Whilst we might be well into January 2020 already – it’s never too late to reflect on what has been one hell of a year for Weglot (we mean that only in the good sense of course) and show you what we were getting up to behind the scenes for all 365 days of 2019. 

From a bigger team, to the launch of a universal version of Weglot, 2019 was the year that we stepped up our game and made website translation accessible to everyone, no matter what technology.  

We launched a new website in August, sponsored even more community events and reached our MRR objective. 

So, let’s take a look back and let you in on a few of our 2020 goals and resolutions. 

High five for our customer support

As the number of Weglot users grow, so does the number of questions users have or might need help with. We’ve always put our customers first and aim to reply within 1 business day (of course, sometimes customizations can be a little trickier) – and this year was no exception. 

In 2019 we had some pretty cool stats to share from the support team:

• 18,357 users helped
• With an average of 182 replies per day
• 35,921 closed cases 

Our support team is pretty amazing! No question is too big or too small and we often see them working to solve user cases quickly, calmly and together as a team. They worked hard in 2019 to streamline the support process to be as efficient as possible. 

This year the rest of the team also had the chance to get involved with support cases as we were each given 1 case a week. This gave us an insight into what our users were asking on a daily basis – plus it allowed other team members to interact with our customers. 

Rave reviews 

What we never get tired of seeing are the countless reviews that keep coming from our users. And, in 2019 we had a total of 516 to read through and pat ourselves on our backs for.  

Our customer support ethos remains for 2020 – we continue to help and reply to your queries and questions, even those from our free users. 

We deliver real human support – no machines here, just personalized responses from our team of 5 that deal with hundreds of support tickets a day!

The Weglot product 

To say 2019 was a big year for the Weglot product would be an understatement! 2019’s goal was to accomplish an even better product, streamline our performance and grow the overall number of Weglot users. 

Our dev team worked to bring big product improvements from the feedback we got from our users.   

And, we’re proud to say we achieved that and more…2019 saw a huge increase in MRR – helped by the launch of a new universal version of Weglot and a number of improved performance enhancements. 

A lot was achieved by the dev team. Just a few highlights of our product updates and changes made in 2019 include:

• Speed and code quality improved 
• Improvement on our translation API response time – from 300ms on average to under 100ms
• More flexible public/private mode with control over what language to publish or edit privately 
• More efficient ‘translations list’ search bar
• ‘Search and replace’ tool – new option to choose by language pair 
• Filter translations by URL
• Option to turn on or off media translations 
• Better access rules when adding team members to project 

This might all sound very technical, but overall these improvements are incredibly important even if they aren’t all visible. They help insure a great service even in years to come! 

That all meant we translated more than 1 billion pages in 2019!

A few other highlights on the product side included…

The universal version 

In May 2019, we launched a new universal version of Weglot meaning no matter what technology your website was created on, you could also use Weglot as your translation solution! So those using Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, PHP, Ruby on Rails and more could now have a multilingual website without code or duplicate pages. 

This was big for us. What drove us to develop this part of Weglot? The first reason was philosophical. When Weglot was founded, the main mission was always to develop a technology that would make any website multilingual. 

The second was to improve our product. As each CMS and community is different, it’s hard to make just one unique solution for everyone. But putting in the effort forced us to make a simple and complete product for all technologies. 

The final reason was from a business perspective. Weglot isn’t dependent on one CMS. Having our customers split across CMS and other technologies means we reduce our risk. 

You can read more about our journey to a universal Weglot here. 

Launching on Product Hunt  

Something we had always wanted to do was launch Weglot on Product Hunt and at the end of October 2019 we did just that. 

With a full month of prep behind us we were fairly confident we had everything ready to make Weglot seen and heard by an even wider audience – but was it enough to be placed at the all important #1 position? 

08:01am on the 29 October was no ordinary day for the Weglot team. We clicked ‘launch product’ and anxiously waited to see what response our simple, easy and no-code translation solution would bring…

That triggered a full 10 hours of ‘game on’ as we followed every step of our plan to bring home the #1 spot and get the Weglot name out there. 

24 hours later we were there, we made it – #1 product of the day and a sense of relief, happiness and achievement within the Weglot team. And, as of today we have 114 comments and more than 1000 upvotes – plus we saw a 220% increase in website traffic on the day! Job well done ?.   

GitHub students November 

November also saw us launch Weglot on the GitHub student pack. We’re now offering any student signed up to the GitHub student pack a 1-year Weglot Pro plan for free! We’re really proud to help student developers (like we once were) learn how to use Weglot for no cost. 

So, what’s to come in 2020? The first quarter of the year will see us launch a new version of Weglot dashboard that we’ve been working on for several months. 

This will greatly improve the user experience and make the whole process of collaborating and editing your translations even easier! Check out a sneak peek:

The Weglot team 

One of the big changes this year was growing the team. From just 4 people in 2016 to the 17 strong team we are now – a lot has changed in the office…(Which even extends to the fact restaurants can no longer accommodate us for our monthly team lunches!) 

