WordPress Page Builder Summit Review: Highlights and Insights

BobWP: Today, I’m joined by Nathan and Anchen from a Page Builder Summit. How are you two today? 

Nathan: Good. Thank you. Yep. Really good. Nice to be here. Thanks for having us on Bob. Appreciate it. 

BobWP: The Page Builder Summit, a yearly event on the interwebs. And yeah, so before we even get into it, I know a few people know.  Both of you probably more than a few, quite a few, but why don’t you introduce yourselves, just tell a little bit about what you do and then we’ll get into the Page Builder Summit. 

Anchen: Okay. My name is Anchen le Roux. I run besides from hosting the Page Builder Summit, I run a small boutique studio called Simply Digital Design.  I’m originally from South Africa, but living here in Portugal we’re again on the silver coast, so it’s just an hour outside of Lisbon. It’s really nice. Yeah. And in the studio, it’s we mainly focus on doing, we do a lot of summit websites, which is great. And then just brand and website builds the normal thing for creative service providers.

Nathan: I’m Nathan I run a rival podcast to this spot. It’s all about WordPress. It’s called WPBuilds. I used to build more websites than I do now, but I’ve pivoted into a little bit like you, Bob creating content, I’d. Run live shows. We do a news show every Monday and we do a podcast episode every Thursday.

I also host the WP Tavern podcast, which is called Jukebox that we push that out every Wednesday. All of it’s basically to do with WordPress. So yeah, basically I drone on about WordPress until there’s nothing more to say, and then I keep going a little bit longer. And also, yeah, as Anshan has said, the Page Builder Summit. We’re now on version six. So we have done several years where we’ve done two in a year. So we haven’t been going for six years. Is this the fourth year Anshan would be? 

Anchen: We started 2020. 

Nathan: Yeah. Okay. So 2023 now, so three years, there was some quick maths there. And yeah, so that’s what I do. All right. 

BobWP: The history.  So how, what made you decide to do the Pagebuilder Summit? How did that whole idea evolve? 

Anchen: So I think the end of 2019, I did a summit. But it was more general WordPress. And my whole idea with that was just at that stage it still is. There’s a lot of people from Africa struggled to get to Word camps and struggled to get the same access to and at that point there wasn’t a lot of summits on the topic of WordPress.

So I did the general WordPress, and Nathan and I met at Word Camp that year. And we, I think we’ve talked a little bit about that. He said, no, he has this idea around a summit that is focused solely on page book. So I think, and that’s how it starts. I think Nathan, maybe tell us more about where it went from there.

Nathan:  Yeah. So Anchen had obviously done this already and Being the leech that I am I decided to use her expertise. Yeah, so we basically hit on this idea of doing a summit all about page builders. It probably should say at the outset that it it really, the title is somewhat constraining. It hits the mark, but it also misses out a little bit.

So for example, if you’re using the block editor. That kind of firmly comes under the purview of what we do, but also there’s a lot of content about things just outside of designing web pages. There’s lots of content about, I don’t know, marketing and just design in general. We’ve had a lot of experts on in those areas. And then last year we even had a talk about email deliverability and making sure those things hit the inbox, not get sent to spam, so it, the title itself may be slightly misleading. But yeah, so we put the first event on, it was, I think it was a big success actually from both of our points of view, I think we had a nice audience that engaged and wanted us to carry on.

And so I think at the end of the first one, we asked the question, should we do another one? I don’t know if we really had any expectation that we do a second one. And then the cadence has been every year, every six months, something like that. We put another one out and, yeah, in September this year.  So roughly a month from now, we’re going to be doing version six and we’ve got the speaker lineup all sorted. Still on the lookout for some sponsors. I’m going to say that sentence so many times during this podcast, but we’re still on the lookout for some sponsors. I’ve done it again already. And yeah, so pagebuildersummit. com get on the wait list, or you never know, by the time you listen to this, you might be able to access the event already. 

