Looking Back at 2021 — Kinsta Year in Review

2021 is now gone, and oh, boy — was it ever a challenging year for everyone! To varying extents, everyone had to keep up with a pandemic changing our habits, modifying the way we work, affecting our day-to-day lives, and, ultimately, impacting how we feel.

For many, the end of every year is a perfect time to look back at what you’ve accomplished and where you might have failed, and — more broadly — plan for the new year ahead of you and your business.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing here in this blog post.

Before diving in, we’d like to thank all of our customers for trusting Kinsta and choosing us to host their businesses, like WooCommerce stores, high-trafficked publications, and agency sites. And that’s just to name a few of the many business types we’re happy to support.

A public note of appreciation wouldn’t be complete without a sincere “thank you” dedicated to all our readers, followers, viewers, and listeners. In 2021, we embarked on adventures with new channels (more on this below), and we had the opportunity to reach new audiences, get to know, and engage with them. Thank you all for being so proactive!

We thank you on behalf of the team members at Kinsta. Our colleagues and friends make Kinsta possible and provide you the very best hosting experience you can get these days. You can get to know them by taking a look at our About page.

Now, it’s time to share some really interesting facts and stats about 2021 at Kinsta.

Are you ready? Let’s jump in!

Customer Base and Revenue Growth

In 2021, our customer base has grown by over 41.8% when compared to the previous year! March was by far our busiest month ever in terms of new customer signups. Kinsta now serves more than 22,500 customers from all around the world.

Some might think: more customers means more money! And they wouldn’t be wrong one bit.

In 2021, Kinsta saw a resounding 47% increase in revenue compared to 2020. To put things into perspective, by the end of the year, our recurring revenue was approximately 60 times what it was at the end of 2015.

PHP Version of Sites Hosted at Kinsta

To serve up some juicy data, here’s the summary of which PHP versions have been the most common among Kinsta customers in 2021:

Kinsta supports PHP 8.1 on all environments. Every new PHP version comes with performance improvements. That’s why we encourage everyone to upgrade to the latest PHP version available on their staging site at first, to test things out and see improvements for themselves.

We make this process super easy through MyKinsta!

What about the most-used WordPress versions among Kinsta customers? Let’s take a look at those numbers next.

WordPress Versions Used by Kinsta Customers

At a glance, you can see that WordPress 5.8.2 sits at the very top of our chart (70.04% of sites hosted), followed by WordPress 5.7.4 (7.81%), with WordPress 5.8.1 (4.72%) in third place.

And here are some additional stats on the data we delivered every month:

• 50 billion HTTP requests served through Kinsta
• 1.9 petabytes of data served by Kinsta
• 17+ billion HTTP requests served through the integrated CDN
• 760+ terabytes of data served by the integrated CDN

Kinsta Support, You Say? Unparalleled

One of Kinsta’s pillars — our North Star — has always been our dedication to providing incredible customer support. When customers reach out and ask for help, we’ll do everything we can to make sure there’s a knowledgeable Support Engineer available to assist.

Let’s take a look at what data from actual customers tells us and see how they rated our support in 2021.

We’ve averaged around a 97% positive conversation rating all year (as with the previous year). This tells us we’re doing a great job at supporting our customers.

But hold on a minute — there are more statistics about Kinsta’s support efforts in 2021 I’d like to share:

• 146,658 support conversations responded to (up from 105,182 as recorded in 2020)
• The median first response time was 1:22s (down from 1:40 as recorded in 2020)
• The median time to close was 43:37s (down from 43:55 as recorded in 2020)
• The median positive rating was 97% (same as 2020)
• 4 p.m. UTC was our busiest time in support (same as 2020)
• The Malware and Abuse team handled 5,142 cases of spam/malware/terms-of-service violations
• The Migrations team moved over 8,500 sites to our platform

To make sure we’re able to take care of all customers promptly and effectively, in 2021, we hired 25 additional support engineers (while in 2020 we hired 15 support engineers). Kinsta support is available in English 24/7/365 and, thanks to our bilingual Support Engineers, we’re also able to assist customers in several other languages.

