BoldGrid continues to be my favorite website builder for WordPress websites. They’ve done a great job in speeding up and enhancing the site creation process for WordPress users. But what’s also very impressive about BoldGrid is the continued enhancements and improvements that have been added since it was first released. We’ve updated our BoldGrid Review to reflect these changes. However, there are even more great things upcoming from BoldGrid. And to get a better idea on just what we can expect, I sat down for an interview with BoldGrid Product Evangelist, Mike Demo.
Web Hosting Cat: What are some of the latest enhancements and improvements with BoldGrid?
Mike Demo: We’ve had a lot of road map work done. We’re all modular now, so all of our plugins are individual. So instead of one plugin that installs every feature, you can pick and choose which plugins make sense for your needs. For example, if you already have a page builder and you want to use our SEO tool, you can do that, and you don’t have to switch over everything you’re using for our ecosystem. Of course we’d love you to use all of our tools, but every use case is a little different. For example, maybe you have an SEO tool like Yoast and you don’t want to use BoldGrid SEO. Well, that’s okay. You can still build a site with BoldGrid and keep using Yoast if that’s your preference.
WHC: How will BoldGrid function in regards to Gutenberg?
MD: We’re super excited about Gutenberg. Gutenberg is the next generation of WordPress. If you look at how we’re using BoldGrid today, we just extend Tiny MCE, which is the built-in editor of WordPress today. So Gutenberg is just the next evolution of that. Our whole goal is just to extend WordPress and make WordPress even better than it already is. How we’re going to do that exactly isn’t 100% set because Gutenberg is a moving target. But we are excited for Gutenberg, and just like we just extend WordPress now and don’t take you out of the WordPress ecosystem, we’re going to keep that going for WordPress 5.0 when Gutenberg hits core.
WHC: What are the main differences between the free and premium versions of BoldGrid?
MD: It’s changing quite a bit. But some of the things you get is that you get premium themes and you get premium BoldGrid block layouts. You can stage unlimited websites instead of just one website. You can keep your staging sites for more than a year. The way that you get premium is that you can go to BoldGrid.com, upgrade for $5 a month, or you can use one of our BoldGrid official hosts and have BoldGrid included in your hosting package.
WHC: What are the benefits of going with an official BoldGrid host?
MD: The main thing you get is support. Because we are very active with these hosts, we go through a very thorough QA process. Now, we’ve tested BoldGrid on 100+ WordPress hosts. And if it runs on WordPress, it’s going to run BoldGrid. But every host has a slightly different setup. So when it’s an official host, we go through a multi-week quality assurance process to make sure that it works flawlessly with their ecosystem because we want the user to have the best experience. You can certainly use it anywhere that you’d like. But going with an official host that has that stamped seal of approval, and their team has been trained on our product, they know BoldGrid inside and out. So not only can you come to us for support, you can also go to your host for support—which depending on your preference may be preferred because some of our official hosts have phone support.
WHC: How would you compare BoldGrid to Beaver Builder and some of the other WordPress website builders out there?
MD: We get asked this question quite a bit, like “Which one is better?” and things like that. And it’s a question I really don’t like because it’s kind of the wrong question to be asking. Beaver Builder for example is a great page builder. They do some amazing things. Beaver Builder has a much different solution to solving a similar problem, but a different problem. I’m not saying it’s better or worse. It’s all about your workflow, what do you prefer? We kind of mimic the Wix and Weebly and SquareSpace wizard workflow. And we also have some advanced toolsets for developers and we solve one use case. Beaver Builder solves a different use case. But our stuff works with Beaver. Our stuff works with all the page builders. Sure, you can’t really use our drop and drag page builder plugin with Beaver Builder. But, you can use our staging plugin, our SEO plugin and the rest of the suite. So we made it modular on purpose so that you can pick and choose what makes sense for you.
WHC: Can you tell us about what BoldGrid provides for website backups?
MD: Sure. So we’ve got two versions of BoldGrid backup—the Free and Premium. And the way Premium works is if you have Premium on one plugin, you get it for the whole suite. A lot of people don’t update their sites because they’re afraid their sites are going to break. So, what we do is we take a backup before you update your WordPress site. A lot of backup solutions do that. But what’s a little bit unique about us is the fact that you have to practically say, “Yup, this site is good”, or it’s going to roll back—instead of doing the reverse, which is rolling back only if you discover that something is wrong. And some of our advanced backup features, you can kind of customize that; choose where they go and things like that. We just tried to make it a very elegant solution.
WHC: What’s coming up in the future for BoldGrid?
MD: The premium version will have a front end security scan powered by an international security agency. It’s not a replacement for a firewall or something from your host, but it’s a good safety measure to make sure that at a minimum you’re doing that. And we got a new master theme that’s coming out. It’s going to be sold exclusively on Envato, called BoldGrid Creole. And think of it as what BoldGrid did for the site building experience, Creole is going to give for the theme building experience. So it’s going to be a very easy theme designer that is super powerful and it’s going to be priced similarly to how Envato prices their stuff, with one time purchase and then you can get extended support and things like that. And, it’s really changing the game on how to take what BoldGrid already does, but then if you don’t like one of our starter themes, you can design your own now.
