Interview with Matt Medeiros: A Case Study of Moving a Website to Beaver Builder

Can you share a little information about your background and business?

My day job is with Pagely as an account executive. I help qualify potential customers of Pagely’s hosting stack and guide them to make the best decisions for their WordPress experience.

Outside of my 9 to 5 job, I publish podcasts at MattReport.com & Southcoast.fm. I’ve also got a tiny plugin that helps people provide video support inside of their WordPress dashboards called Easy Support Videos.

How did you learn about Beaver Builder?

I first learned about Beaver Builder when I was building the Conductor Plugin. [Editor’s note: Conductor Plugin helps display grids—also called blocks of content—from within WordPress, but it is not a page builder.]

I remember meeting Robby McCullough at a PressNomics WordPress conference, and everyone was comparing my plugin to his. 🙂

Obviously, that worked out better for Robby and the team in the long run, but I’ve been a huge fan of the software for a while now.

PressNomics is an event for entrepreneurs who create WordPress products and services to collaborate.

What problems were you having with your website that prompted you to look into using a page builder?

The old MattReport.com website was built using a theme my company designed many years ago. At the time, even Beaver Builder wasn’t really the right solution for me.

Once I started going through a rebranding phase, I realized that using something like Beaver Builder would allow me to be more flexible with my layouts and site design.

Using Beaver Builder for his website meant Matt had more flexibility and control.

I’m not a developer and when I want to make things happen on my site, it’s either spending hours hacking it all together myself or asking someone else to do it for me.

Even “easy” things like modifying after-post sections meant I had to spin up a code editor, access my server, make the code adjustments, and hope I deployed correctly without bugs.

With Beaver Builder, I can do this right in the UI and feel comfortable doing so!

What features were on your “must-have” list when comparing different page builders?

Page builders are going through a massive growth phase right now. There’s an intense race to push as many bells and whistles into these plugins, with shiny new add-ons being released every day.

First and foremost, I wanted stability.

I don’t want to worry about upgrading a plugin that powers my entire website just to get a new widget.

I also wanted something that allows me to skip expensive or time-consuming developer tasks. That’s where Beaver Themer really knocks it out of the park for me.

Beaver Themer enables you to build headers/footers and create templates using Page Builder’s drag and drop interface.

From there, it was just the basic needs of a typical blog or marketing site.

I needed something that would allow me to create and re-use nice hero areas throughout my site, display my podcast episodes, and clearly define the call-to-action areas.

What made you decide to rebuild your site using Beaver Builder?

For all of the reasons I mentioned above. I wanted the power to customize my site with the stability of the Beaver Builder software.

How have you benefited from Beaver Builder since making the switch?

I’m already modifying areas of my site that I used to wait for a developer to do.

It’s allowing me to get more creative and have a more flexible approach to building out landing pages and long-form content.

Anything else you want to share with the community?

I hope more people spend time thinking about stability and reliability for the long-term of their business and for their customers.

It’s easy to get attracted to new page builders or fancy add-ons that are getting released every day, but you should look at the business models first and foremost.

Ask yourself:

• Does this really help my core business offering?
• Does this help my customer in the long-term?
• Will that company stay in business for the next year or five years?
• Do I know who the business owners are and do I appreciate their business ideals?

If we start to align our plugin/software choices for the long-term for our own business, our client’s business, and the software providers we choose to do business with, then the more sustainable the solutions become.

About Anthony Tran

Anthony Tran is the Marketing Director for Beaver Builder. Before working with the company he managed a WordPress web design agency. He loves Starbucks iced coffee, watching NBA basketball, and catching the latest blockbuster movie.