Site.pro provides an easy to use, a self-hosted website builder for the users. The project is very competitive on the market. We’ve talked with Filip Borcov, CEO of Site.pro about the company, the project, security, and the future plans of the website builder project.
What is the history of the company? What were the milestones for you?
We were a web design studio for over 10 years. Then one customer came to us and said “Hey guys can you make a product like that?” then we create the product for him. The product was so nice and he said, “we can do it together”. Later we separated, his part of the product died. Everything started with that, we did very well. We’ve slowly invested in the product, it grew up slowly and in time we had more and more customers. We tried to scale as we can and tried to invest more in time for money. Our product is about 6 years old now.
What are the advantages of using Site.pro and why “free websites”?
If you use Site.pro you can get a server in your country because most of the hosting companies are using Site.pro and providing basic website builder packages with no costs. Hosting companies get basic packages for free and offer with no costs to their customers. The hosting company customers do not need to pay money in USD. Ever to start — hosting company customers do not need to pay a single dollar, just use the free version of the website builder.
Later he upgrades for premium features and, pays with the local payment method and currency. Also, there won’t be any challenge to find support if the customer needs help because the local hosting company you get Site.pro service also provides support. If you use Site.pro, your website will be faster, because most of the local hosting companies run servers within the borders of their countries. In many conditions, the hosting companies provide support much faster than us. For many customers, it is also better to have support in their native language.
In the long term, having local servers instead of one in the US is important for accessibility. A lot of countries close borders, and some of them close electronic borders as well. You know about the Super Firewall in China, Russia, Ukraine, Belorus, Pakistan, UAE. In some countries, you can use Messengers but you can not make a call. Some of the countries can turn off the whole internet for their citizens. So buying Site.pro from a local hosting company allows the availability of the website in such conditions.
For example, if you are in South Africa, you have to wait for 350ms if your website is in the US. Also, Google sees this and that negatively affects your search results. Also some countries such as Russia or Belarus, it is a must to have a paper invoice and an official agreement for having a service from another country. Of course, nowadays most governments make it easy for their citizens to buy electronic services from other countries in the long-term, but our service is still the most competitive one in that case.
What is your business model? Tell us more about it.
We offer our product to shared hosting companies. Our product is a website builder like Wix, Weebly, and others. But we have several differences. Shared hosting companies buy the white label product from us, put their logo on the product, sell it, and become successful. In 7 countries, our product is number one. We provide an unlimited package of free websites and the best market price for upgrades, so the hosting companies can make a big profit with our product.
How do you provide customer happiness? Tell us about your technologies that differs you from the competitors
There are many parameters for making customers happy. Providing a user-friendly interface, allowing the user to make small changes quickly, serving the website on a fast local server, and many more. The big players in the market such as GoDaddy, 1and1, Wix come as website builder companies to the not mature markets (as for example Turkey) and monopolize it, but now the local companies can and should protect their markets and their customers from global players. Site.pro helps the local hosting companies to keep their customers by providing a powerful white label website building service with unlimited free websites.
What if a user wants to create a website on Site.pro similar to the one already has?
We have a unique technology, website import. When you search “website import” on Google, you can see the companies using our technology or the websites built by Site.pro. Website import is a technology to clone a website easily. All you need to do is entering the URL of the original website and clicking the Import button. After that, it will crawl the website and begin copying it. For the websites, which have 10-15 pages our technology works great. If you have bigger websites, there may be small differences but no worries, you can easily modify the page with just a few clicks and drag & drops.
We have thousands of imports a day. It is a free feature for our customers. We are adding new features and making this technology better and better every day. The customers can also create e-commerce websites by using Site.pro both directly from us by the local hosting provider. It is also very easy to integrate the international and local payment gateways to their website. All they need to do is drag & drop the needed element on the website.
Why a mobile-friendly website is important?
The new generation does not need a browser. They can do everything by just using Google Play or Apple Market. If they would like to buy a book, they use the Amazon application and they buy the book for kindle. Most of the youth is using just social media like Instagram or Facebook. They do not need a domain, they do not need a browser. It’s something there is another internet exists and they just use it. So we need to allow them to join our traditional internet. We can do it by just encouraging them to create their websites. That’s why mobile-friendly UI is getting more important.
There are also still many websites on the internet, which are not mobile-friendly. So, we also help the customers to have a mobile-friendly website. And in the near future, they can do it just by using a smartphone or a tablet.
What differs Site.pro than open-source projects such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magneto, etc.?
People can use WordPress or any other open-source projects to create a website or an online shop. But they have to struggle with many things like designing and developing, finding a good hosting provider, buying an SSL certificate, etc. With Site.pro they can do it on a user-friendly UI very shortly. Select the template, modify the elements, select your payment gateway and you have your website!
You can use our services by registering on Site.pro directly. If a customer would like to build a website on our servers, we check the GeoLocation of the visitor and suggest the nearest and the most suitable server for him. But the visitor still has a chance to select the location of the server. We have servers in many countries like Taiwan, Brasil, the US, Germany, Russia, etc. We cover quite the world.
Are you planning any new features?
We are now hard working on the website import feature to get better results. We are making a study on the customers using our importing tool, to see the results of the original website and the imported ones. Also, we are working on usability and more features. If the customer has more options, it means you help the customer more.
Another feature that we are trying to provide a better user experience is developing the website on a mobile device. For now, it is more common for people to build a website on a desktop computer. But the new generation is using the mobile device more, and what we are trying to do—allow them to build their websites via their mobile devices.