The multilingual support schedule is as follows:

• Spanish support is available weekdays between 2 p.m. and 12 a.m. UTC. ??
• French support is available weekdays between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m. UTC. ??
• German support is no longer available.
• Italian support is available weekdays between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. UTC. ??
• Portuguese support is available weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. UTC ??

We’re always on the lookout for more talented Engineers to join our team. If you’re interested, check out our Careers page.

We feel lucky and privileged to be serving such amazing customers. And it really warms our hearts reading how much they appreciate what we do and the help they receive from us:

Shout-outs and a massive “Thank you!” to our fantastic Support and Sysadmin teams for their work!

Team Expansion Grew by 64% — No Slowing Down

We began the year with 158 team members. Now, we currently have 259 talented team members spread around the world! The HR team has been busy with this 64% increase, including welcoming some new roles to our own team.

This year we have also launched our Career Development program, with a cool $1,000 per year to spend on enhancing our team member’s skills, plus career conversations happening regularly throughout the year. We also launched our Leadership Development program to enhance our managers’ skill sets, providing extra tools that they’ll need to provide an environment in which professionals flourish.

It was also very flattering to have made the list of the Best Places to Work for remote teams. What’s more, our team member NPS pulse surveys have shown a steady rating of over 80 (which, if you know your NPS ratings, you’ll know is exceptionally good!).

We’re still growing, so make sure you visit and/or bookmark our Careers page if you’re interested in joining us!

Connecting and Supporting WordPress Communities Around the World

Similar to 2020, last year saw plenty of in-person events get canceled/postponed or moved to virtual events. Kinsta has always actively supported WordPress communities around the world, and 2021 was no exception.

WordCamps

Even though we’ve said goodbye to 2021, it might still take a little longer before we can attend in-person events safely. Will 2022 finally be the year?

Let’s hope so — we can’t stress enough how much we’re looking forward to meeting everyone and chatting about WordPress, website speed, SEO strategy, or anything else, as soon as in-person events are possible again!

Feature Updates and Changes in 2021

In 2021, our engineers and development teams were quite busy. We’ve put together a list of the key feature updates and changes we rolled out last year so you can see how far ahead we leaped (make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to never miss an update).

Cloudflare Integration (New CDN, Enterprise-level Security, Wildcard SSLs Support)

The biggest update in 2021 was, without a doubt, integrating Cloudflare into our Kinsta hosting solutions and making it available at no additional cost to all customers across all plans.

Thanks to this enhancement to our tech stack and server architecture, Kinsta customers today take advantage of an enterprise-level firewall with included DDoS protection, HTTP/3 support, wildcard SSLs, and the high-performance Kinsta CDN, which is powered by Cloudflare’s global network spanning nearly 200 cities in more than 100 countries.

During our performance benchmark tests, we saw up to a 44% reduction in page load time in sites using Kinsta CDN, compared to those that weren’t using it. If you haven’t yet, make sure to enable Kinsta CDN on your site.

DevKinsta

We’ve been listening to our customers’ feedback here at Kinsta since day one. And one of the most frequent requests we’ve had was to provide more tools for developers to make their work (and their lives) easier.

In 2020, we released Kinsta APM, our powerful built-in tool for application performance monitoring. In 2021, we released DevKinsta, our forever-free local WordPress development suite of tools. We made it available for macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu.

One of the greatest things about Devkinsta is its community forum, where users share tips, talk about how they’re using DevKinsta, and have a way to raise issues directly with us.

To use DevKinsta, you don’t need to be a Kinsta customer, so feel free to download it and give it a try — 16,500+ other developers have already!

5 New Data Center Locations

Placing your website as close as possible to your customers and users is one of the most important factors to improving your pages’ load times and reducing latency.

