The Future of WordPress is in the Cloud
One of StellarWP’s biggest brands is offering a new cloud product for WordPress. Here’s why.
This summer, LearnDash—the leading course creator plugin for WordPress—took its first step into hosted WordPress solutions by launching LearnDash Cloud.
You may be wondering… why? Why venture into the cloud space? Is this a departure from StellarWP’s commitment to WordPress? Is StellarWP trying to become a SaaS company?
Fair questions. Below, we’ll do our best to answer them and explain our philosophy on cloud technology.
But first things first: We believe in WordPress.
Hosted WordPress has some similarities to SaaS. Importantly, they both offer ease for the end user. But we’re committed to WordPress. We’re not interested in departing from the platform in favor of a full SaaS model.
We want to make it simple for anyone to get started on WordPress.
That said, bringing WordPress products to the cloud with a product like LearnDash Cloud comes with serious advantages for customers. Those advantages ultimately result in a larger, stronger WordPress community.
We want to make it simple for anyone to get started on WordPress. That requires making WordPress accessible to everybody who wants to use it. Think people who might opt for a turnkey SaaS solution, like Wix or Squarespace, when faced with the hurdles in starting a WordPress site.
LearnDash already supports tens of thousands of course creators around the globe with its core plugin. But we can reach countless more course creators by offering a cloud solution and streamlining the process to get started in WordPress.
How “easy” is WordPress, really?
WordPress is beloved by website creators around the world (and by us) for its flexibility. You download CMS and install it on any site with any host. That sounds easy enough if you’re already integrated in the WordPress world, like most of us here.
But WordPress’s barriers to entry are higher for someone without a technical background. LearnDash Product Manager Jack Kitterhing breaks down the “easy” process of getting started on WordPress with LearnDash for a novice user with no technical expertise:
- Register a domain name
- Search for a web host (and possibly first understand what a web host even is)
- Dive into the murky world of web hosting reviews
- Install WordPress
- Buy LearnDash
- Install LearnDash
- Create your course
How many people get stuck on step one or two listed above? Many of us take WordPress for granted because we’ve used it for years. But the process to get started can feel daunting to newbies. These “easy” steps can be a deterrent to choosing the platform in the first place.
Enter cloud solutions.
By offering cloud versions of our most popular products, we’re striving to make WordPress—and its flagship plugins under the StellarWP umbrella—more accessible to anybody and everybody. We’re helping new users bypass the stress of researching web hosts, making sense of server speed, and learning technical jargon.
Plus, with LearnDash Cloud, the product is built to scale. Hosting plans adapt to each course creator’s bandwidth needs. There’s no guesswork about which type of hosting is right for you.
For LearnDash Cloud customers, this is a win-win. Cloud users receive a helping hand as they get their site off the ground along with peace of mind that their hosting is secure and fast (even if they only just learned what “hosting” entails).
They also get to tap into the power of WordPress and everything the open-source community has to offer. By offering a cloud-based product, we help people move over the hill of getting started and dive right into the best that WordPress has to offer: total control and customization of your website.
Cloud solutions also make business sense.
We won’t pretend that we aren’t running a business at StellarWP. LearnDash Cloud is also an opportunity for us to reach a new segment of the course creator market.
But that doesn’t make our work any less user-focused. We’re constantly striving to solve problems for business owners in a way that’s also sustainable for our company. While we firmly stand behind WordPress’s commitment to open-source code, we also believe that the teams behind powerful plugins deserve to earn a living. (We think the freemium model is an excellent middle ground for accomplishing both goals; we’ll explore that in a future blog post.)
As we monitor sales and user data for LearnDash Cloud, we’ll have a chance to learn more about who we’re reaching (and who we’re missing) with this product. If you’re curious to learn more about our marketing approach to LearnDash Cloud, check out this blog post from StellarWP Brand & Marketing Director James Giroux.
Democratize publishing with cloud solutions.
To us, investing in hosted cloud solutions is another way to fulfill WordPress’s mission to democratize publishing. Whether you’re comfortable with a DIY set-up or looking for some more support, we believe you deserve options. Cloud WordPress products simply add more choices to the mix.
For now, we’re excited to see how LearnDash Cloud opens doors and brings more course creators to WordPress. As we get our feet wet, we look forward to exploring other cloud solutions for the rest of our StellarWP brands.
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