What does it take to market a WordPress plugin?

In December of last year, when I wrote about my struggles with the number of hours I have been working, I shared a graph similar to this one, of Accessibility Checker’s growth.

Show/Hide Accessibility Checker active installs data table

Date	Active Installs
2021-01-20	20
2021-01-24	34
2021-01-31	60
2021-02-07	69
2021-02-14	72
2021-02-21	85
2021-02-28	98
2021-03-07	119
2021-03-14	128
2021-03-21	134
2021-03-28	151
2021-04-04	160
2021-04-11	166
2021-04-18	169
2021-04-25	173
2021-05-02	191
2021-05-09	209
2021-05-16	223
2021-05-23	233
2021-05-30	253
2021-06-06	264
2021-06-13	276
2021-06-20	294
2021-06-27	309
2021-07-04	321
2021-07-11	333
2021-07-18	345
2021-07-25	361
2021-08-01	373
2021-08-08	373
2021-08-15	379
2021-08-22	386
2021-08-29	395
2021-09-05	407
2021-09-12	414
2021-09-19	422
2021-09-26	445
2021-10-03	454
2021-10-10	464
2021-10-17	476
2021-10-24	495
2021-10-31	513
2021-11-07	525
2021-11-14	524
2021-11-21	536
2021-11-28	548
2021-12-05	543
2021-12-12	544
2021-12-19	554
2021-12-26	560
2022-01-02	567
2022-01-09	585
2022-01-16	588
2022-01-23	600
2022-01-30	606
2022-02-06	611
2022-02-13	618
2022-02-20	636
2022-02-27	691
2022-03-06	729
2022-03-13	754
2022-03-20	772
2022-03-27	782
2022-04-03	805
2022-04-10	825
2022-04-17	848
2022-04-24	856
2022-05-01	864
2022-05-08	885
2022-05-15	916
2022-05-22	952
2022-05-29	970
2022-06-05	995
2022-06-12	1015
2022-06-19	1038
2022-06-26	1066
2022-07-03	1088
2022-07-10	1114
2022-07-17	1121
2022-07-24	1132
2022-07-31	1142
2022-08-07	1153
2022-08-14	1168
2022-08-21	1198
2022-08-28	1232
2022-09-04	1275
2022-09-11	1316
2022-09-18	1355
2022-09-25	1377
2023-03-12	2000
2023-11-12	3000
2024-06-30	4000
2025-04-27	5000
2025-06-27	6000
2025-08-28	7000
2025-10-11	8000
2025-11-27	9000
2026-01-10	10,000

Twelve days after publishing that post, on January 10th, Accessibility Checker hit 10,000 active installs on WordPress.org. The graph above has been updated to include that milestone.

Accessibility Checker is five years old and has shown steady growth, but, as I wrote last December, it really took off over the past 12 months. We more than doubled active installs, from 4,000 to 10,000, in seven months, and increased Accessibility Checker revenue by 44.3% in 2025. Year-to-date in 2026, we’ve exceeded our product revenue target (based on the budget we set in December) by more than 26%.

There has been a lot of talk in the WordPress space about the impact of AI on plugin companies, and several WP founders have openly discussed sales stagnation or even dramatic revenue decreases. As described above, we have not experienced a slowdown—we’re fully in ramp-up mode.

I’ve been promising for a while to shine a light backstage, and this 5-year, 10k+ installs milestone feels like a good moment to do it. So, that’s what this blog post is. A look at what it has taken to get over 10k active installs and some advice for other product owners.

Marketing in the early days

How Accessibility Checker started

Accessibility Checker was built during COVID. It just happened that, right before the world went crazy, we were already planning to create a software product and had taken out a Small Business Administration loan to fund our team working on an internal project instead of client work. Accessibility Checker development and the Equalize Digital website build were funded by that ~$120k SBA loan and additional Paycheck Protection Program funds that saved us when much of our client work dried up during COVID.