BobWP: Now, did this start during COVID? Did you start this during COVID? So was that, did that have anything to do with a little bit of the thinking? Okay. We’re online.  Everybody’s moving online. Nobody can really do anything. So that, I don’t want to say inspire because COVID really shouldn’t inspire any of us to do anything, but in a sense, it’s like a solution during a rough time.

Nathan: Yeah, I think so. Is that right? And shouldn’t it wasn’t it?

Anchen: If memory serves, we were all in, we started planning it before lockdown, but when Lockdown happened, we like went all in.  So we, and I think that’s one of the reasons why that first one was so good because we had everyone like starve for any events. So yes. 

Nathan: Yeah. So I’d actually forgotten that, but that’s really serendipitous, isn’t it? The fact that happened and we were organizing an event was really amazing. Forgive me. That obviously wasn’t meant to come out that way, but it was a, an amazing coincidence that kind of worked in our favor. But yeah, online summits, there’s still a thing. I think people are still attending them in great numbers, but yeah, the first one definitely did coincide with that, but I had forgotten that.

BobWP: Yeah. And that’s interesting because starting it, actually thinking it through beforehand. You almost are like the, one of the leaders in hey, we got to go to online events here because everybody can’t travel. But it had already been planned, so yeah, it was almost perfect timing, although not planned.  You didn’t, when you were talking, say what if it happens that there’s a pandemic and nobody can leave, this will even make it better. Odd bar that aren’t, isn’t going to happen, hey. Just me, 

Nathan: I can assure you, we never had that conversation, but it was an amazing bit of timing.  Yeah, so we’ve done five. The last time we did it was what month was it? Was it November last? And 

Anchen: now we did one in February. Yeah. Yeah. We had one in the beginning of the year. 

Nathan: Oh, sorry. No February. Yeah. 

BobWP: So we go to these summits and. Everything cruises along. We see all this content and we’re happy and joyous, but we, somebody really realizes what’s involved in doing this.  Talk us a little bit through that, not the entire process, but some of the stuff it actually takes to do in an event like this that people maybe don’t really think about.

Anchen: Okay, so firstly, of course, speaker management. It’s like always one of the it’s the most rewarding because I just have.  Reaching out to the speakers and connecting with them, but obviously hardest work like just getting everything ready and deciding who to invite and everything. We don’t have an open call for speakers. We actually invite speakers. Just because we, just for a lot of reasons diversity being one of them.

Yeah, so then just getting everything in from speaker side and they are setting everything up. Like it’s we have a custom post type of speaker. So just loading all the data. Primary material, just, yeah, what else, Nathan, what am I not thinking about?

Nathan: There is a lot. What I would say is if you are even thinking about doing an online summit, just if, I think if you want to do it well, just be prepared that there is a lot more to it.  Like I said earlier, jokingly, Anchen had done all this before and  one of her main lines of work is to help other people do this. And so she’s not just done it through our summits. She’s done it for countless other summits. And I was really amazed actually how many different pieces to this jigsaw puzzle there are.

So Anchen’s mentioned the. The massive game of email tennis that you get into when you’re trying to invite the speakers, because that’s a whole process, just imagine 40 plus speakers and you’ve got countless emails going backwards and forwards. This is all Anchen, by the way, I’m not a part of all that.  But that in itself is one thing. And then there’s all the media to be created around it. So the advertising, the promo bits and pieces, all of the speakers bring something to offer to the table. Because we have this thing called the power pack, which is a, like an upsell and the speakers throw their bits and pieces into that.

So that’s one big bundle. You can buy it prior to the summit and actually during the summit as well. So there’s all of that to be organized. Obviously there’s the website to be created to house that choices about which video platform you’re going to use, how you’re going to get the chat on the screen, organizing so that the speakers know to show up at the.  The right time. We actually pre record everything. The theory there is that if it’s pre recorded, you get the best version of their 30, 40 minutes, as opposed to the live. Possibility, which is great, but also I think sometimes it’s easy to run out of time or get derailed and go off in the wrong direction and realize suddenly 40 minutes in, you’ve still got 30 minutes of content to say, and you can no longer do it.

