Profiles

Driving, traveling, hiking, meeting new people, photography, blogging, experimenting with WordPress design, exploring cafes, listening to music and podcasts.

My WordPress journey goes all the way back to 2007. I was working in product marketing at 123Greetings.com, learning SEO, blogging, and how organic traffic actually grows. That curiosity pushed me to start my own blog, but buying a domain or hosting in India wasn’t simple back then. Everything had to be done offline and in cash, so I experimented with free platforms like Netfirms and later Blogspot. Both gave me subdomains and both came with restrictions. Netfirms showed a huge banner on top of my site, Blogspot limited customization, and at one point it even banned my blog without warning.

By 2009, I knew I needed something stable. I bought my first hosting plan on GoDaddy and installed WordPress. That moment changed everything. I launched BollywoodGossips.net, and within two years the site crossed 15,000 daily visitors. I learned real SEO, article writing, performance optimization on shared hosting, and eventually moved to VPS and later Linode. I also partnered with production houses like Eros Entertainment and earned steady PPC revenue. WordPress was the playground where I tested ideas, broke things, fixed them, and built confidence as a creator.

As time passed, I started taking client projects and building sites with Elementor. During the Covid years, I rebuilt my personal blog rahulbasu.in from scratch and shifted toward writing about product management and digital trends.

Today, the journey has come full circle. I’m part of the Kolkata WordPress community and work as a Product Manager at group.one, contributing to BackWPup, one of the leading backup and security plugins. My days are filled with customer insights, UX improvements, product decisions, and constant learning from an ecosystem that has shaped so much of my career.

I turned to WordPress when I realized I needed a reliable and customizable place to build my blog. Over the years, it became a skill, a passion, a community, and now a career. And I’m still learning something new every single day.