When we launched Accessibility Checker in December 2020, we didn’t have an email list beyond 50-60 current clients. We had been doing accessibility work in client projects, but we were known as a marketing and web shop, not an accessibility company. We were “known” as Road Warrior Creative (RWC)—I put “known” in quotes because I won’t say I was particularly good at marketing or differentiating us as RWC. We had some great clients, but we didn’t have a strong inbound pipeline or any audience we could lean into to buy our newly released plugin.

Equalize Digital was a massive pivot not only in what we were selling, but in our entire company identity.

Initial challenge: time and money

If any time was the right time for that pivot, COVID was it. However, we knew that users and buyers would not come overnight, and we hedged against that.

When you’re bootstrapping a WordPress plugin or any software product, you typically need something else to pay the bills. We kept the RWC website up and kept doing business as RWC for more than two years after we first released Accessibility Checker in December 2020.

Let’s just say, it’s not “build it and buyers will come.” This isn’t the field of dreams.

Because we could only afford to take time off from client work for a short time, initial marketing efforts in 2021 were limited, and then we dove back into client work to ensure bills were paid.

You can see that client work was taking priority by looking at the number of blog posts and the GitHub commit history for Accessibility Checker. We didn’t release many plugin updates that year, and there were months when we didn’t publish a single blog post. Accessibility Checker dev and marketing had to squeeze into whatever available time we had.

2021 marketing

In the first months after launch, I marketed the plugin in whatever free ways I could find to reach other people’s audiences (because we didn’t have one):

• 7 podcast interviews (you can find these on my press page if you want to see what early-day messaging sounded like).
• 1 feature on The Enterprise League blog.
• Spoke at a handful of WordPress meetups that were still meeting online post-COVID.
• Spoke at Knowbility’s AccessU accessibility conference, which is local to me (no travel costs).
• Organized WPCampus 2021, which was online and targets one of our key customer groups: higher education. (Fun fact: organizing this conference was what got me noticed by the team building the NASA website, and eventually led to NASA buying our plugin and hiring us as the accessibility team on the NASA.gov rebuild.)
• Spoke at WordCamp Santa Clarita (online).
• Joined several WordPress-related Facebook groups (like The Admin Bar) and engaged whenever there was an accessibility question. I never broke the “no self-promotion” rules; I just provided really helpful accessibility advice so people would start to see me as an expert.
• Started our own Facebook group.

In addition to speaking and engagement, I did three key things to set us up for marketing success:

1. In July 2021, I started the WordPress Accessibility Meetup. This provided a way to educate people about accessibility and guaranteed that at least two blog posts (meetup recaps) would be published on our website each month. I didn’t have time to create much content, but it was simple for our content specialist to write presentation summaries without any knowledge of accessibility. Bringing in outside speakers also helped us get in front of the speakers’ audiences when they shared the event and recap links. Average attendance was 25 people per meetup.
2. In November of 2021, we started an email newsletter, figured out a process for getting people to subscribe, and made a plan to send emails every other week.
3. Also in November, we took the advice of Kim Coleman of Paid Memberships Pro and added our free plugin as a product on our website, instead of directing people WordPress.org. Downloads still pull from WordPress.org, but this gave us a way to capture people’s email addresses when previously we had been sending them off-site. This lets us add people to a drip automation for nurturing into paying customers.

In 2021, we published 21 blog posts, 12 of which were meetup recaps. Our website was brand new at the end of 2020, so we didn’t have any pre-existing traffic to leverage. Until we created our email newsletter at the end of the year, we didn’t even have a good way to capture prospective customers or follow up with people who attended the meetup.

We ended our first year with 560 active installs.

2022 marketing

Marketing in 2022 was much like 2021: doing what I could around client work and largely things that took time or effort but little money. The underlying theme of my efforts was “be as helpful as possible” — I figured that sharing knowledge and being helpful was the best way I could reach people when we didn’t have any budget for ads.

