From Azeroth to WordPress: How Warcraft Tavern Uses Beaver Builder

Since releasing Beaver Builder 12 years ago, a feeling will come up from time to time that just never gets old. Now and then, I’ll be on a well-known site and recognize some little detail that makes me think, “Oh, this might be a Beaver Builder site.” I’ll inspect or view the page source, and then, what do you know, it is a Beaver Builder site!

It’s a delightful feeling seeing your work out in the wild, more so when it’s the property of a well-known brand or a particularly impressive implementation. Warcraft Tavern gave me a slightly different version of that feeling…

I’ve been an off-and-on World of Warcraft player for almost twenty years and a regular visitor and user of the Warcraft Tavern site. So, color me surprised when Kalee Raisor, the site’s founder, reached out to us to ask if we’d be interested in showcasing the site because of how deeply their team has customized Beaver Builder. Despite many visits, I had no idea it was running Beaver Builder.

That was part of what made the story so fun. Kalee and their team have done such a remarkable job shaping Beaver Builder around Warcraft Tavern’s content, community, and workflow that, to me, it never registered as “a Beaver Builder site.” It just felt like Warcraft Tavern.

So I reached out to see if Kalee would be open to doing an interview. We touched on gaming, growing a content site, and how Beaver Builder fit into the process.

I hope you enjoy my interview with Kalee Raisor, founder of Warcraft Tavern.

The Origin Story

Your LinkedIn describes Warcraft Tavern starting as a way to test SEO processes in a “controlled environment,” basically a passion project with a practical excuse. What did that actually look like in the early days?

With SEO and web development, it’s really hard to be able to measure the impact from individual initiatives. So a lot of it was testing one thing at a time. For example, if I leave the entire website the same but change title tags, what happens? If I do nothing except promote it on Reddit, what happens? So a lot of testing to measure what did or didn’t have an impact.

The site launched as “Night Elf Mohawk” in 2018, which any long-time WoW player is going to appreciate. When did it stop feeling like an experiment and start feeling like something real?

Probably in 2021 when Blizzard started talking a lot about TBC Classic and WoW Classic Era realms. That really emphasized that this was something they were committed to and we could grow with. I was still working a full-time job until 2022, and at that point, I was able to switch over to working on the websites full time.

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Gaming as a Career Asset

There’s still this idea that gaming is wasted time, that one’s better off doing “something productive.” You literally built a business out of it. How do you think about that, and what has being a gamer actually done for your career?

One of the first websites I made was back in 2000 or 2001 as a fansite for Final Fantasy 8 using Macromedia Dreamweaver. You can trace my entire career in web development and SEO back to that. Gaming helps give people a community, not just for entertainment but also as something to be passionate about. I also think anyone who considers gaming to be wasted time should go watch The Remarkable Life of Ibelin as a great example of how it can improve lives!

For me, I can think of several updates I made to our company Slack after seeing how different guilds organized their Discord channels. Were there specific things from gaming or MMOs that translated into how you think about running a business or building a community?

We use Discord for the company for our business chat, so that’s obviously something that came from gaming and MMOs. Another thing for us is around how we stay on top of updates from the games we cover and how players were doing it already. We use custom Discord bots, RSS feeds, etc., and pipe those through into Discord channels on our business server so we’re always up to date with patch notes, releases, and information directly from the game publishers.

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The WordPress and Beaver Builder Side

Warcraft Tavern is running on WordPress with Beaver Builder, but it’s clearly not a vanilla setup. With so much content across guides, tools, and news for multiple versions of the game, where does a page builder actually fit into that picture?

We use it for so many things! Archives, partial page templates, conditional menus, etc. BB makes it so much easier to create layouts for different pages. For example, a tool might need to have a full-width page instead of a sidebar, and the conditional options with priorities and rules in Beaver Builder make it so much easier to implement.

We also use it for each game version so that they have different menus and global row templates so that we can have a featured guides section that syncs everywhere when it’s updated.

What made you land on Beaver Builder? Was that a deliberate call or something you arrived at after trying other things?

We tested so many options; I don’t even want to think about it lol. I found BB to be so much more intuitive to use than the other plugins we tried while still providing a great degree of flexibility. Especially Beaver Themer, which really is what sold us on it when using it with the Beaver Theme.

What’s the most interesting or unexpected thing you’ve done with it on the site?

I don’t think any one thing really jumps out at me on what we’ve done, it’s more that we’ve been able to do so many different things with it. Everything from countdown timers at the top of a specific game page, replacing about the author sections on posts, customizing the search result page, the main vertical menu on the site, using custom field conditionals to show sources and references for quotes—there’s just so much we’ve been able to do.

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Building a Content Network

You’ve grown Warcraft Tavern through acquisitions over the years, including GnarlyGuides, Wowclassicbis. How do you think about that as a strategy? What makes a site worth picking up?

Because of the expansion progression that Blizzard uses with WoW Classic versions, what happens is a player will make a good website or resource but then stop playing after that expansion’s content is done, and eventually the website/resource is lost. So we try to look for opportunities when it’s a great resource for players, even if it’s for a version that isn’t currently active since it will come back around as Blizzard resets the progression cycle. We just acquired Classic-armory.org not long ago in the same way, the dev was ready to move on to something else, but it was a great site. So instead of players losing a resource, it’s been rebuilt, and new features were added.

You’ve used the revenue here to build out a broader gaming network through Lexicon Gaming. What does that look like today, and how do you manage it all without losing the thread on any one property?

It’s difficult! Staying organized in our task and project management tools helps a lot, along with internal documentation and wikis. We also tend to focus on structured game sections and less time on news and reviews like many other gaming sites. Having a great team of people is the biggest thing, though.

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The WoW Questions

I have to ask: what’s your main, and where are you spending most of your time in the game right now?

I’ve actually been playing pretty casually lately and just leveling alts on The Burning Crusade Anniversary realms. My main is a Warlock, which is the same class as my original character I made back in 2006 when WoW first launched.

Warcraft Tavern has Classic roots going back to 2017 when the announcement first happened. Do you think Classic has a permanent place in WoW’s future, or is it something that fades as the player base gets older?

I definitely think it has a permanent place. Classic is so much different from modern WoW that they’re effectively different games. With Classic, we’ve seen Blizzard testing many different approaches, including progressive realms (Vanilla -> TBC -> WotLK) but also seasonal realms and hardcore realms. Of course, the big thing people are waiting for is a Classic+ option.

One thing I think some of the older players like myself are looking for is permanence, which we get on Classic Era realms and hopefully we’ll also get TBC and WotLK versions of at some point.

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Thanks again to Kalee for sharing the Warcraft Tavern story. It’s always a pleasure to see how people work with Beaver Builder and even more so when it overlaps with another hobby.

If you enjoyed this format, you might also like my recent conversation with David McCan on growing a 14,000-member WordPress community. And if you’re running a site you’d like us to showcase, drop us a line. We love seeing what people build.