Happy Birthday, Barrel Roll!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year since we launched Barrel Roll.

What a year 2016 has been! We had an unprecedented presidential election, just about every artist anyone ever cared about passed away, and WordPress has gone from version 3.9.9 to almost 4.7.

Since launching we’ve applied thousands of WordPress plugin, theme, and core updates to our member sites. We’ve worked with our members to harden their sites against security threats, optimize their performance, and increase their search engine rankings. We have helped members migrate off of under performing hosts to great ones and seen their uptime and load speeds benefit tremendously as a result.

As for Barrel Roll itself, we’ve been busy improving our technology behind the scenes to provide still faster and more comprehensive services and worked with various plugin and theme developers to build improvements into updates that benefit not only our members, but the WordPress community as a whole. We also launched an Affiliate Program with some of the best commission rates in the industry.

Here are a few of our favorite blog posts from Barrel Roll in 2016:

• The List: The Best WordPress Plugins – A comprehensive guide of the very WordPress plugins we recommend to our members.
• WordPress Framework Showdown – An in-depth comparison of four of the biggest names in WordPress frameworks.
• How to Find The Right WordPress Host – There are any number of posts online that list WordPress hosting recommendations, often influenced by those who offer the largest affiliate commissions. This post is an outlines what you should be looking for in a host rather than telling you which one to sign up with.
• Do You Need WordPress Maintenance Services? – This post asks whether or not you even need a service like ours. Spoiler alert: we think you probably do. 🙂

What to look for from Barrel Roll in 2017

We’re pumped about our second year. Since we launched, we’ve been maintaining a growing list of new features to add to our service and we’re planning only rolling out as many of them as possible over the next year. Here are a few things we’re working on:

• A brand new website design – Fresh and clean for 2017!
• Improved client reports – Although the existing reports get the job done, they could use a bit of polish.
• More dashboard features – Keep your eye on your My Account area!

Here’s a little something extra, just for fun!

When we were in the planning stages for Barrel Roll our graphics folks had a lot of interesting ideas for our logo. You can see the final version in our header but we thought it would be fun to show you the logos we didn’t choose; some of them are great but just didn’t quite feel right for our brand. What do you think? Did we make the right call? Let us know in the comments.