This was marketing in 2022:

• Ran 25 meetups with an average attendance of 54 people at daytime events and 47 at evening events.
• Published 37 blog posts (24 of which were meetup recaps).
• Sent email newsletters about twice a month (sometimes fewer).
• I gave 7 podcast interviews.
• I spoke at AccessU again (in person, but local) and was paid to deliver several accessibility webinars for iThemes and The Nonprofit Learning Lab.
• I spoke at Recurring Revenue Retreat, which made this possible by covering my travel expenses.
• Continued engagement in Facebook groups, especially The Admin Bar, where the frequency of accessibility questions was higher than in a lot of other groups, but also, it just had the best vibe for connecting with agency owners.
• We got the meetup pre-approved for continuing education credits toward accessibility certifications with the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, which opened our meetups up to a new audience beyond typical WordPress attendees.

In 2022, we sold one of our other WordPress plugins to Liquid Web (it’s now part of The Events Calendar), which gave us extra cash to invest in marketing Accessibility Checker:

• We paid to sponsor HighEdWeb’s online accessibility summit, a conference geared toward web and IT professionals in higher ed. The sponsorship was less expensive than many in-person events, but it gave me a speaking slot, and we received an email list of opted-in attendees, all of whom were in one of our key customer groups.
• We also paid for our partner Steve and me to travel to WordCamp US in San Diego, where I spoke on accessibility, and we did a lot of networking with other WordPress folks.

In 2022, I started contributing more to the WordPress open source project than I had in the past. A few times, I opened tickets in Trac or participated in accessibility team meetings via Slack, and became more vocal about accessibility in WordPress itself. I attended my first contributor day at WordCamp US. And, together with Joe Dolson, I revived the WP Accessibility Day conference, with Equalize Digital as a top sponsor.

Plugin growth in 2022 was slow but picking up. In February, we saw the growth curve steepen slightly, and we hit 1000 active installs in June 2022 — 508 days after launching on WordPress.org.

We ended the year with 1,654 active installs, 1,100 more than the prior year.

Making a bigger investment

We knew early on that we wanted to grow faster than we could by bootstrapping and funding the product with client work.

In 2021, we participated in the Mass Challenge accelerator. I spent a good portion of late 2021 through Q3 2022 trying to find investors, without much luck. We had a handful of promising conversations that dried up in the summer of 2022 due to world economic changes. Chris, Steve, and I decided to put fundraising on pause as a result. Then, just a few months later, we connected with Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt, which led to a pre-seed investment from their company Emilia Capital in March 2023.

Bringing on investors gave us extra cash for two important things: hiring a full-time developer so the plugin could move faster, and paying for paid marketing and travel.

2023 marketing

Investor dollars enabled us to do much more marketing beginning in 2023. Here are some of the highlights:

• Ran 24 meetups with an average attendance of 82 people at daytime events and 51 at evening events.
• Published 34 blog posts (22 of which were meetup recaps).
• Launched our Accessibility Craft podcast in February 2023, which releases episodes every Monday, alternating between conversations with Chris, Steve, and me (there were 21 of these) and meetup recordings.
• I wrote a weekly accessibility column on The Admin Bar website — 51 articles(!), which were shared in the Facebook group, are still cited by agency owners, and continue to bring us traffic three years later.
• Started sending email newsletters weekly and additional emails 24 hours before events.
• I gave 4 podcast interviews, and we were written about in at least 6 articles.
• Steve and I both spoke at WordCamp Birmingham (in-person).
• I spoke at WordCamp Phoenix, AccessU, and Cloudfest USA (in-person).
• We sponsored:
  • Atarim’s agency summit (online)
  • HighEdWeb accessibility summit (online)
  • WordCamp USA (in-person, with 4 team members in attendance)
  • WP Accessibility Day (online)
  • A11yWeekly newsletter (all year)
• Paid 2 YouTubers to create videos about Accessibility Checker.
• Chris started speaking.
• We started putting more effort into hosting company partnerships and became a recommended solution for several hosts, including Nexcess, Convesio, and WP Engine.
• Before Black Friday, we paid for some sponsored listings in WordPress Black Friday round-ups.
• Continued engagements in Facebook groups and Slack channels.
• Continued participation in the WordPress community, through leading WP Accessibility Day, being an accessibility table lead at WordCamp US, and contributing to WordPress core.

