WP Reset User Testimonial – Paul Charlton from WPTuts

Feedback is one of the most powerful motivators in the world, isn’t it? It is what drives us to be better every day, regardless of whether it is a compliment or criticism. Don’t trust us? Go ahead and ask your dog, “Who’s a good boy?”, and see its tail wiggle – you’ll witness it yourself.

You might think your idea is the best one since pancakes, but your target audience might disagree. Overall, you need to know what works, what has helped them, and what needs improvement – because that is what essential changes in your business should be based on for them to make sense.

When we created the WP Reset plugin, we didn’t consider it to be the lifesaver. Timesaver? Surely. Nerve-saver? Absolutely. So we’ve decided to share it with the world, as we realized that people could benefit from it and save some time while resetting their website. We’ve gotten quite a number of feedbacks since then!

From those early beginnings, WP Reset has significantly evolved, mostly thanks to our users’ feedback. It now features multiple ways to get rid of unneeded things on a WordPress site and tools to speed up the post-reset setup. Ultimately, it also comes with a website-saver called the Emergency Recovery Script, helping you gain back access to your website in case of a mistake, which, unfortunately, does tend to happen.

Customer Success Story: Paul Charlton

The first user that provided us with the feedback was Paul Charlton. Paul is the mastermind behind WPTuts, the up and coming YouTube channel with the goal to help people get the most out of their WordPress website.

Considering how valuable his channel is, it is easy to see Paul’s dedication to its growth, so we want to thank him for finding the time to give us this fantastic interview!

WPR: Hello Paul, and thank you for taking the time to share your expertise with our readers by participating in this interview. WPTuts is getting more and more recognition on a daily basis, but let’s get back to the beginning of your adventure. How did you decide to start your career as the ultimate WordPress educator?

Paul: While I love the term ‘Ultimate WordPress Educator’, I consider myself someone simply sharing a passion for learning.

My journey started a long time ago when I was an IT Trainer for local adult education and found that I really wanted to teach more creative applications over the office-based tools.

During my ten years of teaching, I was fortunate enough to be able to create and teach many creative courses on web design, graphic design, and digital imaging.

I started off simply converting my handouts to a digital format so as to avoid having to keep reprinting copies for the ones my students kept losing!

To make my life easier, I built a simple website on sharing those tutorials with my students, and that ended up growing into a tutorial site in its own right.

As part of that site, I was incredibly fortunate to strike up a deal with a hosting company, and that allowed me to move on to video tutorials (this is way before YouTube was even a thing).

I also attracted attention from the likes of magazines like Computer Arts and .Net, and they approached me to create exclusive tutorials for their cover CDs.

When I left teaching, I became a partner in a design company, and I focused on web design, company branding, and digital media and sadly didn’t have the time to keep the training website and tutorials going.

I left that endeavour nearly four years ago to focus on my freelance career and start-up WPTuts.

WPR: Your YouTube channel is packed with tutorials from every corner of WordPress to ensure that your users get every piece of advice they need, with new tutorials coming out frequently. What was your idea behind starting this channel, and what was your secret ingredient to making it so successful?

Paul: I can’t say there was a master plan when I started WPTuts. I was learning more and more about WordPress after moving away from the in-house CMS that I’d built and used with clients for many years.

WPTuts was more of a passion project than anything planned. I just wanted to share the solutions and workarounds to the frustrations that I felt when trying to achieve various things for clients with WordPress and the tools available at the time.

As things grew, it allowed me to start focusing my passion for more advanced dynamic content using tools like ACF, JetEngine, etc.

I feel like this is the niche I needed to embrace to help WPTuts find its personality and speciality. Thankfully, this has resonated with the WordPress and Elementor Community, and that helps me drive new ideas forward.

WPR: Are there any features that you put particular emphasis on when searching for a new plugin?

Paul: I rarely go looking for a plugin unless I have a specific need or if a viewer asks a question that I think is interesting, and I look for solutions.

Most of the time, I stumble across things that are mentioned, and they pique my interest.

A great example is the ACF Frontend Forms. I got a lot of questions when I started doing the ‘deep dive’ tutorials on how to allow site visitors to be able to upload new content without Dashboard access.

I tested a few pro plugins and created some content on those and then somehow stumbled on ACF Frontend Forms and tested it out.

I loved the simplicity of use, created a tutorial on it the same day, and started talking to the developer. Since finding that, we’ve spoken almost every week. I’ve shared ideas and suggestions, and Shabti (the developer) has been super open and implemented many of those suggestions into either the free or the Pro version.

WP Reset ended up being another great example. I’d used it alongside some other WP reset plugins to simply reset sites once I’d finished a tutorial. I honestly didn’t even know it did more than that… Now I know, I wish I’d looked into it in more detail sooner!

WPR: Recently, you have started using WP Reset. Can you give us some insights on what is your overall experience with the plugin?

Paul: Let me answer that by saying that it is now part of my everyday website maintenance toolkit. Something that I use on both my own websites as well as my client’s websites.

WPR: Which features did you find the most useful?

Paul: Snapshot is a Godsend for me. I test and tweak a lot of different WordPress based setups out and can have up to 10 different websites set up at any one time.

Snapshots now mean that I can easily set things up with one setup and set of plugins and themes and then create a snapshot, reset things and test a whole new setup out.

Best of all, this can be swapped back and forth in seconds.

I also love the Collections option. Again, as someone who teaches a lot of different topics, there are various ‘starter point’ setup’s that I have to install over and over. Collection sets mean I can simply create a new collection, set up the plugins and theme that I want, and have a new site configured and set up in a matter of minutes.

A massive time saver for me!

WPR: Is there something that you would like to see improved or reworked?

Paul: Hmm, if I had one small gripe, it would be the remote activation process. It would be awesome if that was completely headless. In other words, so I could activate the process remotely and not need to go back to the remote site to confirm.

But that really is a minor nitpick and not something that I would lose sleep over.

WPR: Do you plan on using WP Reset in the future?

Paul: Absolutely! As I mentioned earlier, WP Reset is now part of my WordPress Toolbox, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon!

WPR: Are there any guidelines that you’d like to give to users that think about trying out WP Reset?

Paul: Don’t be put off by the name like I was!

It may be called WP Reset, but it does way more than simply reset WordPress. It’s a toolkit that every web designer should take the time to look into.

If you’d like to see why I feel it’s such a worthy investment, I’d suggest checking out the video I did straight after testing it out (shameless plug!!)

First of all, huge thanks to Paul for taking the time to answer our questions and for using our WP Reset! We’re always happy to hear that our plugin is helping and making things easier. We’ll be sure to keep updating and working on it to make it the best version it could be.

In the meantime, we would love to hear your thoughts on WP Reset, too! Drop us a line if you have a success story with it that you would like to share with our readers, or have tips on its improvement!