In 2021, we added five new Google Cloud data center locations. You can now choose from 35 total locations:

• Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)
• Hong Kong (asia-east2)
• Tokyo, Japan (asia-northeast1)
• Osaka, Japan (asia-northeast2)
• Seoul, South Korea (asia-northeast3)
• Mumbai, India (asia-south1)
• Delhi, India (asia-south2) — New!
• Jurong West, Singapore (asia-southeast1)
• Jakarta, Indonesia (asia-southeast2)
• Sydney, Australia (australia-southeast1)
• Melbourne, Australia (australia-southeast2) — New!
• Warsaw, Poland (europe-central2) — New!
• Hamina, Finland (europe-north1)
• St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1)
• London, United Kingdom (europe-west2)
• Frankfurt, Germany (europe-west3)
• Eemshaven, Netherlands (europe-west4)
• Zurich, Switzerland, (europe-west6)
• Montréal, Canada (northamerica-northeast1)
• Toronto, Canada (northamerica-northeast2) — New!
• São Paulo, Brazil (southamerica-east1)
• Santiago, Chile (southamerica-west1) — New!
• Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1)
• Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (us-east1)
• Ashburn, Virginia, USA (us-east4)
• The Dalles, Oregon, USA (us-west1)
• Los Angeles, California, USA (us-west2)
• Salt Lake City, Utah, USA (us-west3)
• Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (us-west4)

Unlimited Free Basic WordPress Migrations

We’ve always asserted that changing host providers should be as easy as submitting a ticket to support.

In 2021, we put our vision into practice and introduced a big change to how many (and from which) hosting providers you can request a free basic migration from.

Specifically, all new customers and existing ones can now request unlimited basic WordPress migrations at no cost, every time they need one, regardless of which hosting provider they’ll need the website migrated from.

To request your free basic migrations, you should:

1. Create an account (if you’re a new customer).
2. Make your request directly through MyKinsta, following the steps outlined in our documentation, based on whether you’re requesting migrations from another hosting provider or from a backup file.

Selective Push

One of the features most appreciated by our customers is Kinsta’s staging environments, which come for free on all plans. In 2021, we made these even more useful by enriching them with Selective Push functionality.

Thanks to the Selective Push feature, you’ll have more granular control on what you can push live. In fact, you can choose to:

Additional Updates

In addition to all of the major feature updates and changes mentioned above, here’s a list of a few additional feature announcements. As you can see, our Development, Engineering, and MyKinsta teams have been quite busy!

The Kinsta Reviews Are In

The best compliment we could ever receive as a hosting company is knowing that Kinsta has helped a customer’s business succeed and has given them peace of mind.

We feel fortunate to receive thousands of these reviews from customers around the world who have shared their Kinsta experience and the SEO, speed, and security benefits they’ve seen after making the switch.

You can read more Kinsta reviews on G2, Trustpilot, and Google.

More Content, More Formats

If 2020 was the year in which we tested the waters with videos by launching our YouTube channel, 2021 is its twin in spirit, as we embarked on a new (and really exciting) quest with Reverse Engineered, Kinsta’s business and tech podcast!

Reverse Engineered

Launched in 2021 and hosted by Jon Penland, Chief Operating Officer at Kinsta, Reverse Engineered is our podcast where entrepreneurs from companies like Google, Databox, Pentagram, eWebinar, and more share their wins, losses, and business stories.

Below, for example, you’ll get to hear from Austin Ginder, who’s a solo developer managing more than 1,300 WordPress websites on his own:

When we heard Austin’s story, we were blown away, and we just knew it would interest our wider audience!

If you’d like to listen and watch more stories from some of the most inspiring and brilliant voices in the tech industry, make sure to tune in and subscribe to Reverse Engineered:

Pssst… we’re working on the upcoming Season 2 of RE, but you didn’t hear it from me! 😉

Kinsta’s YouTube Channel

It’s been a little more than a year since we launched our YouTube channel. 2021 was the year in which we successfully started building a video community and put to use our experience with YouTube SEO.

As you can see, 2021 has been marked by an ongoing upward trend in terms of growth for our channel. That’s the result of our huge commitment to and teamwork in producing high-quality and useful content, which most of our viewers seem to appreciate.

Since videos provide a powerful way to communicate, we’ll for sure keep focusing on them this year and in the future.

Actually, I cannot wait for everyone to see what we’ve been cooking in the past few months in terms of new videos! To make sure you won’t miss those and all the helpful tutorials we regularly publish, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

How Much We Published in 2021

Who would like to know how much content we published last year?