In 2023, we also experimented with paid Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads, both in connection with a sale (GAAD during May and Black Friday in November) and retargeting campaigns outside of sales. None of these seemed to work or could be attributed to sales, and in some cases, the cost per click was so high that it mathematically didn’t make sense at Accessibility Checker’s price point.

I also tried to get PR and people talking about the exciting things that happened to us in 2023. I was successful in getting people to talk about Emilia coming on as an investor and NASA funding the development of a feature in our plugin, and at the end of 2023, we won a GAADY award for the plugin.

If you can’t tell from that list, I worked my butt off in 2023. And while I was working on marketing, Chris was continuing to refine a sales process and automation campaigns in a new CRM, and Steve and our devs were building many new features that made the plugin more appealing to less-technical users and more “mass marketable”.

We hit 2,000 active installs in March 2023 (273 days from 1,000 to 2,000) and 3,000 active installs in November (245 days later). We ended the year with 3,127 active installs.

2024 marketing

We kept up the fast pace in 2024, trying to do way more than was humanly possible in each day or week, with a big focus on content creation. Here are the highlights from 2024:

• Ran 24 meetups with an average attendance of 98 people at daytime events and 54 at evening events.
• Published 55 blog posts (23 of which were meetup recaps) or more than one per week. This included our WordPress page builder comparison, which became our first piece of content to create meaningful buzz in the community.
• Published 26 Accessibility Craft podcast conversation episodes, which, along with meetup recordings, meant we continued to put out a podcast episode every week.
• We started putting more effort into YouTube as a marketing channel and switched Accessibility Craft from audio-only to a video podcast, which was also available on YouTube.
• We teamed up with WP Buffs to publish an e-book about accessibility for small businesses, which we use as a lead magnet and promote in a pop-up on our blog posts. (Yes, we have an evil pop-up on some parts of our website, but it works.)
• Sent weekly email newsletters, 24-hour event reminders, and multiple drip automations for a total of 148 different email campaigns.
• I gave at least 3 podcast interviews (probably more, but I didn’t track them well on my press page).
• Events:
  • Steve, Chris, and I went to WordCamp Europe for the first time. Equalize Digital was a sponsor; I spoke and I was an accessibility table lead for Contributor Day.
  • I spoke at WordCamp Canada (twice: on a panel and with my own talk), and I was the accessibility table lead for Contributor Day.
  • Steve and I went to WordCamp US, and I was on stage three times – Steve and I gave two talks, plus I did a WordPress speed build. We also hosted an Accessibility Craft IRL Meetup at a brewery before WordCamp started, with 60+ attendees. And, yes, I was an accessibility table lead for Contributor Day.
  • I spoke at a handful of other virtual events
• We sponsored:
  • HighEdWeb accessibility summit (online)
  • WordCamp Europe (in-person, with 4 team members in attendance)
  • WP Accessibility Day (online)
  • A11yWeekly newsletter (all year)
• Paid to promote our Black Friday sale.
• Continued engagements in Facebook groups and Slack channels.
• Continued participation in the WordPress community and organizing WP Accessibility Day.

2024 was a big year for us on the WordCamp front. We learned in 2023 that the small local camps didn’t have enough attendees to justify the travel expenses, so our focus in 2024 was on the flagship events.

The NASA hype at the end of 2023 worked well for us, and we decided to take the risk of paying to attend WordCamp Europe because the European Accessibility Act deadline was approaching in 2025.

2024 was also the third year of my intentional effort to be more visible in the community. Thanks to meetup, my participation on the accessibility team, the content I had been creating, and all the prior year’s efforts, there was a perfect storm that helped us get a lot of stage time and build credibility.

This directly led us to bring in more accessibility service work, which more than covered the cost of attending the events, but I can’t say it drove any dramatic changes in plugin sales or adoption.

One noteworthy change we made in September 2024 was to our website checkout flow for free and paid users. Prior to September 2024, customers were taken to an unstyled Easy Digital Downloads checkout page that required a ton of information (account creation, phone number, billing address, etc.), likely killing conversions for some paid users, and especially free users. In September, we launched a new, more professional checkout page for purchases and a sign-up page for free users that only asked for one thing: an email address. This significantly increased our conversions, especially of free users that we could nurture.

