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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
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Speaker 1:The wpminute.com/support. Today's special guest is Mike Hansen. Mike and I have been crossing paths at WordCamp for many, many years. We were joking off screen. Bluehost found the land to build the Bluehost building, and Mike was already there.
Speaker 1:And they just built the building around Mike. That's how long Mike has been at Bluehost now. Mike, welcome to the program.
Speaker 2:Hey. Thanks, Matt.
Speaker 1:VP of WordPress product. I think I've got the title right. Do you have any other titles?
Speaker 2:I'm I'm not sure I've shed any of the previous titles, but that that is currently accurate.
Speaker 1:You're joining us today to talk about Bluehost's new Wonder Suite of products, features all within the suite of Wonder Suite. We're gonna talk more about that tagline as WordPress made wonderful. Bluehost recently announced this, a few weeks ago. It includes things like Wonder Theme, Wonder Blocks, Wonder Help, Wonder Cart. It's wonderful, Mike.
Speaker 1:Great job.
Speaker 2:Yep. Lot of lot of features, a lot of, products in there. The the overall Wonder Suite.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Let's start with who is Bluehost for? A lot of us in the WordPress space, maybe a lot of people listening to this podcast, we're crazy, right? We're we got our DigitalOcean nodes, we got our lin nodes, we got our AWS stacks, and we're just hammering away at the terminal all day doing get pull requests to, you know, the simple WordPress site that only we know how the plumbing of it works. I don't think that's the type of customer Bluehost serves.
Speaker 1:So let's start with that. What do you think the customer is for Bluehost using your WordPress products?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So with with the Wunder Suite, this is obviously beneficial to small businesses who need to get online quickly. Novice users who need WordPress to be easier, they need some guidance. But it's also beneficial to freelancers and sort of that web pro segment who need speed, they need a head start, and they don't wanna be built into a corner. And so the interoperability and the compatibility with WordPress, Gutenberg, whole site editing, the works is one of the things that was really important when we built this product.
Speaker 2:You're not built into a corner. And while we don't put it front and center on the Bluehost website, we don't make it inconvenient for pros. On our $3 hosting plan, you can get SSH access. We have WP CLI installed. So I would say we have lots of customers, small businesses are the big portion.
Speaker 1:There's just a ton of people now more than ever just onboarding a business website, which is I know it's kind of obvious, but everyone thought it was obvious pre COVID, right? Everyone thought, well, everybody has a website, right? Every business has a website, an order form, a contact form, and then COVID hit. And I I hadn't been in the agency game for years. I ran an agency for a decade, but I had customers calling me that I talked to about building a website for them fifteen years ago that they never pulled the trigger on.
Speaker 1:And then COVID hit, doors shut, people couldn't do anything, and they were like, oh my god, I need that website you told me about fifteen years ago. Yeah man, yeah you do. You need to get on board with the internet. It's crazy that folks are still building up websites today. It's a long way of getting to you think there's still room there for the small business to start something and start selling things online?
Speaker 1:Like, you still see opportunity in that space as saturated as as we pros might think it to be?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, their new business is coming online every day. And to your point, when COVID happened, a lot of people started viewing websites instead of viewing them as an enhancement. They viewed them as the primary channel, right, the front door instead of an enhancement to their existing business.
Speaker 2:So we did see an uptick in people trying to get online, and I think we still see both new businesses coming online. And so the opportunity is there.
Speaker 1:One of the interesting things, I don't want to get to this in a moment, but obviously e commerce, WooCommerce, still kind of the I don't know. Did you say sleeping giant, sleeping gorilla in the room? 50,000 pound sleeping gorilla in the room? Like I just don't hear of WooCommerce as much as as I do Shopify. Even in the space that I'm in, like, just don't hear other podcasters, other marketers be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm spinning up a store. Gonna go with, let's say, WooCommerce. It's you're always hearing Shopify for better or worse. Talk to me about Wondercart. How does that align with WooCommerce?
Speaker 1:Does it align with WooCommerce? Is it an alternative solution? And and where do you see the opportunity for Wondercart?
Speaker 2:No. Absolutely. So Wondercart is built on top of WooCommerce. So it it utilizes WooCommerce and you WooCommerce functionality. And what Wondercart does is it pulls together multiple features from previously multiple plug ins to help operating a store be more efficient.
Speaker 2:An operating merchant needs to run campaigns, liquidations, Black Friday sales, all of those kind of things. And that's what Wondercard helps with. Your promotions and increasing conversion rates, those kind of items, but it's all built on top of WooCommerce.
