2026 year in preview
Welcome to my 2026 year in preview post. Instead of writing about what happened in 2025 (short version, I left Corporate in late June to run my own business), I’m going to visualise what my potential 2026 would look like.
In Dec 2026 I can look back at this and see how accurate I was in each area.
Plugins
Document Library Pro Power Pack
Launched 9 months ago in March 2025, DLP Power Pack has 21 customers (at time of writing). My aim for 2026 is to increase that total to at least 100, which would be an average of 7 new sales a month.
With an advertised install base of around 10,000 sites, Document Library Pro has a large enough audience for an niche add-on plugin. While some of these sites would have been life time deal purchases with no need for additional functionality, growing to 1% of that total site count is an achievable target.
As an add-on for another plugin, Power Pack’s visitors are from Barn2’s knowledge base articles, Support team and newsletter mentions. If I can improve Power Packs marketing site to improve conversions then this target should be achievable.
WP Admin Toolkit
This is my big product based bet for 2026. This new plugin will combine existing functionality from Administrator Toolkit, Nag Me Not, Media Library Essentials, Remind Me, Just Add Search, Something To Say, Draggable Image Viewer and Grow That Newsletter into one modular multiple purpose solution.
I had been thinking for a few months about combing several of them into one larger solution, and after a discussion with Ryan from InfluenceWP I decided its worth a shot.
WP Admin Toolkit will be pitched at freelancer’s / agencies as its primary audience (Note 30th Dec 2025: In the initial 2026 preview I had picked pro site owners, but this has since changed).
It will take a few months to get all functionality ported over to the new framework. With this in mind I will prioritise the smaller plugins first to get WP Admin Toolkit V1.0 released, which will then provide a road map for other plugins to migrate over.
Discounts will be provided for early adopters while the plugin grows. For those who have previously purchased any of the individual plugins they will receive a free license for WP Admin Toolkit as an incentive to migrate over.
The existing standalone plugins will go into maintenance mode, if I discover any bugs in the WP Admin Toolkit version they will be ported back to the standalone versions during 2026.
A new marketing site will be created to go alongside the new combined plugin.
Pricing is still to be decided. I am thinking that WP Admin Toolkit will offer annual payments for single site installs, with monthly payments offered for larger multi-site plans.
For WP Admin Toolkit I’m going to be more cautious in my targets, and will aim for 50 brand new annual plan sales and 50 migrations from existing license holders.
ClickTock
I will be using ClickTock for all of my time tracking during 2026. You can expect additional features based on my own needs and those from the early adopters.
As time tracking is a little niche for owners vs site maintainers / builders, it is likely to remain a standalone plugin and not merged into WP Admin Toolkit. I’m not fully decided on this however, so don’t be surprised if it is eventually ported over by the end of 2026.
Browser Extensions
To expand my knowledge beyond WordPress plugins I started creating a handful of browser extensions during the latter part of 2025, namely URL Need This, Forget Me Not and Fill In The Blanks.
Fill In The Blanks hasn’t been actively marketed so any sales for this would be a start. I have several ideas to improve it for my own purposes so this will continue to be developed and a lot of website content added.
Nag Me Not has a dedicated Chrome extension as well, this will continued to be offered separately to WP Admin Toolkit.
Client Work / Hosting / Services
While my aim for 2026 is product based growth, development services will continue to provide important one-off revenue to keep the lights on.
Hamish & Milo, my .NET portal client, will be a core part of these plans. They recently confirmed some development budget for 2026 which was welcome news.
White label plugin customisation work was a new revenue stream for me in 2025. Due to the nature of client work, quoting on projects and not hearing anything back, for 2026 I’m going to prioritise requests where I am a good fit and will not try to take on all projects that aren’t being covered by others.
It will be a challenge balancing the opportunity cost of time spent on one-off work vs product development and its growth. Time tracking will be vital next year to keep an eye on what work is most profitable.
Hosting and support services will remain a foundation layer of my business. These will continued to be offered for local small business who value personal service.
Marketing
Having a development background it is easy to feel like something has been achieved if X lines of code have been written and a feature is finished (or all bugs fixed). With marketing this will be a step into the semi-unknown.
Currently Power Pack is sitting on a sub domain of my old plugin brand. I’m going to bring this into my main Friendly Web Guy site to help cross promote my other plugins.
From late Jan I plan on sending a short monthly newsletter to all (opted-in) customers with product updates. This will be combined with a new onboarding emails for Power Pack / WP Admin Toolkit customers.
Family & Fitness
This might sound like a random thing to put on a year in preview post that has so far talked about business, but the reason some of my aims might seem like I’m playing it safe is that I also need to factor in extended family needs and my own fitness around work.
When I left corporate I had the wonderful idea in my head that managing my own time would mean I could take breaks and get more exercise instead of sitting at a desk to justify my weekly timesheet.
In reality it couldn’t have been further than the truth, which isn’t really a surprise for a young business.
I was still working many evenings on new ideas or finishing off “one more thing” and didn’t block out time to take movement / screen breaks. This then crept into evenings when I’d shut down the laptop gone 10:30 / 10:45 before starting to wind down.
With plugin customers around the world, and white label project replies I’d been waiting for arriving gone 11pm, that had the knock on affect of not settling down until gone midnight as my brain was still buzzing away. It was either work or asking Claude to spin up something before I could settle.
With 2 children and school runs to do the 7am alarm always goes off to early.
Factoring all of this, I’m planning to scale back the number of work hours I have each day. Hopefully with less hours available each week I can block them out and become more focused during them (blocking Twitter on my laptop for starters!).
Work will cut off at a fixed time in the evening (unless something is on fire), so no late night replies when they can wait till the morning.
Can you truly return to a 9 – 5 while working from home? Probably not, but it is something to aim for.
And so that is my year in preview. Lets find out in 12 months time how comically wrong I was (hopefully with sales a lot higher!).
