Meet Beaver Builder: The Easiest WordPress Page Builder (Q/A with Co-Founder Robby McCullough)

Website Planet had the chance to sit down and chat with Robby McCullough, Co-Founder of Beaver Builder, the sitebuilder chosen by 1 million+ sites and some of the biggest names on the web.

We discussed how their sitebuilder stands out from the competition, and what challenges and opportunities he sees in the near future of WordPress as an industry.

Let’s introduce Beaver Builder to our audience. What is it and how does it work?

Beaver Builder is a popular WordPress page builder plugin that allows users to build and customize WordPress sites and pages visually, without needing to code. It provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and a library of pre-made page templates, modules, and design elements that can be added to pages.

We have a wide range of customers from enterprise-level web agencies to mom-and-pop small businesses. We strive to find a balance between power and usability. Beaver Builder has many advanced features and extensibility for developers to leverage, but the user interface is intuitive enough that just about anyone can jump in and start building or editing their website. In fact, compared to something like Shopify or Squarespace, the challenging part with our sitebuilder is getting familiar with and setting up WordPress. From there, we have a huge number of pre-made templates and designs that anyone can start with to build their webpage.

Some features that agencies particularly like:

1. Great role management features. Developers can create specific user roles with customizable privileges. This allows limiting client access to make edits without compromising security
2. White labeling in our Agency and Ultimate packages. With this, agencies can white label the interface by removing branding and customizing icons/colors to match their brand. This creates a customized look for clients.
3. Our support team is always available to help with questions and we have extensive online documentation and video courses available – both for agencies and their clients.

We also just completed a full overhaul of our responsive editing mode, so you can get an accurate view of what a site will look like on various screen sizes. Most of our design settings can be customized based on different pixel breakpoints, so you can tweak font sizes or element stacking depending on whether the end user is using a large monitor or a cell phone.

Adding to its ease of use, Beaver Builder works great with just about any other plugin or theme out there, and we have some elaborate integrations for eCommerce solutions like WooCommerce and BigCommerce, so building a shop with WordPress + Beaver Builder is a breeze.

We also have extensive documentation and a free library of video course, and there is a great community around Beaver Builder, so lots of people are available to ask questions if something comes up. However, we take great pride in offering ourselves outstanding tech support! All of our support team have spent several years working with Beaver Builder and many of them have lots of experience writing code.

Talking scalability, Beaver Builder isn’t going to be the bottleneck on a high-volume site. Just like most other WordPress applications, caching is going to make or break your users’ experience in that scenario. As proof of that, Beaver Builder was used to build d23.org, a Disney membership site and fan club, which is to our knowledge the largest membership site running WordPress in existence!

How does your mission differ from the other sitebuilders around?

We believe in doing right by our customers. We like to take our time and create high-quality software. We have a great relationship with the other page builder companies and teams in the space.

To use a coffee comparison, we don’t want to be Starbucks with a store on every corner. We see ourselves more like a local coffee shop where the baristas already know your name and your favorite drink.

Who are your typical clients and what problems do they have when they come to you?

We have a pretty wide range of users. There are a lot of “web pros” – people who are building websites professionally for other people. We also have a good number of small business owners or hobbyists that needed a no-code solution to put a website together. Beaver Builder is a complete website building package. We have a theme and many pre-made designs for lots of different niches and styles. I think the WordPress ecosystem of themes, plugins, hosting companies, etc., can be a bit daunting and overwhelming for new users, so we try to streamline that as much as possible.

And what makes them eventually stick with you?

If I am totally honest, once someone invests time in creating their website on any given platform, we find they’re pretty likely to stick around for a while. I always encourage potential customers to try out a few builders, platforms, and communities to see which one feels right.

Once you have a site up and running with us, it’s unlikely you’re going to want to switch.

Can you share one success story from your customers? What was their pain point, and what results did they get thanks to Beaver Builder?

We actually just published a blog post where we interviewed a woman named Cami who runs a web design business out of Seattle. She shared a bit about her story and showed us a site she built for a realtor using Beaver Builder and the Pods Framework.

What do you see in the future of your industry, and how do you plan to cope?

My hope is that WordPress will continue to grow. Beaver Builder has been around for almost 10 years and I am always surprised and encouraged that the WordPress project and community has been able to flourish this whole time. We hope to be able to continue solving problems for our customers and people in the WordPress space and we look forward to participating in more WordPress community events.

If you had unlimited funds, how would you improve your product?

Personally, in a hypothetical situation, I feel like I could benefit more from unlimited time than unlimited money.

We’ve deliberately kept our team size small (~20 people) and intimate. Sometimes I think it would be nice to have an unlimited marketing budget or a larger development team, but I worry that it would be difficult to do that quickly and maintain the level of quality that we want to have for our branding and our software. I do think it would be great to contribute more back to WordPress and, again in the hypothetical unlimited money situation, everyone on our team would get a fat bonus check. 🙂