So we pre record everything. And then we ask the speakers to, to drop into the live chat for the first hour. That it’s available, we make we make all the content freely available. So it’s a completely free event to attend, but there is some sort of gate there in that we make it freely available for 48 hours.  And during that 48 hours, for the first hour, the speaker shows up. And so you can get questions answered if you’ve got anything around that. And then the, have I mentioned this already? The sponsorship piece as well, where, you’ve got to see both Bob and Anchen just straining their faces at the moment as I pitch this, the sponsorship piece is another part of the puzzle.

It’s a bit like the speaker puzzle in that you, you reach out to lots and lots of different people and some come back and say, yeah, we’d like to sponsor that event and we have a, like a roster of things that we offer for various different packages. Long and the short is there’s a lot, and Anshan does pretty much all of it.

BobWP: So the prerecording obviously is also a nice safeguard against internet outages or low bandwidth or other technical things that you really have no control over, except to just swear at them, or make faces at them, so that makes total sense. 

Nathan: Yeah we’ve used Vimeo as the platform to, to host the video, but we’re having a bit of a change this time around, aren’t we Anchen?  We’ve just decided to try something different. It’s basically the same experience though. You show up, hit play. You you would think that would, unless everybody showed up at the same time, it would be really hard to get your questions answered because you might have six people at three minutes and 22 people at eight minutes and, so the questions coming in might not match up.  But for reasons that I can’t quite explain, that all just works out. Somehow everybody seems to be able to ask a question, which is answerable. So it doesn’t, it’s not a problem. 

BobWP: Now, aside from sponsorships, what’s the biggest challenge of doing this thing? I 

Anchen: I can’t even really think it’s just, it’s not really a challenge. It’s just a lot of work that goes into it. Like Nathan mentioned the, like the project management task, the task list has got almost 400 tasks on this point, we don’t. It’s not really, it’s just going through the motions and getting everything set up.  We’ve always had a lovely community. We’ve, we hardly ever get like really bad support calls or things. You do get like people struggling to get in or have been questions, but yeah, we’ve never had like really bad feedback or anything bad. So I I don’t know. It’s a hard one.

BobWP: It’s obviously a well managed and oiled summit doesn’t have challenges. You just have a lot of work to do. It’s obviously you have this down because somebody else that might be doing it and maybe for the first time they might. Have a whole list of challenges just because it wasn’t quite managed in the way it should have been. Yeah that’s good to hear. One does not need challenges at all.

Now, one thing I’m curious about, and you touched on a little bit, Nathan, is the whole thing. And I don’t want to get into big talk about Page builders, with page builders and with the direction of WordPress and the blocks and the full site editor and on and whatever is to come, it sounds like page builders aren’t going away, obviously, you must have a little bit of an opinion of that, but also you’re, you have enough pieces in that almost becomes, like you said, not just a page builder summit, it becomes a, Web business summit or something else, cause you’re touching on so many elements that aren’t just specifically about using a page builder.

Talking about email and stuff like that. Was that a, an effort you thought about making because we, cause of the direction of WordPress or was that just something that. naturally and organically happen that, yeah, there’s all these other things around them, whether you’re using a page builder or not, that people really need to know about.  You can’t just have a summit about, page builders. Literally just 

Nathan: that. Yeah, I think I think the first event that we did Because it was new and we were looking for speakers just really primarily around page builders that first event really was largely about that. And then when the second one came around, I was thinking that it would have to be the same.  Kind of content again, but Anshan was able to convince me that there’s, it’s fine to have those different threads of content underneath the same banner. So it’s definitely, if you’re not a fan of a particular page builder, let’s say, I don’t know, you may be an Elementor user or something like that, there’s.

There’s going to be some content about that page builder. There’s going to be some content about how to work with blocks in a particular scenario, but there’ll also be lots and lots of content, which isn’t related to a particular page builder. We have all sorts of experts on in all sorts of other areas and we publish the.  The schedule a long time prior to the event actually coming up. So when that page is live, you’ll be able to see day by day what’s on and add it to your calendars and things like that. So you’ll be able to pick and choose. I think possibly that’s the best way to do it. We do have actually a couple of.