We reached 4,000 active installs at the end of June 2024, 231 days since the 3,000 mark. I suspect we would have ended the year with nearly 5,000 active installs, but the #WPDrama that left some hosting companies unable to pull plugins from WordPress.org means the numbers on WordPress.org are no longer fully representative of all websites using a plugin. By my estimates, we ended the year with approximately 4,700 active installs.

2025 marketing

2025 was a year of transition. In 2023 and 2024, we intentionally burned cash, but we went into 2025 knowing we wanted to work our way back to breakeven or profitability. That meant that I needed to be more thoughtful about our marketing plan and ROI, and I cut a bunch of things, most notably our event travel budget.

Here are the highlights of our marketing in 2025:

• Ran 20 meetups with an average attendance of 110 people at daytime events and 56 at evening events. We ended up canceling all evening events in Q4 and beyond because we had trouble securing speakers for that timeslot.
• We started promoting our meetups differently:
  • We created Meetup groups in six different cities so our events would show up for people across the US (not just in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the “official” group is located).
  • We started posting meetups in different Slack Groups and discussion boards for the accessibility industry, not just for WordPress folks.
• Published 71 blog posts (21 of which were meetup recaps), several of which were lead magnets where people had to give us an email address to access the content.
• Published 25 Accessibility Craft podcast conversation episodes (+ meetup recordings).
• Steve and William (developer) started live streaming changelogs on YouTube a few times per month, following big releases.
• Sent weekly email newsletters, 24-hour event reminders, sales emails, and multiple drip automations for a total of 290 different email campaigns.
• I gave 4 podcast interviews and did a handful of virtual talks, but Chris and Steve started speaking more to give me a break, so I wasn’t the only one speaking. (I don’t have a number for how many talks/interviews they gave.)
• For budgetary reasons, only Chris and I went to WordCamp Europe. Equalize Digital was a sponsor; I spoke and was an accessibility table lead for Contributor Day.
• Beyond WordCamp Europe, we only sponsored WP Accessibility Day and the A11yWeekly newsletter.
• Ran our own virtual contributor day for Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
• Continued participation in the WordPress community and organizing WP Accessibility Day.
• Reduced/only occasional engagements in Facebook groups and Slack channels, because I created two courses last year, which took up a lot of my time.

WCEU got all of our travel budget because of the European Accessibility Act deadline on June 28, 2025. We wanted to make sure we were there and present.

We kept costs down by only sending two of us, but that made the event feel less successful. It was difficult to schedule meetings because we didn’t want to leave the booth empty, and I got super sick and had to spend part of the last day in our hotel room, leaving Chris representing us alone. I couldn’t tie any sales directly to the event (no one used the coupon code), but adoption accelerated around that time, so it’s possible that being at WordCamp Europe helped, along with all the other efforts we were putting into the content front.

We hit 5,000 active installs on April 27, 2025. That was 301 days since reaching 4,000 (that number is higher than the previous milestones because fewer hosting companies are sending install data back to WordPress.org).

After 5,000 active installs, things really took off:

• 6,000 installs on June 27, 2025 (61 days).
• 7,000 installs on August 28, 2025 (62 days).
• 8,000 installs on October 11, 2025 (44 days).
• 9,000 installs on November 27, 2025 (47 days).
• 10,000 installs on January 10, 2026 (44 days)

I’m guessing we might be at around 15,000 active installs right now, though we don’t have access to the data to prove it, since the next visible milestone on WordPress.org is 20,000+.

Measuring impact

The cost of marketing

Some of our marketing activities, like traveling to a conference, have obvious costs, but even content creation is not free. Time is not free, even if it’s your own, if it takes you away from doing billable work.