Speaker 1:And then that sort of acts as a sort of like feature layer to WooCommerce. Here's the things WooCommerce might be missing for your average shop owner to make life easier? Do do you put sort of like an onboarding layer to the ecommerce experience to make it easier for the end user?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when you're when you're running through WonderStart, which is the onboarding portion, if you imply that you want to sell something or if you actually purchased a a store plan from Bluehost, we'll put you through an additional portion of onboarding to help get your your products set up. Are you selling digital products, physical products? Do you need shipping? Are you gonna charge taxes?
Speaker 2:How many products? Because that might imply the organization your your store needs. So we give them an extra an extra couple steps in onboarding if they're building a store, and then we give them a lot more tools within WordPress.
Speaker 1:I I think one of the interesting things, and I saw this recently with a friend of mine. He's starting a nonprofit foundation, and this isn't exactly ecommerce, but there's a payment and a transaction. And then just to set that up, I'm like, hey. Just I'll set the WordPress website up for you. Side note, I work for Gravity Forms, so we'll use Gravity Forms for the for the donation.
Speaker 1:Hey, man. Just just go set up Stripe. Just just go set up Stripe. Just go set up PayPal. Come back to me with that stuff, and then we'll get it all set up.
Speaker 1:And as easy as that stuff is for us, like, hey, you're creating an account at Stripe. You're putting in your bank your bank account number, your personal information, and that's it. Like, that's all you have to do. That's such a technical burden over to people that just don't even know this stuff. And what I'm getting at is sometimes we often make the website building, the store building because we know it so well.
Speaker 1:We're like, yeah, you just set up a shop. It's super easy. You just start selling. And there's a lot of these other like technical overheads like a Stripe, a PayPal, a merchant setting this up to you. How do I know I'm getting orders?
Speaker 1:I got to check email. This is not just about the website side of things. There's so much little points of interest for the first time website builder. Again, another long way of getting to how do you help sort of, like, the merchant side process? Do you still leave that up to WooCommerce?
Speaker 1:Does Bluehost or will Bluehost maybe have their own payment gateway? Anything like that in the future to just even simplify it even more for folks?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in inside of the Wonder Suite, we have some pages in the Bluehost plugin inside of WP admin. They have some additional next steps. One of the things that's hard about WordPress is the right thing at the right time. Not everything needs to be first.
Speaker 2:And so something like payments and shipping can happen a little bit later. Building your site and creating your first product more important than than connecting your payments. And so when the customer gets to that point, we surface a few options. We surface PayPal and very soon Stripe as payment options in our interface. And with that, our our integrations offer things like Venmo, buy now, pay later, Google Pay, some of those other payment options through those two providers.
Speaker 2:And so we also surface that so the customer can make a better decision when they're trying to pick what to use. And then as you mentioned, we we try to make it as easy as possible in the handoff to PayPal, but that side, it is what it is. On that side, it's it's it's tough.
Speaker 1:How do you want for the WordPress professional that's listening right now, she has 35 clients, 50 clients. Maybe she is having customers
Speaker 2:pick
Speaker 1:their own web hosting account and and then you come to me with your hosting account already signed up for. How do you want that WordPress professional to work with Bluehost? How do you want them to interface with Bluehost? Is there a preferred sort of like agency approach at Bluehost? Because what I hope I did is is sort of paint the picture of which type of customer Wondersuite and Bluehost is good for.
Speaker 1:But now those of us who are helping these folks implement WordPress in their lives, how do you want them to get on board with Bluehost?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So talking about the, like, the implementer or the pro segment, we have new site management tools that we've been iterating on. And so they can manage multiple websites within their control panel. They can there's also some iterations to that to come. But once they get in there, they can manage all of these sites, and then they can utilize these things like Wondercart to make their customers' stores more performant.
Speaker 2:So they could use Wonderstar, Wonderblocks to build a site more quickly, and then they can use something like Wondercart to make their site perform better. The goal of a store is not to have a store with a product and a buy button. It's to actually get people to click that buy button and check out.
Speaker 1:You have AI plastered all over the release notes of Wonder Suite. I'll tell you, Mike, I'm a skeptic on AI. Right? I can't get I mean, you know what I do, Mike. I cover the WordPress news space.
Speaker 1:I'll often ask chat GPT to tell me about my podcast and it'll tell me that Matt Mullenweg founded my podcast. So hey. I mean, it's close. Matt report of old. Maybe it's getting confused there.
Speaker 1:I can't get AI to do a darn thing right for me. Just the other day, I spent some time, like, tweaking things and, I mean, summarizing some posts. It it it almost does that, but it just doesn't know. Certainly doesn't know the WordPress space. No one really does.