I’ll say a couple, several people who seem to attend all of it. And I think, wow, that’s pretty amazing. It’s almost like they’ve just block booked out their week to, to attend the summit. But I think the majority of the people, they hop on days when they’re available or hours when they’re available or talks that they think are going to be aligned well with them or what have you.  And then and then we have this, like I said, the op cell, this power pack thing, which enables people to download that content and keep it forever. So they don’t need to, they don’t need to attend anything live. They can, watch it weeks and weeks after the fact. And Anshan makes that available.

Inside an like an LMS. So it’s a bit like a course that you can go through and tick off the different things that you’ve achieved and see the bits that you missed out and so on. Yeah, it’s not just about page builders, even though the name would suggest it. It’s curious, isn’t it? I wonder, given the time again, if we would have a different name for it, because it does feel a bit like it’s only page builders, whereas some of the other, It summits in our space, they have a more, more broad title and it maybe feels like it captures more, but yeah.

Anchen: I think with ours so what I always tell the speakers, it’s still the page builder audience. And although we have topics like onboarding or, running a project or whatever it’s specifically created for the page builder audience or the block edits or audience. So I think I think that’s what makes it specific.

So it’s, yeah, and we do. In many cases still, focus how to use a specific page builder in that scenario, for example, I talk about accessibility. We are set, in the scope of your scope around accessibility for page builders, same with SEO. So we do still try and get that hook. But yeah, it’s the audience, as long as it’s the page builder 

Nathan: audience, we have we have quite a nice social scene, shall we say, during the week of the summit, we have a Facebook group, I forget the number of members, but basically we silo the Facebook group. So it goes into this hibernation state between summits. So you can’t join it until just prior to the summit, but it’s there.

You can see that it exists. And then we open that up and then there’s a lot of conversation going on in there. We have help from somebody called Sunita, who’s incredibly good at keeping that group active and posting interesting questions, which get quite a lot of response and people get stuck into the questions that.  She poses and then during the event, we use that to post live events. And she and I hop on the camera and explain what’s going on each day, that kind of thing. But also it’s a social space and a place where you can play bingo. And I think that is singularly the reason to show up to the Page Builder Summit, so you can download your free bingo card.  And if you fill it up, points mean prizes. 

BobWP: Now I want to know is do you have a little sound effect of the, thing spinning and then Nathan’s little voice comes out. B 12.

Nathan: No. So the card that you download is, it’s like a grid. I think it, is it five by five? I think Anshan.  So there’s 25 different squares. And so rather than it being a number the thing, the square might say, for example, turned up to an online, a live event, so you can. And then watched an event on Monday might be what I can’t actually remember what’s on there, but they’re all those kinds of things.

And so it’s a bit of fun. And then in the Facebook group, we get people just uploading their picture of their card with, they’ve gone into Photoshop or something and crossed out the ones that, that they’ve completed. And yeah, it’s great. And a lot of the, a lot of the speakers donate their materials.  That could be a prize or we give away swag. T shirts and things like that. It’s just a bit of fun, isn’t it? 

Anchen: We always have such generous speakers. They really go out all out on the Bingo prize because it’s only for one person. So it’s usually from the speaker side, it’s something big, like really valuable.  And yeah, and we usually have enough prizes to give everyone that participates. So I don’t think we’ve ever had that where I, there wasn’t a prize for. For someone on some day, we have some of the regulars or like the full of that’s been to every summit that actually hold out on, like they choose whatever price they want and then they wait for that day.  Like the second I post that post they say, yeah, it’s a lot of fun. 

Nathan: Yeah. You’re not going to win a Bentley. A t shirt or something, a book or something like that. But we post all of that, I guess if you are curious about it we have an email list, which you can join by joining the waiting list and you we update you each day that the summit is on with what the prizes are that day and all sorts of things like that.

