WordCamp London 2016 survey results

While there was much to takeaway from WordCamp London 2016, one of our own particular goals was to really quiz WordPress users, and find out what was most important to their WordPress hosting experience.

Throughout the second day (see: calmer!) of #WCLDN we asked everyone who stopped by our stand to share their thoughts with us. We asked users to select the three most important features to them when selecting WordPress hosting – from the following list:

Multiple site hosting
MultiSite WordPress Feature
High Availability
Server based Caching
Vagrant/Docker matching images
Web Application Firewall
Management Services
Dedicated WooCommerce Support
Phone based technical support
WordPress Advice
Automated updates to plugins
Automated updates to core
Staging site
WP-CLI Support
Git Support
Email
Free Daily Backups

We all had our guesses as to the top picks going into the day, but what we hadn’t predicated was the torment some visitors had having to whittle their selection down to just three. Some people couldn’t take the pressure and picked four or five. We’ll forgive them of course, this is serious stuff.

And the results? Quite honestly, a fairly mixed bag:

One big takeaway away for us right off the bat is that staging and backups account for a good 25% of those surveyed – which we think loosely translates as – “I really want to be able to experiment with my site, and be covered if it all goes wrong”. The traditional model of adding a plugin, hitting go and crossing your fingers is not something that WordPress users are comfortable with anymore.

We’re also sure our WordPress platform lead Tim would agree with the larger sentiment on backups too. Tim spoke in depth about the importance of keeping your own offline and tested backups at WordCamp London; and indeed continues to teach the good words on backups. If you missed any of Tim’s talks, don’t worry, the WordCamp London videos will be out soon on and we’ll link to them here.

We’re going to keep running these surveys at events we attend throughout the year like Wordcamp Brighton, Wordcamp Belfast, Wordcamp Manchester and more – we’ll let you know how the trends continue.