And, in 2019 we welcomed 7 new full-time members – Nicolas, Meryl, Mehdi, Elizabeth, Guillaume, Julien and Thibaud. Plus a number of interns – Marie, Arthur, Sébastien, Madeleine and Samuel – in all areas of development, support, marketing and office management. 

Team activities

Our ethos here at Weglot is truly team focused and whilst that might sound pretty standard to most people or even a little wishy washy to some, it’s actually true here. We’re a growing team and it’s important we work well together and have fun outside of our Paris office. 

Which is why hanging out together as a team is never hard. From our aperos every 2 weeks to our 200k party and our incredible 2 day team trip to Bordeaux – there was a whole load of activity in the team bonding camp in 2019. 

What’s next for the team

The plan for 2020 will see new team members join within sales and support, as well as a number of new interns that will have the chance to get stuck in with the rest of the team and make their mark! 

And, hopefully plenty more aperos and team activities to come.

Saying hello to our customers

One of the things we love doing is meeting our users and getting to chat with them in real life. So that meant that along with all the WordCamps and meetups we were already taking part in, we also made sure our team had a big presence at both WordCamp Europe and WordCamp US.

WordCamp Europe

When pitching up to the Weglot WordCamp Europe 2019 stand, our CTO Rémy was impressed at just how professional it looked in comparison to 2018! Having attended all the WordCamp’s since 2017, he remarked that 2019 was the year we really out did ourselves. 

Just a few highlights included: proper branding, a bigger stand, a bigger team presence and a real sense that people knew who we were and wanted to speak to us.

WordCamp US

For the first time ever we took part in WordCamp US in November 2019. We’d become a regular face at the WordCamp Europe event, but had yet to attend the US one. 

So, 5 of us from the Weglot team embarked on a 10 hour flight from Paris to St. Louis to meet all our US customers (and potential new ones!). 
It was an event we were super happy to have taken part in. We met countless people who were already using Weglot and loving it! Plus, numerous people who came to chat to us out after they saw we would be attending.

We also had a chance to meet with many of our partners that we were already chatting to and working with. Overall it was just a great chance to meet so many of you in person and something we’ll continue to do.

Sponsorship

2019 was a big year for sponsorship. In total we sponsored more than 60 WordCamps and over 40 WordPress meetups. From Osaka to Sofia, Bristol to Hong Kong, we pretty much touched all 4 corners of the world last year! 

And, here are just a few highlights to share: 

Our plans for 2020? It won’t just be WordPress events we’ll be popping up at – we’ve got a whole load of different CMS events in our calendar – watch this space!

Reaching new content heights

In August we launched a new Weglot website to give ourselves a more professional site which was met with lots of great feedback from customers and partners. 

Changes also extended to the blog, but this time in terms of content not design. One of our targets for last year was to reach a wider audience with content that would actually be useful and insightful to readers working on different CMS platforms. 

With the arrival of 2 new team members to the content team we were able to push out more articles on a weekly basis and give more value (we hope!) to our audience who are looking for advice on topics such as international ecommerce, translation, theme options, etc (to mention just a few).  

Our new content strategy saw blog views increase by 139% and a 142% increase in new visitors. The Weglot blog took on a whole new look in 2019 with the help of new illustrations created by our content intern and we’ll be working on refreshing the overall design in 2020. 

If you want to check out some of our top posts from the year, here are a few that might catch your interest:

• 9 Tips for Designing a Multi Language Website
• 4 Key Search Engine Optimization Tips for Your Multilingual Website
• How to Set Up your Multilingual Shopify and Sell Worldwide
• How to Add a WordPress Language Switcher to Your Site
• How to Set Up Your Multilingual E-Commerce Website (in 5 Steps)

We also published a number of guides that went into even further detail than our blog articles. We covered – How to make your Squarespace site multilingual, Squarespace SEO: Your ultimate guide and International ecommerce: 35 ways to increase your conversion rate.  

Creating more video tutorials for other CMS platforms (Squarespace, Webflow and general), as well as answering some of the key questions we get from users was also a big priority for the year. 

And, for 2020? We plan on continuing with our blog progress, working on bringing you even more guides and a refreshed newsletter that brings you industry news on the points that matter to you. 

So what’s happening in 2020?   

So, how do we top last year? It’s only right to give the mic or in this case the keyboard over to our Co Founder Rémy for his outlook on 2020.  

“We have many plans for Weglot this year. Firstly, on the product side we’ll be releasing a major version this quarter (which you can check out a sneak peek of from my last Weglot update). The plan is to improve the overall ease of use and scalability of the Weglot platform to fit the needs of the biggest websites too.  

Next up is growing our team. January starts that off with a new support hero, followed by our first head of sales role who will help develop the reach and potential Weglot can offer to big and small businesses. 

Building closer relationships with bigger companies is also something we want to build on from last year. Which means we’ll continue investing a lot in communities like WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace…So make sure you come meet us at any event we participate at!“

Here’s to 2020! We’re looking forward to checking in on this article in 2021 to see just what else changes at Weglot and whether we kept to our 2020 plans.

And, as ever – please reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any feedback, ideas or need any help with Weglot. We’re only an email away!