WPBeginner Turns 10 Years Old – Reflections, Updates, and a WordPress Giveaway ($124,000+ in Prizes)
Wow, it’s the tenth fourth. Today, WPBeginner is officially 10 years old — feels unreal to type this!
Like every year, I want to take a few minutes and do a quick recap of all the major things happening in business as well as my personal life.
Bonus: I’m also doing a huge WordPress giveaway with over $124,000+ in prizes from my favorite WordPress products and services.
On top of that, you can also win our exclusive WPBeginner 10th anniversary shirt, and an all expense paid trip to visit me in Palm Beach, FL to get 1-on-1 mentorship from me.
Yes, there are two separate giveaways happening (Birthday Giveaway and Ultimate Fan Giveaway)
Since this is a long article, you can easily skip to the section you’re most interested in:
- Personal Updates
- WPBeginner Updates
- Product Updates
- WPBeginner Stories
- Birthday Giveaway
- Ultimate Fan Giveaway
WPBeginner Story
I started using WordPress when I was 16 years old and started WPBeginner at age 19 with a single mission: make WordPress easy for beginners.
Since then WPBeginner has become the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners.
For those of you who’re new, you can read the full WPBeginner story on our about page and use the Start Here page to get the most out of WPBeginner.
Personal Updates
My son, Solomon, is now 2.5 years old. He’s growing up fast and I’m enjoying every bit of time with him. Amanda (my wife) and Solomon have been joining me on a lot of my business trips, and we have taken several fun trips as well.
Since the last WPBeginner anniversary post, we went to Spain, Italy, Puerto Rico, St. Maarten, Mexico (Tulum, Punta Mita, Cozumel, Costa Maya), Canada, and did several trips within USA including the memorable roadtrip through Utah where we saw the top national parks.
Last week, we did our all company retreat in Orlando, FL where we celebrated WPBeginner’s 10th birthday a bit early. Here are some photos from that:
WPBeginner Updates
Going into the 10th year, WPBeginner has continued to grow in double-digit percentage (year over year). Aside from tons of amazing WordPress tutorials on our blog, there have been several notable updates from last year, that I’d like to highlight.
1. We launched the WPBeginner Engage Facebook Group
A lot of you have been asking for this, so last week we finally launched our Facebook Group.
WPBeginner Engage is a great place to share and learn tips for using WordPress while getting to know other users.
Aside from peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing, we are also going to be doing exclusive prizes and giveaways through out the year.
What are you waiting for? Go ahead and join the WPBeginner Facebook Group. I look forward to connecting with you
2. New Hosting Infrastructure
In celebration of WPBeginner’s 10th birthday, I got a nice present from our WordPress hosting partner, HostGator. They completely overhauled our hosting infrastructure to make it even more robust and fast.
Here’s an overview of what the new setup looks like:
I will be doing a more detailed write up on this in the coming weeks to explain how cool it is, and the performance improvements we have seen.
The additional server resources will be very helpful with our upcoming new tools section on WPBeginner.
I have been a HostGator customer since 2007, and WPBeginner website has been hosted with them since day 1 (see my full HostGator review). I want to thank their entire team that helped us with the upgrade.
Note: WPBeginner is using a custom HostGator cloud setup (not shared hosting). We started with shared hosting when we were small, but as our website grew, we upgraded to the higher plans.
3. Free Courses on YouTube + 141,305+ subscribers
Many of you already know that I’m obsessed with our YouTube channel.
We recently passed 141,305 subscribers.
On top of creating video tutorials for our blog posts, we are now creating exclusive YouTube only content.
Think of these as free mini-courses on: how to grow your email list, how to make money blogging, how to get better at SEO, etc.
Seriously, check out all the awesome work our team is doing on YouTube (specially the new Playlists area).
4. Instagram and Pinterest
Several of you asked me why WPBeginner is not on other social media networks outside of Twitter and Facebook.
I didn’t have a good answer because I knew that we should be on these social networks.
Well now we are.
If you love Pinterest, then you can follow WPBeginner on Pinterest to learn about WordPress as well as see other business related tips in our various boards.
If you like using Instagram, then please follow WPBeginner on Instagram to stay up to date with WordPress tips as well as exclusive videos / stories from me.
5. WPBeginner Growth Accelerator Fund
Last year, I created the first ever WordPress focused Growth Accelerator Fund.
The goal was simple: invest in WordPress product and service companies to help them grow their business while creating amazing products for our users.
My first investments as part of the growth fund included: MemberPress, Pretty Links, Affiliate Royale, Formidable Forms, and SeedProd.
Working closely with and mentoring such talented entrepreneurs have been an extremely rewarding experience for me.
I plan to open up the growth accelerator applications again next month for our second round of investments. If you have a WordPress focused product or service business, and want to work closely with me, then make sure you subscribe to WPBeginner.
Product Updates
One of the questions that I often get asked via our contact form is what is WPBeginner’s income, and how does WPBeginner make money by giving away all WordPress tutorials for free.
Well, we make money indirectly through our suite of premium WordPress plugins that are now running on over 9 million websites.
WPForms
WPForms is our drag & drop WordPress form builder plugin which turned 3 years old earlier this year.
It is now being used by over 2 million websites and has a 4.9 out of 5 star rating average with over 4200 five star ratings.
This past year, we introduced distraction-free Form Landing Pages and Conversational Forms, two of my favorite addons.
Aside from that, we worked with Google to make WPForms AMP friendly. We also added several powerful features like AJAX form submission, Google reCAPTCHA v3, smart email field, smart phone field, tons of language translations, and a whole lot more.
You can download the free version of WPForms or get WPForms Pro to unlock even more powerful features.
MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It helps you see all the stats that matter right inside your WordPress dashboard.
This past year, we added several new features to MonsterInsights including expanded page insights, front-end page insights, easy scroll-depth tracking, automatic integrations for ThirstyAffiliates, Pretty Links, LifterLMS, and MemberPress, along with many other powerful features.
MonsterInsights is my most favorite plugin in the world because it helps me easily setup analytics, so I can make data-driven decisions and grow our business with confidence.
You can download the free version of MonsterInsights or get MonsterInsights Pro to unlock more powerful features.
OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the best WordPress plugin to convert regular website visitors into subscribers and customers.
Simply put, it helps you get more email subscribers.
This year we added several exciting features into OptinMonster including: Spin a Wheel gamification campaigns, attention activation, Monster Leads, chatbot integrations, and a whole lot more.
OptinMonster truly is the #1 most powerful conversion optimization toolkit in the world. It will help you instantly boost leads and grow revenue by converting and monetizing your existing website traffic.
TrustPulse
TrustPulse is the best social proof activity notification app in the world.
You have likely seen activity notifications on various websites (specially eCommerce) where they say John from Florida just bought X product.
These social proof notifications can immediately increase your website conversions. Learn more about how TrustPulse work.
You can get started with TrustPulse for free to see the uplift in conversion.
WPBeginner Stories
Several of my friends and well-known entrepreneurs were kind enough to record short videos about WPBeginner’s 10th birthday. Thank you so much y’all, it means a lot to me
Over 12 videos in the playlist so far!