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!

Mega WPBeginner Birthday Giveaway

To celebrate the 10th birthday of WPBeginner, I asked my favorite WordPress plugins, themes, and hosting companies to contribute prizes, and the response was just amazing.

We have $124,000+ worth of premium WordPress plugins, themes, and hosting licenses. There are over 735+ prizes, so yes there will be literally over 700 winners (scroll below to see all prizes).

Winners will be chosen randomly using a random generator script.

All you have to do is enter the giveaway using the widget below:

Note: All winners have been selected and emailed, if you have entered our giveaway please check your inbox

Remember we’re doing two separate giveaways. Above is the birthday giveaway where you can enter to win prizes from top WordPress plugins, themes, and hosting companies.

The ultimate fan giveaway where you can win an all expense paid trip + 1-on-1 mentorship from me requires separate entry. Click here to see more details.

Full List of Prizes for WPBeginner Birthday Giveaway:

We have over 70 companies that contributed prizes for our birthday giveaway. Below is the full list of prizes available:

WordPress Hosting:

10 annual licenses of the following hosting products:

• 1 year of Shared Plus Hosting from Bluehost
• 1 year of Standard WordPress Cloud Hosting from HostGator
• 1 year of GoGeek Hosting Plan from SiteGround
• 1 year of Startup Hosting Plan from WP Engine
• 1 year of Unlimited Shared Hosting from Dreamhost
• 1 year of Lite Hosting Plan from A2 Hosting

WordPress Plugins:

10 annual licenses of the following premium WordPress plugins:

OptinMonster / WPForms / MonsterInsights / SeedProd / MemberPress / Pretty Links / Affiliate Royale / AdSanity / AAWP / Advanced Coupons / Advanced Custom Fields Pro / Affiliate Coupons / All in One SEO Pack / Beaver Builder / BirchPress / Blogvault / Booking Robin / S3 Media Maestro / Complianz GDPR / CSS Hero / Delivery Drivers for WooCommerce / Delivery Fees for WooCommerce / Envira Gallery / Full Text Search / Google Fonts for WordPress / Imagely / InfiniteWP / LifterLMS / Malcare / Maps Maker / ProfilePress / PublishPress / Revive Social / Soliloquy / Start Booking / Sugar Calendar / ThirstyAffiliates / UpdraftPlus / Visual Composer / Weglot / Widget Options / WP Rocket / WP Security Audit Log / Yoast SEO Pro

5 annual licenses of the following premium WordPress plugins:

Formidable Forms / Ultimate Member / Groundhogg / WP Dispensary

WordPress Themes:

10 annual licenses of the following premium WordPress themes:

Astra Theme / Elegant Themes / ThemeIsle’s Neve / Themify / CSSIgniter / Anariel Design(6 months) / AccessPress Themes / Organized Themes / Pankogut Themes / Pixelemu / PremiumCoding / Visual Modo / WPZoom / MH Themes / Blogging Theme Styles

Services and Training:

Following companies have donated 10 licenses of their services / training:

Sucuri / LiveChat Inc / ShortPixel / WP Allied / Mfy Messenger Bot Automation / Gutenberg Course by Creator Courses / Custom Types Training Course by Toolset

WPBeginner Swag:

We will also be giving away 100 WPBeginner stickers + our exclusive 10th anniversary shirt.

Ultimate WPBeginner Fan Giveaway

Over the last 10 years, I have had the pleasure to meet thousands of WPBeginner readers across the world and learn their WPBeginner story. It’s extremely motivating to hear the impact WPBeginner has on so many people’s careers and businesses.

During these in-person meetings, many of you ask about how I manage multiple companies, my traffic / growth strategy, and in general how everything runs behind the scenes.

That’s why this year, I want to do something special that I have never done before. I’m calling it the ultimate WPBeginner fan giveaway.

Prize:

All expense paid trip for one WPBeginner reader to visit me in Palm Beach, Florida. You will get to spend time with me, get 1-on-1 mentorship + business advice, and enjoy my favorite food / places.

Included in this are:

• Roundtrip Flight from anywhere in the world*
• 3 nights hotel stay
• Meals and Transportation through the duration of your stay
• Free license for all WPBeginner products

* You must have a valid visa to travel to USA, and you must be 18 years old.

How to Enter:

I want to hear your WPBeginner story.

Tell me where you’re from, how did you first find out about WPBeginner, what have you learned from WPBeginner, what impact has it had on your blog, business, or career, and lastly tell me about your blog / business + your aspirations.

1. Record a short video sharing your WPBeginner story and upload it on YouTube (public or unlisted). Don’t worry about making it professional quality. It can be as simple as you holding your phone camera up and recording.

2. Send me the YouTube video link using the form below.

Unlike the birthday giveaway, winner is NOT chosen randomly. I will watch each video and hand-pick the winner based on your WPBeginner story.

The deadline to submit your WPBeginner story is: July 19th, 2019 Midnight EST.

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.

Syed Balkhi
Founder of WPBeginner

P.S. We’re hiring for several roles as our company grows. If you or someone you know would be interested in being part of our fast-growing team, then please apply here.