Here’s what our marketing spend looks like in recent years (excluding salaries):

• ~$63k in 2023
• ~$71k in 2024
• ~$35.7k in 2025

We break marketing expenses across several GL codes in our accounting software. Here’s what’s included in each:

• Software
  • Active Campaign
  • Castos (podcast hosting)
  • Descript (video editing, now podcast recording)
  • Restream (live streaming)
  • Canva (fast graphics)
  • Buffer (social media scheduling)
  • Adobe (1 seat, all tools)
  • Zapier (this isn’t solely marketing; also has some ops use)
• Subcontractors
  • This is where we pay outside writers or designers, if applicable.
• Marketing: Internal Events (a.k.a., meetup)
  • Zoom Webinars
  • Live captioning services
  • Post-event Transcription
  • Meetup.com Subscription for extra groups beyond the official one
• Marketing: External Events
  • Event Sponsorship Fees
  • Event Admission (if we have to buy tickets to attend)
  • Event shipping, electricity, room rental, misc fees
• Marketing: Content
  • Video Creation/Editing (if we were to pay a vendor to do this, curently we do it all in-house)
  • Video Transcription
  • Podcast Beverages
  • Podcast Editing (if we were to pay a vendor to do this, curently we do it all in-house)
  • Podcast Transcription (we used to pay a vendor for this, but now do it in-house)
• Marketing: Advertising
  • Adwords
  • Facebook/Instagram Ads
  • LinkedIn Ads
  • Influencer Marketing
  • Targeted Display & Other
• Marketing: Partners & Affiliates
  • Product affiliate commissions (20%+ varies based upon the partner)
  • Service affiliate commissions (10% of what the referral pays us for 12 months.)
• Marketing: Swag
  • Things we givaway if attending an event in person.
• General Marketing
  • Press release distribution
  • Misc. marketing
• Meals & Entertainment
  • Meals comped at US federal per diem rates
• Travel & Lodging
  • Event travel costs (airfare, trains, parking, Ubers etc.)
  • Event Hotels
• Dues & Subscriptions
  • Shutterstock
  • IAAP Membership

Travel (field marketing at events) has been, by far, the most expensive part of our budgets — though we have only dabbled in paid ads. I can see how paying for clicks could have rapidly dwarfed everything else if I had let it.

Second to external events are internal events. Every WordPress Accessibility Meetup we run costs us $650 or more, including Zoom Webinars, live captioning by CART providers, and post-event transcription. We have worked in recent years to bring in sponsors to help cover these costs (thank you, GoDaddy and Kinsta!), but it is still a line item we’re aware of and have to account for in case we have unsponsored events.

This year, we’re not traveling to events because we needed to shift budget into redesigning our website. We’re only sponsoring WP Accessibility Day and the A11yWeekly email newsletter, but otherwise focusing on meetup and content creation. We went back to the less extravagant, bootstrapped approach to marketing from our early days, and our marketing budget is still $25,000 (not including salaries). This is what I consider our “zero” for producing the content we create, and basic sponsorships that have shown clear ROI.

How much time does it take?

In the last year or two, one of the biggest changes we made was to make marketing part of everyone’s job.

In the early days, marketing was handled solely by me, with some support from our content specialist (first Emma, then Paola) around client work. The reality, though, is that there is too much for just one or two people to do while also doing client work. We also realized that it’s important for people to see everyone at the company as an expert, not just me. That led us to make marketing part of everyone’s jobs.

Now, everyone helps, whether it’s speaking at a meetup when we can’t find an outside speaker, Steve and William livestreaming to YouTube and helping with writing documentation, our accessibility specialist, Maria, writing blog posts, or everyone applying to speak at outside events or engaging with accessibility content on social media.

What does that look like from a time perspective? In 2025, our six-person team tracked 2,362 hours on marketing-related activities (20% of total time tracked). Multiply that times the cost per employee (or yourself), and you have a picture of how much marketing actually costs.

Calculating ROI and cost per lead

At the end of last year, because I knew we were going to be more limited in what we paid for this year, I spent a long time reviewing everything we’d done in the year, how much it cost us (including literal cost and people’s time), and how many new leads to our CRM came from that activity. This helped me estimate the cost per lead acquisition for each marketing activity.

Then I figured out the average number of days between entering our CRM and first paid purchase, as well as our subscriber-to-paid-purchase ratio.

