired a lovely (and very fancy) farmhouse for a few days, and all lived and worked together. We did some great work, I put on my business hat and did a presentation to the team – plus we sampled all the local takeaways, smashed an escape room and enjoyed the cottage’s grounds where we learnt to play croquet! I love the flexibility we have with remote working, but it is so nice to spend time with the team in person.

I am also incredibly proud that this year we implemented a comprehensive private healthcare plan for our team, via Bupa – as well as setting up a genuine EAP (Employee Assistance Program). This gives our team the support they need for both their continued physical and mental health.

A block-based future

Virtually every client site we have ever built was a custom theme, initially on the _s starter, using ACF to control any additional data. As client requirements evolved and their own marketing teams needed the ability to rapidly create new landing pages or make larger changes, we embraced Elementor as a page building tool. We would still custom build themes but would also use Elementor, building our own Elementor widgets as well – to give clients full control.

For the past few years, we have continued to do this, adding the Classic Editor plugin to effectively disable the block editing interface.

However in 2024, we decided the project had reached sufficient maturity and went all in on it for all new projects. I will probably write a longer post about the switch at some point, it has been painful at times and very frustrating. However a well-built site using blocks is so much more performant, future-proof and flexible than one using Elementor.

Whilst we will typically build custom themes still that use the best of the block editor, we have explored some FSE themes and have found the Ollie theme to be best in class here (this site is built using it!).

We’re now in the process of working with many of our clients to move them off Elementor where it makes sense to do so and to and fully embrace blocks.

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Business Goals for 2025

We are a purpose-driven business, we focus on the happiness of our team, our clients and their users. However I think there is a lot more we could be doing and so in 2025, we will be pursuing a B-Corp application. I am more excited about the process of preparing than I am about the actual accreditation. I am keen to see how we stack up now and which areas of our business we need to focus on.

This is the big one, we need to grow – we do this by growing our clients’ businesses and working with new clients that seem like a good fit. We’ve got a tonne of plans for our existing clients and are excited to see what we can achieve together in 2025.

We fell short last year, but this is still an aim we have. We will have to reassess the plan and it may be that we need to make some changes to our website and sell these directly ourselves.

Who are we? What do we do better than anyone else? We’re just a team of 6, which is not a lot of people for the huge range of services we offer our clients. When we’ve got more work than we can handle, it makes sense to only focus on the most profitable work where we feel we can add the most value for our clients.

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Personal Goals for 2025

How have I been working with WooCommerce for 14 years and HappyKite is nearly a decade old and yet I have shown so little of what we have done, built and achieved? We’re going to stop working in the dark and actually share what we’ve learnt and built. Less perfectionism and more transparency!

I attended WordCamp Whitley Bay in 2023 but could not make the 2024 dates. With no other UK WordCamp running, this meant attending zero events in 2024. There is an absolutely fantastic WP London meet-up which runs monthly, and I intend to start attending that – maybe even speaking eventually. Perhaps we should also be looking at attending WordCamp Europe again? We last attended in Vienna and have missed quite a few.

The fact that you’re reading this suggests that so far, so good. I aim to write here at least once a month, but will only do so when I think I actually have something of value to share.

This is the one I am most anxious about… I got back into running again when I was 36 and told my children I would do a triathlon before I was 40… which seemed like ages away. Well, I turn 39 in the next two weeks and so have just over a year to complete this. My children have not forgotten! Currently I can just about run a half marathon, but my cycling is average at best and my swimming is terrible. I’ll need to come up with a plan for this immediately, I fear.

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I am really excited for the year ahead; I think there are big things in our future here and I cannot think of a better group of people to tackle it all with than the lovely folk at HappyKite.