Overview
Hello everyone, my name is Ryan and I’m a new member on the Print My Blog team. I’ve known Mike (the founder of Print My Blog) for many years, and I have a lot of respect for his transparency, honesty, and decency. To support that spirit, I’m going to be helping out with the transparency report this month.
Let me start by telling you a little about myself. I’ve been living in Japan for the past 13 years, teaching and programming, and I just returned to Canada this past April so that my kids could attend school here. It’s been a big change for us, but we’re starting to settle in. It helps that the weather has been amazing this past spring, and the scenery on Vancouver Island is breathtaking.
I started providing technical support for PMB in May, and so far it has been a great experience. As the new operations manager for the plugin, I hope to continue Mike’s commitment to transparency and helpfulness.
By listening to users, I hope to help develop and roll out new features and improvements that will make your lives easier. I’m also planning to help Mike expand PMB’s social media presence, and provide new “How to” articles and videos.
In this report, I’m going to look at PMB’s various metrics and share some of my thoughts and interpretations, and then go over some news and events from the past month.
We hope you find this information insightful!
If you have any feedback for us or want to chime in on the analysis, please leave a comment on the page.
What Happened This Month
Downloads
Here are our download figures according to WordPress.org. I highlighted the spike on May 30th, to help me explain what causes the periodic spikes in downloads. That spike corresponds with the release of version 3.27.8 of PMB, and the one before that is for the release of version 3.27.7 on April 24th.
It has been a while since we made a transparency report so here is a recap of the five most recent updates, which correspond with the spikes in the chart:
3.27.8 May 30 2025
- Enhancement: for Pro Print, added a filter for the project’s print page
3.27.7 April 24, 2025
- Compatibility: hide related posts from Related Post by PickPlugins
3.27.6 Jan 27, 2024
- Bugfix: for all date pickers, allow choosing dates older than 10 years
- Enhancement: update Freeimus SDK to 2.11.0
- Bugfix: for Pro Print, fix error where DesignRegistry::updateDesign not usable by add-ons
3.27.5 December 18, 2024
- Feature: for Pro Print, introduce “pmb-wide” CSS class, which is just like “mayer-wide” but applies to other designs too.
- Enhancement: for Pro Print, set a larger maximum size for images before resizing them
- Bugfix: for Pro Print, avoid error on Edit Content step by checking for negative index
- Compatibility: avoid overwriting jQuery UI styles
3.27.4 October 19, 2024
- Compatibility: for Pro Print, fix JavaScript error sometimes occurring with Hustle plugin
Mailing List Stats
Freemius Stats
This session, I’m going to compare our Freemius stats from May 2025 with our stats from May 2024. Let’s see how we are doing!
Sales
In terms of net revenue, we are up 16.5% compared to this time last year, even though there was a slight rise in refunds. One refund I recall was related to a need for better support for Gallery Plugins, so this is something that I hope to work on in the future.
Here is a breakdown of our license types. As you can see, in May Professional licenses beat out Hobbyist licenses, with a slight increase to both stats.
A country by country breakdown of sales shows that our top three markets for May were the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
Audience
Looking at audience, we made impressive growth compared to last year, raising downloads by 134%, with improvements to both our Activation and Deactivation numbers.
I personally find country by country breakdowns to be one of the more interesting stats to think about. Looking at this graph, it is encouraging to see growth across all measured markets.
One thing that stands out to me though is the absence of Chinese and Japanese users, despite those languages being two that PMB supports. Looking at this report on WordPress.org, it seems that in 2024, 58.5% of Japanese websites were made with WordPress. With a population of over 120 million people, that’s a big market! I’m guessing that part of the reason is that even though our plugin supports those languages, our User Guide and other resources (including this report) are exclusively in English. Perhaps this is something we can work on.
I’m also interested in the 54.9% rise in UK based users, and the 61.7% rise in Spanish users. While the number of Spanish users is relatively low compared to other countries, consistent increases like that will definitely add up.