I’ve shared our subscriber-to-paid-purchase ratio with a few people and in Post Status, and everyone has told me that the percentage of people who go from free to paid is really good (high for a WordPress plugin). So that tells me that we’re reaching the right people and doing a good job of nurturing them once they join our list. We just need to keep reaching more of these same people.

Calculating the cost of getting an email address helped me figure out which activities we should do more of and which were not worth the effort or might need a process adjustment to make them more effective. It was a lot of work, and I definitely wouldn’t do it every year, but if you haven’t done it, I think it’s worth doing at least once.

It is worth noting that there is a lot we do that is hard to track ROI for, but that has definitely helped us. More on that later.

The big picture

It’s important to note that any given year is not a complete picture.

Here’s a graph showing the previously mentioned days to 10k active installs, in 1,000-install increments. This tells a story of ROI over time.

Show/hide Days to Active Install Milestones data table

Active Installs	Days to Milestone
1,000	508
2,000	273
3,000	245
4,000	231
5,000 *	301
6,000	61
7,000	62
8,000	44
9,000	47
10,000	44

Why growth accelerated in 2025

Looking at this graph and having heard that we cut our marketing spend in 2025, you may be wondering, “Why did growth suddenly accelerate so dramatically?”

This may be partially attributable to regulatory deadlines in 2025 and 2026 for the European Accessibility Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. But I don’t think the legal requirements alone are the answer — I know accessibility-focused companies that aren’t doing well right now.

Instead, I think that what happened in 2025 was the result of work that started years earlier.

By 2025, we had published hundreds of blog posts, run more than 90 meetups, sent over a million emails, produced over 100 podcast episodes, spoken at conferences around the world, contributed to WordPress core, organized WP Accessibility Day, and helped thousands of people solve accessibility problems for free.

All of those efforts compounded.

Someone might discover us through a blog post, subscribe to our email list, attend a meetup six months later, hear me speak at a WordCamp a year after that, and only then install Accessibility Checker. Looking at attribution reports, it would be easy to give all the credit to the final touchpoint, but in reality, every interaction helped build trust.

I also think timing plays a role. Agencies, hosting companies, and website owners were suddenly paying more attention, and we were already positioned to help them when they became aware of these laws. If you’re building a product, you need to identify a gap in the market and look ahead to what might be coming in the future.

It’s not just about the marketing strategy

Plugin quality matters

It’s worth mentioning that the product itself is much stronger than in previous years. Two to three years ago, Steve started the process with our dev team of completely modernizing Accessibility Checker, taking it from a “proof of concept” software product to something more modern, secure, and scalable.

We have more features and a more polished UI. The plugin is much easier for a broader group of users to use and understand, without accessibility or dev expertise. When people find us now, they are more likely to stick around than they were when our plugin was a year or two old.

It’s also fully compliant with coding standards and can pass even the most stringent code reviews — something that really matters if you want your plugin used on enterprise websites.

This positioned us well for increased demand in the marketplace. The best marketing strategy means nothing if the product itself can’t deliver on marketing promises.

Sales strategy plays a big role

Chris’ work on the sales side also can’t be ignored.

Marketing brings people to our website or social profiles, but it wouldn’t matter how many visited if they left without engaging with us. The change we made to our free user signup flow in late 2024 was huge. Creating more lead magnets over the past two years also played a big role in our being able to capture more email addresses.

But getting email addresses isn’t enough. You have to follow up with them. We send multiple emails a week, and Chris built automated nurture campaigns that focus on providing as much value as possible to people. Some of these campaigns include 8+ emails that are sent over many months.

Also, unlike many WordPress plugin companies, he is always happy to Zoom or have a phone call with people. We have a phone number posted on our website that people can call, and he answers.

That personal touch makes a difference when people are unsure whether Accessibility Checker is right for them, and it helps us stand out from other companies that don’t answer the phone.

Marketing is a snowball

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve reached a point where people are recommending Accessibility Checker without our involvement. Years of content created, podcast interviews, or being “ever present” build upon one another, and over time, credibility grows.