Although Bob, you have inspired an idea there. I think we should Anchen have some sort of live event where we do. Actually have a numbered bingo card and we can call out, there’s all these numbers, there’s all these phrases, isn’t there, which go with the with all the numbers and I can’t remember what any of them are, number 11 and whatever, yeah, maybe we should do that.

BobWP: That might actually attract even more just to hear Nathan do that, it’s what are the things I. Thought of when you were talking back about the. Speakers and what you ask the speakers to talk to builders, that’s got to be interesting to builders.  Really, you are in a similar place as I am with do the woo. I, everybody thinks everything’s WooCommerce. We talked about a lot of stuff, but it’s of interest to WooCommerce builders. So yeah, they’re, they need to know about WordPress. They need to know about all those other things, just like a page builder, somebody that loves page builders.

That knowledge of knowing what WordPress is doing, how it affects them because they’re in there and that page builder sitting on top of WordPress and all the other pieces and elements fit in so you can have this, yeah, this narrow focus of just, I don’t just always talk about WooCommerce specifically, you don’t always talk about page builders specifically, you talk about the things around page builders, And what people need to know, and sometimes I think that stuff is more valuable because they get so focused on the tool, the page builder or WooCommerce, that they don’t start looking at the other pieces, like you said, email marketing, or maybe something that WordPress is doing that would actually affect or would be good for them to know.  When using a page builder with WordPress. So it’s just a interesting piece that I could really relate to. So bingo. And yeah, that’s something to look forward to. So what else do we have to look forward to? Tell me a little bit about the speakers.

Anchen: We have 19 women and 14 men on this new speakers.  So overall it’ll be 23 women and. 15 men. This is the first time that happens. We usually, and yeah, so that’s, quite a different one. 

BobWP: Yeah. So give me a few, just let’s share a few of the topics. Or, and if you want to say who the speaker is, that’s fine too. But just to give an idea of the variety. 

Nathan: Yeah. I’ve got the spreadsheet open actually. And I won’t link the name to the person. I’ll just read a few randomly. And I do mean randomly, I’m just going to go down. So we’ve got the spreadsheet with 33. Presentations on it. So here are a few personalized user experience using AI in web design to drive growth.  Can get through a summit without AI being mentioned. I think this one’s curious. Make of it what you will. I just want to get to Friday. . 

BobWP: Oh yeah. 

Nathan: Isn’t that interesting? It’s such an interesting title. Save Time, creating Content with Block Templates if you’re using the Block editor that might speak.

Bang. Speak well to you client offboarding. That doesn’t often get mentioned. It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it? Break points were yesterday. Rethinking you, the way you design with WordPress, five tips to build websites that Excel in SEO, cadence, empowering web designers to create stunning websites, building better websites with dynamic components, and I could go on, but you can see right away that there’s a whole.

BobWP: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Because, it’s true there’s a lot there that that you just, that, you could literally go to that and probably find enough even if you didn’t use. PageBuilder, but you wanted to go to a summit and pick up some other little pieces, just from what you said there, it makes a lot of sense.

Nathan:  The honestly the bestway, if any of your curiosity is being peaked, I think really the best way is just to go to pagebuildersummit.com and join the wait list and that way you’ll get all of the data. As we push it out in the run up to the event. So yeah, that, I think I probably read about six of those out.  There’s another 27 or so to go and they really do run the gamut of more or less everything WordPress. We have a few speakers, we call them vault speakers. So we have a few popular presentations from previous. Summits. We throw those in. Now they’re available during the whole summit. So rather than being available for this 48 hour window, they’re available from the moment the summit begins on Monday.

Monday the 18th of September so that they all become available then. And they, they keep going right until the end. I keep talking about this 48 hour thing. I should explain what that is in more detail anyway. So yeah, they’ve all got their allotted time. So let’s say one of them begins at 2 p. m. UK time on the Wednesday, we start the clock. So two days, exactly two days after that. So 40 hours that will become unavailable for free on the website. And we have this honestly, fairly modestly priced upsell trust me when I say modestly price, we have this yeah, this upsell where you can get access.