Finally, let’s take a look at the language stats. While there were fairly large increases across nearly all measured groups, there was a slight decrease in German speaking users. We’ll need to watch this figure to see if there is a trend there. It could indicate a need for improving our German language translations.
Website Visits
First, let’s take a look at our Koko Analytics stats. Koko Analytics is a privacy friendly WordPress plugin alternative to using Google Analytics. It looks like last month, the “printmy.blog” website received 637 total visitors, and 1470 total page views, meaning that the average visitor viewed approximately 2.3 pages. For each bar in the graph, the darker color indicates the number of visitors on that given day, while the lighter color indicates the number of page views. Notice that on May 30th, there was a relatively large number of visits compared to page views. This is likely related to the release on version 3.27.8 on May 30th.
Our top site referrer in May was Google with 212 visitors, and aside from the homepage, our most popular pages were a comparison article explaining the difference between Quick Print and Pro Print and our Pricing Page.
Here go our server-side visitor analytics for the printmy.blog website. Notice how different the numbers here are compared to our Koko Analytics numbers. This is likely because Koko’s stats omit crawlers, and bots while these stats show them. Print My Blog is a fairly high profile plugin, so these numbers are not unusually, but it is still strange to think that the bots outnumber the people around 8 to 1! I’ve spoken about this with Mike, and one thing I would like to work on is auditing and beefing up the security of our website and plugin.
Finances and More Plugin Stats
The Details
New LinkedIn Page
We started expanding our social media presence this month with the addition of a new LinkedIn company page for Print My Blog.
The goal of the page is to help us connect with fellow WordPress users and developers.
If you’re on LinkedIn, let’s connect!
Version 3.27.8 Released
This update includes two main things. First, I took a little time to proofread and edit the “readme.txt” file that controls the plugin description on our WordPress.org page. There were only a few minor typos and formatting issues, but the real goal was to get me used to editing the Print My Blog code base.
The second element included in this update was a new “apply_filters” hook into how the Intermediary Print Page File URL is generated for Pro Print projects. This was in response to an issue experienced by a customer that had a multi-site WordPress installation with a non-standard upload path configuration.
Using the filter name below with an “add_filter” declaration you can modify the Intermediary Print Page File Url output.
add_filter( '\PrintMyBlog\entities\ProjectGeneration::getGeneratedIntermediaryFileUrl return',
'your_callback_function'
);
function your_callback_function($url){
$url = str_replace(
'THE TEXT YOU WANT TO REPLACE',
'THE REPLACEMENT TEXT',
$url
);
return $url;
}With this filter in place, users with similar issues can solve their problem by adding a filter to their theme’s “functions.php” file or creating a micro plugin to apply the fix.
User Guide Updates
This month I added two sections to the FAQ page of the User Guide to address some support questions that I thought might be helpful to users.
My Embedded Videos are not Displaying Properly
While helping a customer get their Vimeo videos working properly, I figured that the information I was providing would be helpful to other users too. So, I wrote a short article including explanations and solutions for two problems you might experience when working with videos. The article explains how to correctly embed videos from sources like Vimeo and YouTube, and it also goes over the “Convert Videos to Images” PMB settings option to support ePub readers that cannot handle video playback.
How do I change the style of the Quick Print Buttons?
One of the most common questions I have seen so far in my first month at Print My Blog is related to implementing Custom CSS rules. If you are working with Pro Print you can add Custom CSS under the Customize Theme menu. If you want to customize the look of the front-end print buttons that are generated by the PMB shortcode though, we recommend adding Custom CSS under the Appearance > Customize menu. This new FAQ article provides you with a step by step walk-through of how to do that.
Podcast Affiliates
Mike has given me the green light to work with podcasts to help promote Print My Blog. So, if you are reading this and you are interested in getting involved as an affiliate, please reach out to us at please@printmy.blog so we can learn more about your show and see if there is a good fit.
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!.