Customers tell colleagues about it. Agencies recommended it to clients. People bring it up when answering questions in Slack groups and on Facebook or Reddit. Those recommendations are incredibly powerful because they come with built-in trust, as they’re from a third party unaffiliated with us.

The more happy users you have, the more people might be out there recommending your plugin, and then more people will hear about it without you even having to do anything.

My advice

If you’re building a WordPress plugin or software product and trying to figure out how to market it, here’s what I would recommend…

1. Build a community

My top recommendation is not to underestimate the value of community. Figure out who your target demographic is for your product, and then do what you can to be as helpful as possible in that industry or to those people. All of the content you post online should present you as an expert who will help them solve X problem(s) on their website.

Some of the activities that are hardest to justify on a spreadsheet end up creating the strongest long-term returns. Running meetups, contributing to WordPress, organizing WP Accessibility Day, helping people for free, and reporting accessibility issues in other plugins all helped to position us as experts in our field. This builds trust that our plugin will do what we say it does. Trust is difficult to measure, but it matters.

If you are trying to market a plugin, spend time figuring out how to consistently help the people you want to serve. Give back in a way that shows your expertise, and then people will naturally see your product as a solution they want to try.

Figure out a way for people to easily connect with your company in a safe, low-risk way. Running free meetups has worked very well for us. Other companies have done this with Facebook groups. Do what works for you, but if possible, get their email address so you can stay in touch and nurture the relationship over time.

2. Stick with it

My second piece of advice is simple: play the long game.

One thing I’ve learned over the last five years is that most marketing activities don’t work immediately. A blog post might not generate meaningful traffic for months. A conference conversation might not turn into a customer for a year or more. Someone who joins your email list today might not buy until they’ve received dozens of emails, attended multiple webinars, and seen your name repeatedly over time.

It’s tempting to look for the shortcut, the growth hack, the ad campaign, or the viral moment that will suddenly change everything. Maybe those things happen for some companies, but they didn’t happen for us.

What worked for us was showing up consistently.

We published content when it felt like no one was reading it. We organized meetups when attendance was 20 or 30 people. We sent newsletters to a tiny list. We answered questions in Facebook groups without expecting anything in return. We made time to contribute to WordPress. We built relationships. We kept improving the product.

Then we did it again the next week.

And the next week.

And the next year.

I also think it’s important to recognize that marketing and product development aren’t separate activities. The best marketing in the world won’t save a product that doesn’t solve a real problem. At the same time, even a great product can struggle if nobody knows it exists.

The two have to work together.

Every year, while we were creating content and building community, our dev team was also improving Accessibility Checker. We were listening to customers, adding features, fixing bugs, refining our sales process, and providing thoughtful support. Growth happened because both sides of the business were improving at the same time.

The companies that seem like overnight successes often have years of work hidden beneath the surface. As a product owner, you need to plan for that slog. Figure out how you’ll fund the growth years, whether it’s with continued client work, investor dollars, or business loans. I also can’t say enough how helpful it’s been to have partners on this journey — there’s no way I could have gotten this far as a solopreneur.

Five years ago, Accessibility Checker launched to a list of fewer than 100 people. Today, we’re serving thousands of websites around the world. Looking back, there wasn’t one thing that got us here. It was thousands of small actions, repeated consistently, over a very long period of time.

When I look at today’s growth curve, I don’t see a single successful campaign. I see the cumulative effect of five years of consistently showing up, creating content, helping people, building relationships, improving the product, and staying focused on the same mission.

That’s probably not the answer people want to hear because it’s not fast and it’s not glamorous. But if there’s one lesson I’ve learned from growing Accessibility Checker, it’s that sustainable growth usually results from many small things done consistently over a very long time.

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Post Script

I have additional thoughts on why AI hasn’t hurt us like many other WordPress plugin owners have reported, and I want to talk about the impact of being featured on the front page of the WordPress.org plugin directory (which we were in March). But this post is already well over 6,000 words, so I’m going to save that for future posts.

In the meantime, post any questions you have about our marketing approach here, and I’ll answer them. I’ll admit this post ended up more tactical than strategic. If you have more questions about the high-level strategy, let me know.