I see lots of hands in the air, so… here goes:

• New Blog Posts: 181
• New Knowledge Base Articles: 64
• Help Center Articles: 149
• New Videos: 202
• New Landing Pages: 50+
• New Case Studies: 9
• New Feature Updates: 15
• New Ebooks: 7
• Weekly Newsletters: 51

This list doesn’t take into account all the content updates published throughout 2021. Kinsta’s content machine keeps pushing its limits further every year.

The number above gives you a partial view of how many pieces of content we were able to produce as they’re all related to our main site (kinsta.com) and written in English. Kinsta, though, also serves audiences that don’t speak English.

That’s where our Global Expansion team and translators, with their immense workload and effort, have stepped in to help deliver content in other languages that aren’t English. Here below, you can see how much content the Global Expansion produced (combining all languages Kinsta is available in):

• Blog posts: 1,169
• Knowledge Bases: 454
• Feature Updates: 97
• Landing Pages: 261

We could never thank all of them enough for their work and their help in making sure our content reaches users who don’t speak English.

Most-Read Articles of 2021

To be able to get the full picture, on top of the quantity, let me share with you which written content pieces performed the best.

Top 10 Blog Posts

1. How to Fix Your Connection is Not Private Error in Chrome (18 Tips)
2. How to Fix a 502 Bad Gateway Error on Your WordPress Site
3. 22 Alternative Search Engines to Use
4. How to Use the Gmail SMTP Server to Send Emails for Free
5. How to Fix the ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT Error (Step by Step)
6. 13 Ways to Find Someone’s Email Address (Level Up Your Outreach Game)
7. How to Fix the ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED Error in Chrome (9 Tips)
8. How to Fix the 504 Gateway Timeout Error on Your WordPress Site
9. How to Fix The ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS Error
10. How to Fix the 405 Method Not Allowed Error on Your WordPress Site

Top 10 Knowledge Base Articles

1. How to Fix DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN in Chrome
2. How to the Fix ‘DNS Server Not Responding’ Error on Windows and Mac
3. How to Fix the NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID Error
4. 10 Ways to Fix the NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID Error
5. How to Fix a 400 Bad Request Error [Causes and Fixes]
6. How to Fix the SSH “Connection Refused” Error
7. How to Fix the “SSL Handshake Failed” Error (5 Methods)
8. How to Clear Cache for All Major Browsers
9. How to Fix the ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR
10. How to Fix the NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID Error

What to Expect in 2022

Did you enjoy this deep dive into Kinsta’s 2021? Hope so!

But, hey, the new year has started already, and although I can’t spill the beans and share everything we’ll be introducing in 2022 — which, trust me, will be unprecedented! — I’m happy to give you a sneak peek.

Faster and More Secure Websites

Edge computing provides endless opportunities to improve our hosting platform and, by extension, our offerings to our customers.

These speed benefits are why Kinsta built a code minification feature into the MyKinsta dashboard. Customers can choose to opt into automatic code minification for their CSS and JavaScript files, speeding up their sites with zero manual effort.

More Solutions to Help Customers Grow Their Business

We care about our customers, and we always try to support them at our best. This means we regularly introduce new tools and features; we promptly reply to their support requests; we publish tutorials and tips; and we keep our documentation sleek.

2022 will be the year in which we’ll be delivering new and more specific solutions to help developers, agencies, and businesses thrive online.

What Else?

Well, suffice to say that 2022 will be the year in which Kinsta’s going to innovate beyond anything you’ve come to expect from a WordPress host!

We’d love to hear from our customers about what Kinsta features or posts helped them the most in 2021. Comment to share yours! We appreciate your continued support and we’re always looking forward to hearing from you.

Here’s to a great start to 2022!

As 2021 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to say thank you to our customers ?

Thank you for inspiring us, for trusting us, and for allowing us to be part of your journey this year.

We can’t wait to see what 2022 has in store. ?#TeamKinsta #HappyNewYear pic.twitter.com/u6H8A9DCWN

— Kinsta (@kinsta) December 31, 2021