Today is July 4th, which means WPBeginner is officially 14 years old. We’ve come a long way!
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 massive birthday giveaway, and you’ll get a chance to win your favorite premium WordPress plugins worth $50,000. On top of that, you can also win a 1-on-1 mentorship call with me for 1 hour.
Since this is a long article, you can easily skip to the section you’re most interested in:
WPBeginner Story
I first started using WordPress when I was 16 years old and I fell in love with the community. This led me to start WPBeginner at age 19 with a single mission: to 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 6.5 years old, and it’s quite cool to see him taking interest in WordPress. He attended WordCamp Asia with me earlier this year in Bangkok.
His favorite task in the company is coming up with mascot ideas for our new plugins at Awesome Motive.
We as a family are continuing our travels around the world, and it’s really awesome to meet our local WPBeginner users.
Since the last WPBeginner birthday, we have taken trips to Istanbul, Karachi, Alaska, Dubai, California, Mexico, St. Thomas, Maldives, Thailand, Canada, and more.
One of the best parts about running a fully remote online company is that I can work from anywhere in the world. We have team members in 50 countries now, and I’m planning to visit at least few more countries this year.
If you didn’t get a chance to read my 2022 recap, I highly recommend checking it out on my personal blog where I share lessons learned from last year.
Btw, here’s a preview of a mascot that Solomon helped come up with for our new plugin, Duplicator. The mascot’s name is Willie the Walrus.
WPBeginner Updates
Thanks to our awesome community, WPBeginner has continued to grow year after year. Aside from all the amazing WordPress tutorials on our blog, there have been several notable updates from last year that I’d like to highlight.
But before I do that, I want to share a huge milestone that I’m super proud of. We got featured on the NASDAQ billboard in Time Square for passing 25 million active installs of our products.
This was a huge celebration for our entire team — going from a blog to being in Time Square in New York City!!!
These milestones are proof that hard work does pay off.
Talking about hard work, here are some big WPBeginner updates that happened in the last 12 months:
1. We launched Five New Free Business Tools
Since last year, we have launched 5 new free business tools to help you do more with WordPress.
- Keyword Generator Tool: It makes keyword research easy by helping you generate 300+ keyword ideas in a click.
- Blog Post Idea Generator: It helps you come up with a year’s worth of content ideas in a second.
- Smart Headline Analyzer: It lets you write irresistible headlines that your users can’t help but click.
- Website SEO Analyzer: It finds critical errors on your site and generates a free SEO report to fix them.
- Keyword Density Checker: It enables you to find the primary keywords on any content to fix over-optimization. Also great for competitor research.
2. Larger community + More Content
Our community has continued to grow on all social media networks. Our WPBeginner Engage Facebook group now has over 94,000 members.
And the WPBeginner YouTube channel has passed 291,000 subscribers.
We also revamped our WPBeginner video site. Now you can access loads of step-by-step videos without hiring a developer for free.
You can follow us on various social media networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
3. Contributing to WordPress and Open Source
We have always been huge supporters of open source. This past year, we revamped our free Insert Headers and Footers plugin from the ground up and relaunched it under a new brand WPCode.
It was originally created to help you add code snippets in WordPress without editing your theme’s functions.php file or installing an additional plugin.
Now we launched a brand new snippet library from where you can find the snippet and add them to your site with one click.
You can also create your own WPCode profile to save snippets, create private snippets, and more.
See the full WPCode announcement to see why this is the most underrated yet MUST HAVE plugin for all websites, and it’s now being used by over 2 million websites!
4. New Acquisitions & Investments
In 2018, I created the WPBeginner Growth Fund to invest in WordPress-focused companies that are solving important problems that you, our readers, want me to help out with.
Over the past 12 months, we have made several big acquisitions and investments in the ecosystem.
- We acquired Thrive Themes, company behind some of the most powerful growth tools for WordPress. Over 200,000+ smart website owners use the Thrive plugin suite to easily convert website visitors into email subscribers, paying customers, and raving fans. Some of their plugins include landing page builder, quiz builder, course platform, and more. Here’s the full background story.
- We acquired Duplicator, a powerful WordPress backup and migration plugin used by over 1.5 million websites. You can use it to create automatic backups and store them on cloud. It comes with easy restore option to save time. It’s also the best solution to migrate your website from one hosting provider to another, or even from local server to live. Here’s the full background story.
- We acquired WP101, which offers professionally-produced WordPress training videos to help you learn WordPress, fast. It’s a perfect solution for business owners to offer WordPress training videos in their employee onboarding process. Here’s the full background story.
- We acquired Easy WP SMTP, which helps you solve email delivery issues and prevent your emails from landing in the spam folder.
