Welcome to Day 31 of our Divi 100 Marathon. Keep tuning in for 100 days in a row of awesome Divi resources as we count down to the amazing release of Divi 3.0 on the final day of the series!

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Last week we invited the Divi community to partake in the Divi 100 Survey. Over 5,000 people completed the questionnaire, which is more than 3x the turnout we had for our previous survey. The questions covered a wide range of topics and we are confident that the community will benefit from their answers just as much as we will. I have broken down the results into three difference categories: Customer Insights, Divi Theme Usage, and Divi Theme Professionals.

Customer Insights paint us a picture of what the Divi community looks like. Divi Theme Usage give us information about how people are using Divi and what they want from Divi in the future. The Divi Theme Professionals section focuses on WordPress freelancers and web design agencies, how they are using Divi and how they run their businesses.

All individual statistics were rounded to the nearest 1%. In addition, we asked a few open ended questions at the end of the survey. I featured some of the most common responses at the end of this post.

I have designed four infographic to showcase the results from each category, each of which can be viewed below. Click on the images to zoom in if the text is too small for you to read.

Customer Insights

The Customer Insight questions help us better understand “who we are” as a community and what Divi means to us on a broader scale.

A Few Things We Learned

• Our Customers Love Divi – We were very pleased to find that the vast majority of our customers would highly recommend Divi to their friends and peers. This resulted in a net promotor score of 75, which is very strong and is something we are very proud of. Matt Mullenweg recently shared a study on his blog that showed WordPress at the top of its class with a NPS of 73, and Divi is right up there with it! You can learn more about how Net Promotor Scores work here.
• People Earn Their Livings With Divi – 25% of our customers make their living using Divi, and 44% make a portion of their income using Divi, which means that 69% of our customers are using Divi on a professional level to support themselves and their families. This is such an amazing thing for us to see and it shows us just how impactful the software has become and how quickly the Divi economy is growing.
• 3rd Party Extensions Are A Big Opportunity – Something amazing started happening in the Divi community over the past year, which is that we started to see a huge increase in third party development. We were surprised to find that 68% of our customers have purchased a third party Divi extension, child theme or layout pack. This is truly a growing market and something we plan to help support very soon. The more third party development that exists, and the more people who are able to make a living and therefore dedicate themselves to building Divi related products, the stronger the community will become.
• Divi Conferences Could Be A Real Thing! – We have always toyed with the idea of hosting a Divi conference. We share so many amazing moments with each other in the forums, on the blog and on Facebook, it would be great to meet some of those familiar faces in person. ~800 people said they would definitely travel to attend a Divi conference, and ~2,600 people said they might travel to attend. What do you think, is that enough people to get the party started?

Divi Theme Usage

The Divi Theme Usage category focused on asking questions that would help give us insights into how we can make Divi even better, and to help us better understand the various ways that people use Divi.

A Few Things We Learned

• Divi Customization Options Are Still Lacking – 41% of customers always use a child theme in order to customize Divi beyond the controls provided in the Theme Customizer and Divi Builder design settings. This tells us that there are still places for us to expand and improve upon these options so that custom coding isn’t so often necessary.
• Divi Remains Easy To Use – According to the survey, 84% of customers want us to add more features to Divi and are not worried about the theme becoming overcomplicated. This is a good sign, because it means we have done a good job balancing ease of use with the addition of new features so far. This is a line we plan to walk carefully moving forward.
• Customers Want More Features, But Not At The Expense Of Loading Speeds – While our customers do want more features, there is definitely a concern about the impact these features will have on loading times. 48% of customers would rather us make Divi faster before adding more features. This validates our decision to commit to our “developer release.” After Divi 3.0 is finished, the first thing we will be doing is working on our Divi 3.1 Developer Release, which will focus on performance improvements as well as more hooks, filters and documentation for third party developers. Moving forward, we will continue to think carefully about how new features may affect loading speeds.
• New Features Are Equally Important To Feature Improvements – When thinking about what to do next, it’s easy for us to get wrapped up in new ideas for exciting new features while ignoring the features that already exist. The survey showed us that there is nearly a 50/50 split between the desire for new modules and a desire for module improvements. As we make our plans for Divi 3.2 and beyond, we need to think about ways the we can improve Divi’s current module set and Theme Customizer controls.

Divi Theme Professionals

As shown in the results from our Customer Insights section, a vast majority of our customers are WordPress professionals that make a living building Divi websites for their clients. In fact, this statistic has increased since our last survey 2 years ago. We took this survey as an opportunity to learn more about this growing demographic.

What We Learned

• The WordPress Freelancing Business Is Stronger Than Ever – 68% of the WordPress professionals that use Divi describe themselves as “solo freelancers.” There is obviously a lot of opportunity for individuals to make a career building Divi websites, even without the help of a team. Of course the support of the Divi community doesn’t hurt either!
• Maintenance Plans Are Common – 70% of Divi WordPress Professionals offer paid maintenance plans for their customers, and we suspect that this greatly contributes to developer incomes. The majority of these maintenance plans sell for between $25-$100 per month.
• Most WordPress Websites Cost Less than $5,000 – 95% of our customers charge between $0-$5,000 per website, 47% of which charge between $1,000 and $5,000. Only a small 1% of customers charge more than $10,000 per website, but it’s inspiring to know that these types of project exist. Similarly, a small 1% of customers consider themselves a “large web design agency,” and I would guess that these two statistics are correlated.
• Building Divi Websites Is Relatively Fast – 58% of Divi Professionals finish their client projects in less than one month.

The Open Ended Questions And A Few Standout Answers

At the end of the survey, we asked a few open ended questions. We received over 20,000 responses, and I am confident that they will prove an invaludable resource for our team moving forward. These are countless suggestions and we can’t begin to list them all, but I did observe a few common trends and have featured some of the most common responses below.

Thanks again to everyone who participated. It means a lot to us that so many of you took the time to fill out the survey, and your responses will surely help us to improve Divi. What did you think of the results? Did anything surprise you? I look forward to hearing your opinions in the comments!