The Wirecutter 2020 Year in Review
2020 did not go the way we’d planned.
In 2019, we opened a beautiful new flagship office, which sat dormant for most of 2020 due to the pandemic. We prepared a special “How to Work From Home Week” series for April, and then that “week” became tens of millions of people’s day-to-day reality. Conversations about systemic racism were amplified in every area of people’s lives, which showed us the importance of both resolving to do better and then following through. The long-planned migration of our site from thewirecutter.com to nytimes.com/wirecutter in May was successful, but we had to cancel our yearly all-company in-person meeting in June. And this year Prime Day was in October instead of July, causing the holiday deals season to last nearly three months. It’s hard to believe 2020 was only 12 months long. Keep reading for a trip down memory lane.
Our top 10 guides
These were the most-read Wirecutter reviews in 2020:
Our top 5 picks
These were the picks most purchased by readers in 2020:
Perfect for bedrooms, playrooms, and living rooms, the Mighty is one of the best-performing, most durable, and most economical air purifiers we’ve tested.
Read more: The Best Air Purifier
Simple, quiet, effective, and easier to clean than any other option, the HCM-350 has consistently come out on top in several years of humidifier testing.
Read more: The Best Humidifier
With its classic flared-lip pan shape, slick nonstick coating, and comfortable handle, this is a quality pan that will last for years.
Read more: The Best Nonstick Pan
Each tube in this handled, user-friendly, five-band kit is reinforced with an inner rope meant to increase safety. These bands are also in high demand—and often out of stock.
Read more: The Best Resistance Bands
This was one of our top picks, until we found better options in September.
Read more and see our new picks: The Best Thermometer for Kids and Adults
Revisit all of our most popular picks from the past eleven months: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November. Stay tuned for December’s leaderboard.
Deals by the numbers
We’re discriminating in the deals we share. Indeed, we post less than 1% of the deals we review daily—but we still managed to surface thousands of Wirecutter-approved deals this year. In 2020, Amazon Prime Day was in October, instead of the usual July. During that event, we scanned 47,112 deals but posted only 342. Then during Cyber Week (the flurry of sales around Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday), we scanned 77,012 deals and posted only 740.
More about our deals process:
Our newsletters
We launched several new newsletters for readers this year. In addition to our Sunday Best of Wirecutter newsletter and our Daily Deals newsletter, we launched 52 Things We Love, a series spotlighting Wirecutter picks that have withstood the test of time. We also launched Clean Everything to help our readers maintain the things they own.
Most requested
Every year, without fail, the lion’s share of messages we get from readers are requests for us to review more things. This year, the most popular requests fell into four categories, none of which should come as a huge surprise:
- Home office gear: Wirecutter has a largely remote workforce, and we’ve covered home office gear for years. But in 2020, with so many people newly and unexpectedly working from home, the appetite for this coverage grew. The most popular things you asked for were small desks, ring lights, and more lighting for video calls (video).
- Home exercise equipment: Pandemic-era necessity forced many readers to move their workouts from the gym to their homes. As a result, we received a number of requests to cover gear like massage guns, rowing machines, stationary bikes (beyond those we cover in our Peloton guide), e-bikes, and e-bike accessories.
- Comfortable clothing: This year we branched out with more apparel coverage, and so far you’ve been happy to let us know what else you’d like to see. Sweatpants, sweatshirts, and T-shirts were especially popular requests. Good news—guides to leggings and white tees are in the works, and our guides to the best cashmere sweaters and wearable sleeping bags are already live.
- Third-party replacements: Folks who already have an air purifier or a laser printer have been wondering and asking whether third-party filters or toner will perform as well as the name-brand stuff.
How did we do on your 2019 requests? Some of the popular reader asks we fulfilled in 2020 included solar outdoor lighting, wallets, and trail cameras. Meanwhile, e-bikes and grocery carts remain on our to-do list. We’ll do our best to get to them soon.
Is there another topic you’d like to see us cover? Leave us a comment, tweet @wirecutter, or write to us!
We read the comments
In 2020, more than 20,000 comments were posted across our site. (This number would have been a bit higher, but since Wirecutter’s move to the New York Times domain back in May, some readers have been unable to access our comments sections. We’re working on a long-term fix for the issue, which we address in more depth in this post.) Our community team tries to read every comment that comes in. (You can read more about our process here.)
These are some of the reviews and posts you were most excited to talk about this year:
Cloth face masks
Our most-commented-on review of the year was How to Choose the Best Cloth Face Mask for You. The majority of your comments were requests for us to review brands we haven’t yet covered, along with testimonials about your experiences with the brands we have covered. Comments of this nature are tremendously helpful, so please keep them coming!
This review actually came to be in part thanks to you. Early on in the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US Surgeon General, and several independent epidemiologists we interviewed insisted that most people didn’t need to wear face masks unless they were sick or caring for someone who was. Our coverage in March and April reflected that guidance. We urged people not to stockpile medical-grade personal protective equipment (PPE), and we did not recommend cloth face coverings for individuals. Throughout that time, many readers urged us to cover the growing variety of cloth face masks. Eventually, official guidance changed. We removed all coverage not meeting those new guidelines and got to work on the guide you see today. Thank you for always keeping us on our toes, and for urging us to do more and better work for you.
Slim wallets and instant noodles
The best slim wallets and the best instant noodles were 2020’s two most-commented-on pieces unrelated to the pandemic. They also have something else in common: In each, we’ve made picks in several categories, depending on your taste and preferences. One of the community team’s favorite things about this format is how much readers like to chat about them, and share your own great suggestions and recommendations.