Aside from the full acquisitions, we also invested in HeroThemes, a company that specializes in building tools to help users deliver great customer service on their websites. See more details here.
I’m really proud of how far we’ve come with the Growth Fund, and it’s really amazing to see the impact our companies are making in the WordPress ecosystem and the larger open web.
Want me to invest in your business? Learn more about the WPBeginner growth fund.
Product / Company Updates
Often readers ask me 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 25 million websites. Aside from that, we also have investments in a suite of other WordPress companies through our growth fund that I mentioned above.
Our team at Awesome Motive continued to set new records this year, and all of our products saw tremendous growth.
Here’s a list of our plugins that you should check out:
- OptinMonster – The #1 conversion optimization software that helps you convert abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers. There’s also a free version here.
- WPForms – The most beginner-friendly WordPress form builder used by over 5 million websites. There’s also a free version – WPForms Lite.
- MonsterInsights – The most popular WordPress Analytics plugin to help you grow your business with confidence. I use this on all of my websites. Free version available: MonsterInsights Lite.
- AIOSEO – The original WordPress SEO plugin to help you get more traffic. Used by over 3 million websites. There’s also a free version of AIOSEO.
- WP Mail SMTP – The #1 plugin that helps improve your WordPress email deliverability. The free version: WP Mail SMTP Lite is sufficient for most website owners.
- SeedProd – The best drag & drop website builder for WordPress. You can use it to create custom WordPress themes, landing pages, and website layouts without any code. Try the free version of SeedProd.
- RafflePress – A powerful WordPress giveaway and contest plugin to grow your website traffic.
- Smash Balloon – The most popular social media feeds plugin for WordPress. A free version is available for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube feeds.
- PushEngage – The leading web push notification software for small businesses. It helps send over 9 billion push notifications each month.
- SearchWP – The most advanced WordPress search plugin. Completely customize your WordPress search form and search results algorithm to improve your content discoverability and increase sales. Trusted by over 30,000+ website owners.
- Easy Digital Downloads – the top-rated WordPress plugin for selling digital products and subscriptions. Easily sell eBooks, software, music, and more, protect digital downloads, accept payments, and more. Trusted by over 50,000+ website owners. Try the free version of EDD.
- AffiliateWP – The most popular affiliate management plugin for WordPress. Easily launch an affiliate program for your store. One-click integration with WooCommerce, WPForms, and 20 other payment plugins. Unlock a new growth channel without the middleman fees.
- WP Simple Pay – Easily accept payments online without a complex shopping cart setup. Great for simple one-time or recurring payments. Built-in support for credit card payments, ACH bank debit, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and more. Try the free version of WP Simple Pay.
- TrustPulse – Leverage the power of social proof to instantly increase site conversions by up to 15%. Automatically show real-time purchase notifications and other website activity notifications to increase trust, conversions, and sales.
- WP Charitable – The top-rated donation and fundraising plugin for WordPress. Over 10,000+ non-profit organizations and website owners across the world use Charitable to create fundraising campaigns and raise more money online. Try the free version of Charitable.
- Thrive Themes: Powerful growth tool suite for WordPress to help you transform your website into an online business platform. The suite includes Thrive Theme Builder, Thrive Automator, Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads, and more.
- Duplicator: Secure your WordPress website with reliable backups. It also makes it easy to migrate and restore your website to your favorite locations. Try the free version of Duplicator.
- User Feedback: Easiest way to collect user feedback and make surveys on your website. Great HotJar alternative (free version here).
We’re a fully remote team of over 290+ people across 50 countries. Want to join our team and work alongside me in helping small businesses grow and compete with the big guys? We’re hiring.
WPBeginner Birthday Giveaway
To celebrate the 14th birthday of WPBeginner, we are offering premium plugins worth $50,000.
The prize includes 10 licenses of each of the plugins listed here.
WPForms, MonsterInsights, OptinMonster, AIOSEO, SeedProd, Thrive Suite, Funnelkit, Uncanny Automator, MemberPress, Easy Digital Downloads, SearchWP, RafflePress, Formidable Forms, WPCode, Duplicator, Smash Balloon, WP Mail SMTP, WP Simple Pay, AffiliateWP, Pretty Links.
On top of that, you can also win a 1-on-1 mentorship call with me for 1 hour.
The winner will be chosen randomly using a random generator script.
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 interactions at events.
I also want to say a special thank you to everyone who’s using our plugins because that enables us to keep bringing more free tutorials on WPBeginner.
You all are AMAZING, and without you, there is no WPBeginner.
I look forward to another solid year ahead of us.
Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner
The post WPBeginner Turns 14 Years Old – Reflections, Updates, and a Giveaway ($50,000 in Prizes) first appeared on WPBeginner.