Hired In A Week: WPBeginner Turns 6 – Reflections on the Past and a Glance at Our Future

Today is America’s birthday and (more important) WPBeginner’s birthday, which turns 6 today. It’s crazy to think that WPBeginner is six years old, but it’s true!

This year’s celebration is going to be a little different. Instead of doing mega giveaways and building 3 schools, I want to take a step back and reflect on this journey, share some key milestones, and what lies ahead.

WPBeginner Story

Syed Before and After

I was 16 years old when I first discovered WordPress in 2006. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the platform.

In 2009 (at age 19), I launched WPBeginner with a mission to make WordPress easy by providing cutting-edge helpful WordPress tutorials that are easy to understand for small businesses, bloggers, and non-techy website owners.

Since then, WPBeginner has become one of the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry.

WPBeginner in Numbers

Read the new and updated About Page of WPBeginner.

United Nations Award

In November, I was recognized as the top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by United Nations. This was super COOL!

Syed at United Nations

Soliloquy and Envira

In August 2014, through a merger / acquisition deal, I became partner in two top notch WordPress plugins: Soliloquy (Fastest WordPress slider plugin) and Envira Gallery (The best gallery plugin).

This was very exciting as I love both of those plugins. I wrote more about this partnership on my personal blog.

WPBeginner’s YouTube Experiment

Last year, we finally decided to focus on WPBeginner’s YouTube channel and put our production in high gear.

The results were phenomenal. We passed 1.6 million total video views and we’re at almost 19,000 subscribers!

We have a total of 394 WordPress video tutorials, and we’re creating a new video 5 days a week (Mon – Friday).

While these stats are great, it’s no where near my other List25 YouTube channel which is in the top 1% of all YouTube channels ranked #675. We have almost 1.6 million subscribers there and 300 million video views.

It would be really awesome if WPBeginner channel can pass 100,000 subscribers before our 7th birthday. But for that I’ll need a lot of help.

Will you help me? Please Subscribe to Our YouTube channel.

WordPress as a SaaS (OptinMonster)

In 2013, we launched OptinMonster which quickly became the industry-standard for WordPress lead generation plugins. In April, we pushed the limits once again by transforming it into a full software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

Which means OptinMonster now works on all websites not just WordPress. The cool part is that we’re using WordPress as our application framework.

Aside from our awesome team that worked on it, a lot of credit has to be given to our technology partners: Pagely (best enterprise WordPress hosting) and MaxCDN (best CDN for WordPress).

SyedBalkhi.com

Thanks to many of you, I decided to relaunch my personal blog at SyedBalkhi.com where I will be blogging regularly and sharing my insights on building businesses online.

Since WPBeginner is strictly focused on WordPress, I will be using my personal blog to talk about tips on improving your blogs, getting more traffic, social media tips, general business advice, and some personal stories as well.

I’d love it if you guys join me there

My favorite on WPBeginner

Over the years, my responsibilities have definitely changed. While I may not write every single article or record any videos, I’m still the guy who reviews everything and press the publish button (daily). We have written tons of awesome articles last year, but here are some of my personal favorite:

What’s Coming Next?

If I start sharing all my notes, we’d be here for a few days. Every day, I get awesome emails from you (WPBeginner readers) with suggestions on things we can do to improve. There are so many things that I’d like to do, but here are some key ones:

WPBeginner Redesign

The last complete redesign we did was in June 2012. Although we’ve made tons of improvements, it is starting to feel a bit dated (and YES I know that it’s still not mobile-responsive).

There hasn’t been a single day this year where I haven’t received an email or comment about the site not being responsive. The reality is that 91% of WPBeginner users are on desktop. The other 3% are on tablets. Both of those screen sizes are large enough for our site. However there are 6% of users who visit the site using mobile, and their experience is less than pleasant.

I’ve already started working on the first sketches of the redesign, and it’s looking great.

Mega Tutorials & eBooks

WordPress has grown so much since I first started WPBeginner. There are now complex topics like memberships, eCommerce, etc that simply cannot be covered in one article.

I’ve long ignored those complex topics because I personally don’t like the concept of “series” posts.

However this site is not about me, it’s about YOU. After talking with several readers over emails and in-person, I think we have come up with a solution that works. I’m calling these Mega Tutorials which will be available in both Web & eBook formats.

Thank You Everyone

I want to say thank you to everyone who has supported us in this journey. I really do appreciate all of your retweets, personal emails, content suggestions, and the in-person hugs / interactions at the events.

You all are AMAZING and without you, there is no WPBeginner.

I look forward to another solid year ahead of us.

Yours Truly,
Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

P.S. We’re hiring a full-time (remote work) content person with great communication skills and expertise in WordPress. If you or someone you know would be interested in being part of WPBeginner, then please send us an email with your resume.

To leave a comment please visit WPBeginner Turns 6 – Reflections on the Past and a Glance at Our Future on WPBeginner.

Hired In A Week

Sunday, July 5, 2015

WPBeginner Turns 6 – Reflections on the Past and a Glance at Our Future