How to Build an Affordable WordPress Website Without Coding – Interview with 10Web Co-Founder
WordPress is a CMS system of the moment. It’s easy-to-use, user-friendly and equipped with all the necessities for managing website content. As the number one choice for millions around the world who create WordPress blog posts every day, this platform grows from day to day. This is why learning about WordPress tips and tricks never stops. In this article Armen Saghatelian the co-Founder of 10Web.io – the all-in-one WordPress Website Builder – shared his thoughts on improving user experience, crucial WordPress features, and Gutenberg editor. Also, he reflected on the best practices you should have in mind when running a WordPress website. Enjoy!
From the user’s perspective, what WordPress feature needs improvement the most?
It would be great to have a native mechanism of getting updates for premium plugins and themes, like the one we have for free plugins and themes on wordpress.org. There are multiple third-party solutions to this problem, created by premium plugins’ developers. But having a unified, native update mechanism would be much better.
What are your thoughts on Gutenberg editor now that we’ve all had some time to get used to it?
I really like it. They did an amazing job creating a truly simple and user-friendly WYSIWYG editor that’s easy and fun to use. But when it comes to building more advanced and functional websites, with complicated layouts and all, it’s hard to compete with the powerful page builders — such as Elementor — with their endless functionality and extendable ecosystems.
What are your favorite tips for improving the user experience on WordPress websites?
Website speed is one of the most important aspects of user experience nowadays. It’s a proven fact that the visitors are not willing to wait for your website to load, and are likely to leave if it takes more than 3 secs. Following the best practices of website performance optimization would make a difference not only in user satisfaction, but also in your website SEO, and as a result, it can boost your conversion rates. The most important steps are: optimizing your website images, using a caching solution, and avoiding cheap shared hosting. On those hostings, the servers are shared between multiple websites, and one’s traffic and security issues can easily affect the others. The best choice is managed hosting on cloud. It’s a bit more expensive than shared hosting, but guarantees higher uptime, speed, and security for the hosted websites.
How did you get involved with WordPress in the first place?
I’ve been in the world of building websites for over 10 years now. It was a part-time side-job while studying at the University. First, we were making websites, then creating plugins and services for different website creation platforms. Taking into account the great community of developers, creators, and enthusiasts around it, WordPress seems an obvious choice now. But back then, it wasn’t that obvious. Most of the big WordPress companies we know now did not exist, WordPress was known as a blogging platform used by bloggers and photographers, but not the big brands.
Before I knew it, WordPress became the de-facto standard CMS and an undividable part of my life as well, and I ended up dealing with it as my main occupation.
Do you need advanced knowledge of WordPress to independently manage a
website if you’re only just starting your website?
Definitely not. One of the main secrets of the huge success of WordPress is that it allows you to start simple: you don’t need much knowledge to have a simple WordPress website, and when your demands for the business or blog grow, your WordPress website can grow with you to become the multi-functional platform you need. But it might be tricky since the freedom you have with customization becomes one of the problems for you as a non-developer. You can easily become overwhelmed with all the options you have — how to make hosting, plugins, and services to work correctly and stay optimized. And here comes a solution like the 10Web platform that automatically does it all for you.
What differentiates 10Web from other WordPress website builders?
It’s not just a builder. 10Web is the only all-in-one platform for building, hosting, and managing WordPress websites. This means, that you can build your entire website using our beautiful ready-made website templates, website builder, and 50+ Premium plugins. You can host your website on our managed hosting on Google Cloud, while getting all the necessary services like backup, security, SEO, image optimization — all from a single dashboard. This way, all the essential components of your website will be optimized by default and you can easily get Google Page Speed Score of 95+ which is crucial for user experience and SEO, as I’ve already mentioned.
In your opinion, in what area is 10Web valuable the most to businesses?
Web development and marketing agencies build hundreds of websites every year. It requires a great amount of time and human resources. Having everything in one place can save a lot of time and resources and the companies can multiply their capacity using our tools. It’s even harder for individuals and freelancers. They need to get hosting, plugins, and services from different vendors and have to talk to different customer support teams to solve their problems. Having a single Customer Care team that can answer all your WP-related questions can make a huge difference.
Plus, the platform is incredibly affordable. You get it with all its services, premium plugins, builder and hosting at half the price of a premium hosting of comparable quality and speed elsewhere.
How do you manage to keep up your platform with all WordPress updates?
We use the latest cutting-edge technologies in the field and are constantly working on improving our products, adding features that our customers want and keeping the platform up-to-date.
How does your usual working day look like?
Actually, there is no such thing as a typical day for me. Every new day brings new challenges to deal with, new feature requests from customers. I try to constantly improve not only the 10Web platform, but also our development workflows, customer care practices, and my own working day routines. Of course, some things never change in my life, like the good breakfast with honey and tea I’ve had almost every day as long as I can remember myself.
What do you do for fun outside of work?
Spending time with my family, messing around with my daughter, cooking (mainly meat recipes), automating my routines with 60+ connected wireless devices I have in my home. What can possibly be better than that? Maybe only traveling with my family.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
