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 they’re the first step to online presence, that then expands and evolves into things like SEO, social media, and email marketing. And those functional areas map to the continued feature expansion we see in website builders.

One of those players is Bluehost – a top host in the prevalent and penetrated WordPress universe. The company continues to expand its offerings, including things like cloud hosting, AI writing assistants, and its Wondersuite of site builder tools. It’s all about expanding from host to comprehensive website builder.

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

We cover these questions and more in this two-part series. See part 1 here, and the continuation of the dialogue in Part 2 below…

Hosting as a business has changed over the past several years. Competition has driven prices down for the traditional/core offering, which has compelled many companies to diversify into adjacent and synergistic services such as marketing, ecommerce, SEO, etc. Building on that, a 2-part question: Tell us about that trend generally and how it presents opportunities and challenges for web presence players. How has Bluehost strategically navigated some of those macro factors and what could we see next?

The web hosting landscape has evolved, what was once a business focused purely on uptime and infrastructure is now a much broader ecosystem. At Bluehost, we’ve expanded from hosting into a full-stack digital presence platform, unlocking new ARPU and retention models that go far beyond infrastructure. This creates deeper customer relationships and diversified revenue streams. The opportunity is big, but the expectations are higher than ever. Customers now demand usability, automation, and performance, and success means delivering smarter, seamlessly integrated services that support them at every step. That’s the bar we’re setting at Bluehost.

Of course, AI is everyone’s favorite topic these days so let’s address it. AI has lots of natural synergies with website builders given that the technology is good at some parts of the workflow that users (especially SMBs’) dread, such as writing marketing copy. Give us a sense of the AI tools you’ve integrated so far and what could be coming next?

Our Bluehost AI Website Builder offers an end-to-end WordPress website building experience with intuitive AI onboarding, which includes image search, content creation and layout, as well as ongoing guided AI assistance with any question users may have throughout the process.

Our Yoast AI Optimize feature, designed to automatically fix content for small businesses based on our SEO and readability analysis. It harnesses the power of AI to enhance a user’s content and ensure it is search engine friendly, all to improve rankings to boost site visibility.

We are integrating AI more natively in our products to enhance the current experience and offerings by also integrating content, commerce and discovery.

Beyond the product and the technology that drives it, what about the current and future dynamics from a corporate perspective? What are some of the directions you’re taking things in terms of operational stewardship, culture, and organizational strategy?

Our number one priority is always the customer. As Newfold Digital, we’ve now organized the company into two groups, the Bluehost Group, our global hosting business, and the Network Solutions Group, our global web presence business. Within the Bluehost Group, our brand portfolio consists of Bluehost, HostGator, Yoast, YITH, etc.

My goal is to empower our teams to continue working hard to make our customers’ lives easier and their businesses more successful. We’ve implemented a “One Team, One Dream” mentality where our teams are coming together across all functions and levels of expertise in an effort to solve problems for our customers. I tell my team members that they have a direct line to me and our leaders. I encourage them to stay connected, take action, move with purpose and focus on making the customer experience even better.

In addition, we have our customer experience team reporting directly to me. My ethos is driven by customer empathy and it’s important for me to have first-hand access to customer issues and satisfaction. Our actions are always customer-inspired and we emphasize the value of gathering feedback directly from our customers.

What are some of the other things you’re excited about, and what can we expect to see from Bluehost for the remainder of the year?

Our product roadmap at Bluehost is centered on the entire customer journey, from creation to commerce to conversion to discovery and ongoing management, making it simpler and easier than ever to create websites.

Once a site is live, we focus on conversion, whether that means selling a product, booking a service, capturing a lead, or growing an audience. We’re building features that reduce friction and turn traffic into results. From seamless payment options and one-click checkout for online stores to lead capture forms and content engagement tools for creators and service-based businesses all designed to help customers grow their audience, maximize conversions, capture more value, and achieve their goals.

Then in all this – discovery of the website and store is a paramount step for entrepreneurs, and it is rapidly evolving with advancements in large language models (LLMs). We are investing in cutting-edge SEO tools, such as augmenting traditional robot.txt with standardized LLM.txt, to ensure our customers’ sites are easily discoverable online on search engines and AI platforms.

In addition, with Yoast, we are expanding our focus beyond traditional SEO to help our users thrive in the age of AI and introduce LLMs.txt for all users, and this is only the first step. We’re now developing tools that help our customers understand how their content is interpreted by AI systems, how their content is perceived, and how their brand is ranked within AI-generated results. Our research has also highlighted the growing role of social media in shaping LLM visibility, and we’re working on solutions that go beyond just social link previews.

Within our efforts to make commerce creation truly frictionless, we continue to leverage the strengths of open source and WordPress, while reducing complexity wherever possible. At Bluehost, you will continue to see these innovations reflected in our offerings moving forward.

Our success is rooted in our customers’ success online. When we help entrepreneurs and SMBs gain Traffic, Transactions, and Traction—the 3Ts of a thriving digital presence—we all grow together. That’s how we earn the most important T: Trust.

Header image credit: Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash.