One of the central components of the enterprise marketing mix is the tried-and-true website. As a format, it’s longstanding but not tired. For most businesses,  it’s still the place to which most marketing roads lead – roads being links and traffic, which remain the currency of online media and marketing.

Websites are also the tip of the spear, especially for SMBs. By that, we mean that it’s the first step to online presence, that then expands and evolves into things like SEO, social media, and email marketing. And that SMB evolution maps to the functional expansion we see in website builders.

One of those players is Bluehost – a top web host in the formidable WordPress universe. The company continues to expand its slate of offerings, including things like cloud hosting, AI site builders, and eCommerce tools. It’s all about expanding from web host to SMB operating system.

To get more color on this evolutionary path and directional heading, we recently had the chance to catch up with Bluehost CEO Sachin Puri. Appointed to the role in May, Puri takes over at a time when Bluehost has ample momentum and velocity. So what’s the vision, and where will Bluehost go next?

We cover these questions and more in this two-part series. See part 1 below and stay tuned for Part 2 next week.

To start at a high level, please tell us about the state of Bluehost at the time you’re starting to lead the company – operational scale, brand/reputation as a leading host in the WordPress world, etc.

Since joining the Bluehost team, I’ve been energized by the conversations I’ve had with our team members around the world. I see the dedication, talent, passion, and depth of expertise across the company, and I see our teams working hard to make our customers’ lives easier and their businesses more successful. Now, it’s about reimagining what is possible and taking our products to the next level.

With that backdrop, what are your high-level goals for the company as you carry it forward?

We want to continue offering products and experiences that instill the confidence, creativity and success our users feel when building with Bluehost.

From flexibility to frictionless, we’ve built our foundation on flexible tools and strong WordPress roots, giving customers choice, control and power. Now we’re raising the bar for the entire industry by making web development experiences as intuitive as any SaaS platform.: delivering seamless, frictionless experiences where content, commerce and discovery thrive together.

Tell us about the strategy behind focusing on WordPress. It’s certainly a sizable ecosystem, but is that limiting? Or does that engender focus and more proficient execution of your road map?

WordPress is not limiting; in fact, it creates a multitude of opportunities. At Bluehost, we’re leading with the strong foundation of WordPress while reimagining choice, simplicity, and growth for our customers. So, the power of WordPress allows us to offer flexibility of open-source ecosystems; the goal is to augment it with frictionless possibilities for our customers.

How else is Bluehost positioned in terms of competitive differentiation? What are the features and attributes that stand out as strong suits of the brand and the product, such as the recent emphasis on cloud hosting?

What makes Bluehost unique is the simplicity, flexibility and performance at one the best price-value equation for our customers, all powered by a customer experience to help entrepreneurs and small & medium business be successful online, At Bluehost, SMBs get out of the box integrated experience that usually require an enterprise level investment in people, process and technology.

Our recently launched eCommerce Hosting plans were designed to simplify open-source selling for content creators and online businesses. The all-in-one platform bundles hosting, essential plugins, and intuitive store management, simplifying eCommerce and helping users launch, grow and sell online with ease.

Our premier cloud hosting solution, Bluehost Cloud, offers fully managed WordPress hosting with top-tier performance, 100% uptime SLA, global datacenter footprint, and priority technical support that routes directly to a trained WordPress expert via 24/7 online chat, email, and phone support.

Our AI WordPress Website Builder brings the power of AI to create a personalized and unique website with relevant content, images and pages within minutes for our users.

With Bluehost Cloud, users can effortlessly migrate their WordPress sites with minimal downtime and no data-loss, regardless of size or complexity, with reliability, consistency and accuracy.

Within our eCommerce hosting plans, our users have access to industry-leading Yoast SEO plugins such as Yoast Premium with AI-powered features that are integrated with Bluehost Cloud. We recently launched Yoast feature that directly integrates within Google Docs enabling customers to optimize right into their workflow.

Bluehost also offers a powerful lineup of advanced hosting options with VPS and Dedicated servers, some of its most powerful options to date.

We’ll continue the dialogue with Puri next week in Part 2. Stay Tuned…

Header image credit: Domenico Loia on Unsplash