So if you do. If you happen to miss something for the cost of a handful of coffees, you can you can get yourself access to all of that, including all of the speaker bonuses and I’ve, each time we run the summit, Anshan tots up what the total is, if you were to pay for all of those different bits and pieces, all of the bonuses, and usually it runs into the many thousands of dollars, you may not make use of all of them, but even if you make use of two or three of them, you’ve In many cases dramatically offset the cost of the power pack itself.

BobWP: So 48 hours. So do you both stay up for 48 hours?

Anchen: So we have the, as Nathan mentioned before, we have the speakers live in the chat box at the, but only for the hour of their session. So the, usually there’s the actual schedule is our waking hours we try to make it as, so because we have speakers from all over, we have from Australia and we have from the UK. We do try to, sometimes, some days we start earlier than other days but yeah we, Those times, the actual hour of the speaker’s scheduled talk. That is the live 

Nathan: hours. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It’s an interesting conundrum that we face because, so there are other WordPress events. A notable example would be WordFest live, where they pack many presentations into this 24 hour rolling program.  So they can get, I don’t know, 30 or so. I don’t know. 24, I guess would be the number. And then if there’s multiple stages, they can increase on that. So they run throughout the day so that they catch every single time zone. And because of the fact that we’re doing it over five days and we typically put five, six, seven, maybe a bit more on each day, we have to modify the hours.

So it might begin at 9am in the UK one day, or it might begin at midday. And hopefully in that way, we can capture. It’s always going to be the evening in Australia that’s just geography. I’m not responsible for the shape or size of the planet. And then because when we run the later ones that captures the North American market we try to keep those times sensible.

BobWP: Yeah. And  the power pact is that indefinite access or a. Certain time of access that they have to, go through that content. 

Anchen: So the access to the recordings are indefinite, or in any case, the life of we, if at some point we don’t do it, we’ll give them access to download everything. But the bonuses usually has a two month expiration date, just.  Yeah, because the speakers give us access to a coupon code for two months. Yeah. 

BobWP: Cool. I think we did it on this or if there’s something else, but yeah. I think you should need to at least reiterate where people can go to get tickets and those sponsors that are looking at their. Pockets filled with dough saying, Whoa, what should we do with this?

Nathan: I am glad you mentioned that, Bob. Thanks. I hadn’t occurred to me to to talk about the sponsors. That’s brilliant. So yeah, if you’re interested in sponsoring the event, I guess that the headline is basically we have a, it is very well attended. We do have.

Many thousands of people who show up and subscribe to the email list. So that’s one thing to say. And we have a sponsorship page. If you go to pagebuildersummit. om forward slash sponsor, is it sponsor or sponsors, I can never remember. It’s one of those two. I think, are you just checking Anshan?

Anyway, if you go there, there’s a whole laundry list of the different. Levels that we’ve got plus the the different packages that, and what you can expect in return for a donation. Often it’s, we’re putting you in front of that WordPress audience and you’re associating yourself with a nice WordPressy event.  And then if you want to. If you want to be a part of the summit as an attendee, always just go to pagebuildersummit. com and whatever you need to do at that point is probably going to be displayed there. Cause we, we update the status of that page to reflect what’s happening right now. So it may be signed up to the email and then much closer to the event.  It might send you somewhere else, but yeah, page builder summit. Pagebuildersummit.com/sponsors.

Anchen: And we do have the speakers and some of the topics already on the waitlist page as well, so you can get an idea of what’s going to be on.

BobWP: Excellent. All right. I appreciate you both coming on, sharing. Your story about this and yeah, a lot of work and a lot of stuff you’ve done over the years to push this thing out. Go grab your tickets, sponsor, do all that cool stuff that you should do. That’s what I say. Alright, thank you very much for coming on.

Nathan: Thank you, Bob. 

Anchen: Thanks so much, Bob.