In this month’s transparency report, I’m going to go over stats and news from two months: August and September.

The purpose of these Transparency Reports is to give others an inside look into the behind the scenes of operating a WordPress plugin. Our hope is to bring you all along on our little journey as plugin developers.

Working on Customer Support for our plugin, I encounter a lot of really interesting projects (both among our paid AND free users). So, one thing I tried in our last report that I want to continue is spotlighting YOU, the people using Print My Blog!

With that said, let me introduce Siskiyou News!

Spotlight: Siskiyou News

This report, I’m happy to present one of our business plan customers that has been with us since 2024, Siskiyou News!

Siskiyou News is a weekly community newspaper operated by Jay A. Martin that sells 500 copies per week in stores in Siskiyou county, California.

This great local paper covers county news, and includes obituaries, classified ads, community events and even a weekly crossword puzzle! As someone who studied history and has browsed through old newspapers recorded on microfiche in the basement of my university library, I think this project is fascinating. Local newspapers like this are rare these days, but I think it provides a really great window into a time and place.

Thank you Siskiyou News for letting us help you with your project!

Tell us your Story!

If you have used Print My Blog in an interesting way, let us know! We’d really love to hear about it and to share your story in our newsletter!

Just, send us an email at please@printmy.blog with a link to your project.

What happened in August & September

Newsletter

Now, for the numbers. This month, I want to start off by sharing the numbers from our last newsletter mail-out. It’s a little meta, but in the spirit of transparency, I think it is essential.

Previously, Print My Blog used Mail Chimp for its newsletter needs, but we recently switched to using the The Newsletter Plugin, which has a pretty robust free version. Our main reason for switching over was that our price plan with Mail Chimp put a cap on how many users we were able to keep in our mailing list. The Newsletter Plugin on the other hand offered unlimited subscribers in their free version, and was a newsletter solution that I had used previously and was impressed by.

So, here is what our last mailing looked like:

We reached 6818 subscribers and had an open rate of 17.79%. We had a click rate of 3.68%, a reaction rate of 20%, 5 unsubscribes, and 230 bounced messages. That bounce rate seems high, but keep in mind this was our first newsletter mailing since 2023, I believe.

Now, if you are reading this in newsletter form and wondering how to unsubscribe yourself, you should find a button at the bottom of the newsletter labeled “unsubscribe”. We want you to stay of course, but if a subscriber wants to leave, it is always better for the newsletter writer to make that easy.

If on the other hand, you are reading this and wondering how to sign up for our newsletter, so you can continue following us in our development journey, here is the sign up form:

Freemius Stats

Audience Analytics

Last report, I shared a graphic with you that showed our Activation Growth as a series of rising dips and peaks that resembled a staircase, and we speculated about what August and September would look like. Well, here is the answer:

The peak in July went down in August, but then broke the pattern and continued to decrease in September, returning to levels that we saw in May, while still nearly doubling the numbers we saw last year.

Sales Analytics

One of my favorite graphs to analyze is the Net Payments & Transactions graph. I speculated in previous Transparency Reports that summer sales would be low, based on historical trends. So, I’m excited to see that compared to the previous year, we’ve seen a 89.2% boost in August, and a 63.5% boost in September!

The next graph I want to share shows a country-by-country breakdown of gross payments in September 2025 compared with August. As you can see, the United States is still a dominant market for us.

New Reviews!

We received two new positive reviews this period:

Thank you Dave and Nassar! We are glad we could help you back up your blogs!

We also received one poor review in August. It was removed by WordPress moderation, but I want to discuss it here because it brought to our attention that some users experienced issues when using Print My Blog with the Divi Theme. We reached out to the developers of the theme to learn more about what might have caused the issue, and they very helpful in their response. We haven’t found a solution yet, but I want to mention it in case others using that theme experience similar issues. The WordPress ecosystem has a vast number of plugins, so avoiding plugin conflicts can sometimes be challenging.

Tip of the Day: Embedding Word Doc Images

Users of the Paid version of our plugin gain access to the ability to print unlimited Word Documents using their WordPress website content and Print My Blog’s Pro features.

By default, when making a Pro Print project, all images that exist in selected post content will be included in the generated Word Document, but they are included as linked images, which means you need to be connected to the internet for the images to display.

To convert the linked images to embedded images that can be viewed offline, you’ll need to do an extra step that I can walk you through. Here are the steps for doing it in Microsoft Word 365:

1. Go to File > Info
2. Find the button called “Edit links to files” in the bottom right corner.
3. You’ll see a list of all the linked images. Select them all.
4. Click “Break link”.
5. Click “Confirm” and save the document.

Voila! All your images should now be embedded in the word document and should now appear when offline.

Closing

Thank you for reading! We hope you enjoyed a look into our world as the developers of Print My Blog. Please let us know if you have any feedback or requests.

Coupon Code

Last but not least, if you made it all the way here and are interested in trying Print My Blog’s premium features, use the coupon code “printmyblogplease” at checkout to get 10% off!