User reviews of our picks that didn’t add up
Our 14th-most-commented-on piece of the year is worth highlighting: Why Some Wirecutter Picks Have Bad Amazon Reviews. We know from reading your comments over the years that readers pay close attention to customer reviews on our picks, and that seeing negative Amazon reviews on something we lauded is a particular source of concern and curiosity. So we addressed this by doing a deep dive into that conundrum. In the comments for the piece, some readers thanked us for the explanation, told us what else they’d like to know about our work, shared their own insights and experiences with Amazon reviews, or offered criticism and food for thought about our methods. We were delighted to hear and engage with everything you had to say. In 2021, we’d love to take on more of your big questions about how we work, so don’t hesitate to leave us a comment, tweet @wirecutter, or write to us!
We also debuted a new series of posts this year highlighting the most useful, interesting, and thought-provoking messages we’ve gotten from readers each month. See the posts from March, April, May, June, July, August, September, and October, and stay tuned for a November and December combo edition.
Sharing more about our process
We strive to be transparent with readers about who we are and how we work. This year, we built on a 2019 piece about what happens to the products we test and review when we’re done with them, zeroing in on several other areas of our work.
Read more:
We also launched a long-awaited feature: author pages that round up each piece we’ve published by a given writer, so that readers can keep up with our experts and everything they’re working on.
New ways to help you discover our picks
After a whole week devoted to coffee and the advent of our Most Popular Picks series in 2019, we’ve continued to look for new ways to package our guides and recommendations, connecting readers to unexpected, or new-to-them, areas of Wirecutter coverage.
Here are some of the highlights from 2020:
Diversity, equity, and inclusion in our work
2020 was a catalyst for change across our industry and the world. Since the days following the killing of George Floyd, America has found itself in a watershed moment of reckoning with systemic racism and injustice. As our editor-in-chief said in a note to readers in June:
“We know the problems of racial injustice can’t be solved with products. But we’re determined and actively working to improve the role that race and representation play in the products we recommend, the companies they come from, the sources we seek out in our research, and the diversity of our own staff. We know that doing better in all of these areas will directly improve our ability to help readers.”
We asked you for your feedback, too. Some of you said to keep doing what we’re doing. Many of you asked for more help in making ethical shopping decisions. You want us to include more-diverse voices and perspectives in our reviews, and you want more advice considering the specific needs of underserved audiences of many kinds—from low-income readers to older shoppers to those with disabilities to BIPOC readers. And you’re interested in seeing Wirecutter continue to work on racial justice within our own company and sharing more updates with you.
We published How to Pitch Stories to Wirecutter to ensure that freelance writers from all backgrounds have a clear understanding of our expectations, how we work, and what we pay for assignments. We’ve engaged in new and existing staff trainings focused on hiring, managing, and unconscious bias. We compiled resource lists, and we laid out plans for additional education and training. And we have even more plans for 2021. In the new year, we’ll continue to improve our approach within each editorial team, with discussions on product design principles, gaps and opportunities in our reviews, how to better serve readers from historically underrepresented groups, and more. Many of the actions that follow will be behind the scenes. But we’ll continue to share our progress as we learn and grow.
How the pandemic upended our work
On March 6, we published the first two pieces of what would (little did we know) over three months become 100-plus pieces focused on the coronavirus and its impact on the lives of our readers. One piece discussed what to do about the hand sanitizer shortage, and one covered the “coronavirus supplies” that everyone should have at home. We scrambled and swarmed, interviewing experts on our staff and outside of it, pivoting nearly every team to focus on the pandemic that rapidly upended all of our lives with alarming speed. We helped readers adapt to working remotely (with partners and kids in close quarters), explore alternatives to toilet paper, cut and dye their own hair, host virtual game nights, try out new hobbies, navigate food delivery, and so much more. We learned about the history of soap and how the 1918 flu epidemic birthed Pilates, and we shared tips for how readers could support their communities and essential workers. We gathered all of this coverage into one central hub and pinned it to the top of every page on our site, and we answered questions from readers in another dedicated post. We won a New York Times Publisher’s Award for our service journalism—an internal company award that we’re really proud of. We brainstormed, reported, and wrote, and brainstormed, reported, and wrote, and then … COVID-19 didn’t go away. We gradually stopped singularly writing about the pandemic as a standalone Thing, and started integrating it into our everyday coverage instead. We had our first pandemic summer at home, pandemic back to school with our favorite face masks for kids, pandemic Prime Day and Black Friday deals events, pandemic Thanksgiving, pandemic holiday gifting season … you get the point.
Although the majority of our staff members were already working from home pre-pandemic, we closed our offices in New York City and Los Angeles. As many people now know, working from home during a pandemic is not the same experience as working from home at any other time, even if you work for a company that’s known for its remote workforce, and even if you have a nice standing desk or a backyard or a consistent child-care situation. We’ve had a lot to keep us busy, but we’ve also been living through the pandemic and struggling at the same time. Since March, we’ve all been adapting to “new normals” that are not normal at all, and so have you.
We’re thankful for the time you spent reading and supporting our work this year, no matter how many miles or Mbps away.
Mentioned above
- Get cleaner air in a range of room sizes with air purifiers we’ve tested and measured firsthand.The Best Air Purifier
- A good humidifier can make indoor air more comfortable without constant maintenance.The Best Humidifier
- We’ve cooked mounds of eggs and more in 27 nonstick pans since 2016, and we recommend the slick and durable Tramontina 10-Inch Professional Restaurant Fry Pan.The Best Nonstick Pan
- We spent 25 hours testing 11 sets of resistance bands to find the best resistance bands for most people.The Best Resistance Bands
- Most fever thermometers will read your temperature accurately. But some are speedier and easier to use than others.The Best Thermometers for Kids and Adults
- No room for a full-size desk? No problem. Here are a few of our favorite small desks for cozy apartments and shared spaces.6 Small Desks We Love