The last couple of years I’ve spent a ton of time with our team at Dollie, to figure out a new way for WordPress businesses (Agencies, WaaS builders, Product creators) to sell turnkey WordPress solutions directly to their audience, taking away as many pain points as possible.

In this series I’d like to dive into one specific concept I’ve been thinking about for a while.

An Open API for WordPress Hosts

An open standard for the WordPress ecosystem allowing a (pre-made) WordPress installation to be easily launched to a hosting solution of choice. This could be a Managed Host, an open source WP hosting solution, or a local development environment.

In essence it’s giving anyone the freedom to launch any WordPress site to a hosting solution of choice, taking away the many pain points of initial setup, manual migrations and various other challenges that have been plaguing WordPress forever.

In this series I will dive into this concept, explain how the Hosts API could be utilised by WordPress creators, hosts and end-users, providing huge benefits for all of them.

WordPress needs to provide true turnkey solutions.

We’ve seen an incredible amount of innovation for both plugins and themes, and the way they’ve been sold in the WP Ecosystem. Whether it’s the Freemium model, SaaS model or a combination of both, the market today is infinitely more complex and competitive than ever before. 

WordPress hosting platforms have equally followed suit and have built infrastructures dedicated to hosting even the most challenging WordPress sites, and making inroads in providing customers with more guidance on the best solutions available on the market. 

This being said both product creators and hosts have one fundamental challenge that they’ve both been trying to tackle in different ways;

Customers still need to manually set up WordPress solutions from scratch.

It’s easy to launch a new WordPress site.
It’s easy to purchase/install a WordPress solution.
It’s not easy to combine the two and guarantee the customer their expected result.
This needs to change.

Setting up a WordPress solution remains too challenging.

Customers have to set up their installs themselves, whether it via setup wizards, documentation, videos. Often without having the resources, budget and experience to do so, often leading to frustration and sub-optimal results.

Experienced developers have found their way around this problem using migration scripts, “blueprints” offered by hosts or simply repeating the WordPress setup so many times they do it with their eyes closed.

People new to the WP ecosystem do not have any of these tools and often purchase/install a WP based product somewhere on the web, only to be confronted with a setup process that goes far beyond what the competition requires.

WordPress installs are easy to move around. Complexity is introduced when hosting them

In essence a WordPress installation is a simple as can be. A bunch of static files and a database. Perfectly portable out of the box. So why is there no easy and open to launching a new WordPress site and configuring the product on a hosting solution of choice? No matter how complex the hosting infrastructure setup, the WordPress installation keeps the same fundamentals.

We just need to figure out how to deliver a “WordPress package” in a way that hosts can work with them and apply their specific magic to it after it’s been delivered to their infrastructure. This where the Hosts API comes in.

Coming up..

In part two I will outline the challenges for WordPress product creators and WP hosts, and how an Host API solves them. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

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