Speaker 1:There's only 10,000 of us in the world who really care. So I guess I can't really fault AI for that, but I can't get AI to do anything. What what's the advantages of AI in your case? And and can you say what is powered by? Is it powered by ChatGPT in the back end or or something else?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's there's a few things powered by AI and more to come, but I I agree with your skepticism. I was a bit of a late a late adopter myself getting familiar with it, but I I will say that I'm optimistic about where it's going and what's possible. I think one thing that I think this is my opinion. One of the things I think that's a fad or a trend is things being labeled as AI, AI, AI everywhere.
Speaker 2:I think in the future, we're gonna just see things being enhanced by AI a little bit more behind the scenes. And so two of the two of the features that have AI behind them are Wonder Help as well as Wonder Blocks. So when you go through onboarding, you identify yourself as business auto mechanic, showing them pictures of flowers or a clothing boutique with even if it's not Laura Mipsum and it's content to one of those niches, the it's not they don't relate to it. And so using AI, we built relevant content to them using WonderBlocks, and there's a whole library of patterns that are now relevant to them that they can relate to. Now once you insert those patterns, they're still 100% Gutenberg blocks.
Speaker 2:You click, you edit, you swap pictures, you update text. So that's what I mean when I say compatibility and inter op. We're not building you into a corner at all. It's WordPress. The other one, WonderHelp, you can ask a question, and then you can get answers back.
Speaker 2:Actionable steps. For a novice, there's questions that come in that seem just silly to you and I, like, how do I add a new user? That left navigation is super intimidating to a novice. And so we see questions like, how do I add a user? And then we give them six or seven steps that say, go here, click this, do that.
Speaker 2:And it it meets their needs there. Now we do have a process of kind of auditing quality on that. We're monitoring that closely because we don't want it just giving garbage advice. And we're also constantly iterating on the prompt itself to ensure higher quality responses.
Speaker 1:No. That's super smart because, I mean, for years not to put words in your mouth, but for years I think like a lot of WordPress implementers, designers, developers, I mean we knew what we were doing. We could go to theme Forest of old again fifteen, ten, fifteen years ago, and you'd see like a restaurant theme, and you'd look at that and you go, well, I know the only difference here between this lawyer client of mine that just walked through the door is I can take this restaurant theme and put some stock legal photography in there, and it's now a lawyer's website. Sans maybe changing out some of the the typography and and stuff like that. You and I all and those listening get it, but super smart to use AI to just package it in a different way because that's a lot of what themes are is you could you could literally package the same theme with different photography or images in different ways, and it's what's gonna appeal to that that type of customer.
Speaker 1:Does it set up structural stuff too for for that end user? Contact page, buy page, stuff like that? Or
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Yep. When you go through WonderStart, you get the option of a few default pages based on what you selected in WonderStart. One thing about WonderStart, we don't ask a single question that doesn't alter your product experience. It's not for information or anything.
Speaker 2:It's it actually alters your experience, personalizes your experience. So as you go through that, you get to the default pages that are relevant to your business. You can create an about page, a contact page, a testimonial page, and then insert a template. Like, the whole page gets created from a template. And then one other thing that it does through all of Wonder Start is it actually generates a child theme, a block based child theme of Wonder theme that has all of the colors and fonts and selections that you made baked into that child theme.
Speaker 2:Now where where block based themes, I think, are gonna take us, you can get to the same destination from theme a or theme b. Right? So this two different destinations with the same theme. I think we're gonna see that you can get to the same destination from different themes now Because as you edit your global styles and using the site editor, everything's coupled at that point.
Speaker 1:Put you on the hot seat for a set second, Mike. We do have a representative from Bluehost on the line just in case, case, but just to put you on the hot seat for a second, Mike. What are your thoughts on on how fast or slow we've iterated with full site editing global styles? I feel, man, it's still not there with a beaver builder, an Elementor, in other words, like, making those big global style changes, sweeping template changes. Like, I don't feel like it's there yet, or maybe the isn't there yet in order to to, like, get somebody down that path.
Speaker 1:The style book is kinda like, okay. I think it's called the style book. I just don't feel like it has that global sweeping power that you would get from an Elementor or a traditional page builder, let's say. Your thoughts on how much more time we get we need to get to that point where it's you really feel confident as a web designer with this tool?
Speaker 2:So I think if you think about is it moving fast or slow, I think it's moving fast and slow. Right? Some things are moving extremely fast and something that we wish we had a year ago. But if you look at where the content editor was when it first launched versus where it is today, it has come leaps and bounds forward. And I think one thing that we can agree on is that there's opportunity in blocks and that blocks are better for users versus explaining a short code to a small business owner.
Speaker 2:Right? That's I mean, we both dealt with that in the past, and it's not fun. The blocks, I think, are better, and I think we all see that. Now the editor editing interface, I think, is evolving and getting much better. And with every release, we see improvements.
Speaker 2:So I'm optimistic that it's going the right direction. I would also say that I do think that in today's state, it's very competitive. I wouldn't say it's far and ahead the leader, but I would say it's very competitive. And I think as the plug in landscape also starts to evolve and better support it, I think that's where we'll see a lot of the advantages of that. Because e even with a Beaver builder or an Elementor or some of those page builders, we get a little we get a little bit of that lock in problem that I described earlier where it's not compatible with the WordPress system.
Speaker 2:And I think that WordPress eco system is the foundation of why WordPress is popular.
Speaker 1:I heard you say something before that I wanted to hold on to. You said that the left hand side of WordPress can be pretty scary for a novice user. Right? All of these options, all what do I click on, what's a page, what's a post, customize, what's the settings. I thought years ago, I probably have a blog post, I'm sure you have a blog post out there too, from years ago, saying that web hosts were going to start their own flavors of WordPress.
Speaker 1:And that was like the magical thing I think a lot of us in the industry thought web hosts were going to do. Like you'd have a website builder, you had no idea it was WordPress but it was and you just went through the web host flavor of WordPress. Do see your onboarding tool eventually evolving into maybe just masking WordPress into the only essentials that your customers need to touch? Wunder Suite being the foundation of it, but then when you log in, you don't even see that left hand sidebar as we know it these days?
Speaker 2:So yes and no. I think Wunder Suite and the Bluehost experience inside of WP admin, think we're gonna surface the launch pads that get you where you're going quicker, but we won't prevent you from doing anything that you can do in WordPress. And so that's there's a balance there. But I also think that WordPress is evolving in a way that it's gonna become less of a problem in the future. As we see with the site editor and the content editor, full site editing, I think more things are gonna actually start happening in the editor.
Speaker 2:Less configuration is gonna happen on a settings page elsewhere. And if you remember a long time ago in the community, there was a lot of discussion about front end editing. Right? Essentially, we might come full circle back to that after we get all of this in place.
Speaker 1:Mike, I built the entire business off of the customizer that crashed and burned because everyone left the customizer. So, yeah. I know. I remember that experience really well. One of the thing and and actually, when you were giving that answer, I was thinking, well, maybe if you put put yourself in the shoes, I used to consult a bunch of startups in a local accelerator.
Speaker 1:People would get seed funding, small businesses, sustainable businesses. Anyway, the point is, is you have these people who are trying to just roll up their sleeves, start a business. It was a bakery. It was a yoga studio. And we'd have twenty, twenty five people in a cohort every winter summer, right?
Speaker 1:Is how it went. So 50 businesses a year would come through. And I was the guy who taught the web class, right? So I would come in and year one, was now you have this is like 2017. So year one, I'd come in and I would be like, WordPress, build your theme.
Speaker 1:And people are like, I am trying to figure out how to do an LLC. And by the end of this incubator, I have to have a whole WordPress site built. It's impossible. And then people are just defaulting to Squarespace and Wix. And I think WordPress got a bad rap for how technically challenging it was.
Speaker 1:I think what I'm hearing is, if we hide WordPress, it might not be good for the WordPress brand, and oh, by the way, people might be like, no, give me that WordPress thing. In a couple years, people will be like, yeah, give me that WordPress thing. I want it now. I didn't want it back in 2017, 2018, but I want it now because it's it's it's got all these great things, and I think that'll be an advantage for all of us.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think I think one of the things that's important about why giving that WordPress theme is an important statement is the difference between WordPress and proprietary builders out there is that eventually you run into a brick wall. Right? And with WordPress, you have continued flexibility ongoing. And the other thing that you said is that business owners are they're time strapped.
Speaker 2:They're trying to set up an LLC, get their kitchen ready, get all of the other things ready. They don't wanna become a web pro. And so helping them get it done quick and then not handcuffing them. Right? Like, not handcuffing them into a brick wall or building building them into a corner where the day they decide to add a newsletter, they can't.
Speaker 2:You know, if if WordPress can do it, the customer should be able to do it when they're ready.
Speaker 1:Mike, is there anything else WunderSuite or Bluehost is doing that you want the world to know about?
Speaker 2:I mean, there's there's a lot of things going on, and there was a lot of people in Teams that it took to get this done. I mean, this wasn't just one team building it. It was lots of teams building it, lots of product managers, lots of engineering leaders. So this was a an effort of many, but there's a few exciting things going on behind the scenes. Over the last year, we've had a a hyper focus on performance, improving that performance and that that perception of Bluehost because we're affordable.
Speaker 2:So our performance is top notch now, best in class for the price point, the value. And so there's there's efforts like that that are ongoing all of the time that are not front and center, but I think are critical to things like WunderSuite being
Speaker 1:a success. Mike Hansen, VP product. Mike, you've been there forever. I'm excited to see you at WordCamp US and many, many more word camps to come. Thanks for hanging out today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
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