About

I’m Harpreet Kumar. I spent 12 years working as a carpenter in India before I taught myself web design, blogging, and SEO. Mostly at night, mostly alone, with no teacher and a slow internet connection.

Today I run several WordPress sites. This one, harpreetkumar.com, carries my own name, and it has a longer and messier history than any of my other sites. This page tells that full story, along with who I am, what happened to this domain over the years, and what you can expect from it going forward.

I’m writing this the same way I write everything else on my sites: plainly, without dressing it up, and without pretending the path here was smoother than it actually was.

From Carpenter To Coder

From 2007 to 2019, I worked as a professional carpenter. My days were spent with a hammer, a saw, and the smell of sawdust, building furniture by hand.

I didn’t go to a top college and I didn’t work in an office. I learned a trade with my hands, cutting wood, fixing joints, and fixing my own mistakes when a piece didn’t come together right.

That trade shaped the way I approach everything I build today, including websites. A few lessons stuck with me more than the rest.

• A solid foundation matters. You can’t build a strong table on warped wood, and you can’t build a good website on bad hosting or sloppy code.
• Measure twice, cut once. In carpentry, one wrong cut ruins the piece. I still check every technical detail before I publish anything.
• There are no real shortcuts. Whether you’re making furniture or a website, quality takes time.
• Build to last, not to look good today. A rushed job always shows up later, in furniture and in code.

Learning To Blog, One Late Night At A Time

In February 2016, while I was still working full time as a carpenter, I discovered blogging. I had no teacher, a slow internet connection, and most guides online were written in English, which wasn’t a language I was strong in yet.

For close to four years, I lived two lives at once. Mornings and evenings belonged to carpentry. Late nights belonged to learning the internet, one tutorial at a time.

• I spent 3 months learning HTML and CSS, because I thought I needed it to build a website. That decision, which felt slow at the time, turned into one of my biggest strengths later.
• I started on Google Blogger, then moved to WordPress using my first real domain, missingideas.com.
• It took close to 4 years of working two jobs at once to actually understand how SEO, hosting, and content work together, not just in theory but in practice.

Nobody handed me a shortcut. I broke things, fixed them, and kept a note of what worked, the same way I used to keep a mental note of which joint held and which one didn’t.

The Leap, And The $20 That Changed Everything

In December 2019, I finally put down my carpentry tools for good and became a full time blogger. I had about 8 months of savings and a big dream, nothing more than that.

Two months later, Google suspended my AdSense account. That was my main source of income gone, with no job, no salary, and my savings running out fast.

I had two real choices in front of me. Go back to the workshop, or find another way to survive online. I chose to keep going, and started gpresstheme.com to help people with the GeneratePress theme.

After 4 months of working every single day without earning a single rupee, I made my first affiliate sale. It was worth $20, and it changed everything that came after.

• It gave me proof that I could earn online without depending on AdSense.
• It shaped how I still think about this work today: help people solve a real problem, and the money follows.
• It eventually led to WP Blogging 101, a place for honest, technical, no fluff advice for beginners.

What I Have Built Since

My interest in building things didn’t stop at one blog. Over the years I’ve built a small network of WordPress sites and tools, each one focused on a specific, narrow problem instead of trying to cover everything on one site.

I also build small tools on the side, including Chrome extensions like DA PA Checker and ScreenGrab, mostly because I needed them myself first and figured other people probably did too.

Running this many sites means I spend most of my working hours inside WordPress, testing plugins, managing hosting, and writing content, which is exactly why I felt ready to bring all of that experience back to a site with my own name on it.

The Story of This Domain

harpreetkumar.com is older than every other site listed above. I registered it on December 17, 2016, not long after I first discovered blogging, while I was still working as a carpenter during the day.

Unlike my other sites, this one didn’t come with a clear plan. It went through a few different lives before landing where it is now, and honestly, most of that time it was more of a personal experiment than a business.

The Hindi blog came first because that was the language I was most comfortable writing in at the time. Moving to English in 2018 was a bigger shift than it sounds, since I was still learning the language alongside everything else.

Between 2018 and 2022, my attention moved to other projects that were actually paying the bills, and this site slowly went quiet. By 2022, I made the call to delete almost everything that had been published here. It no longer reflected where I was or what I wanted to write about.

But I kept renewing the domain every single year. Even with nothing published on it, harpreetkumar.com was still mine, and I wasn’t willing to let a domain with my own name on it expire.

So if you go digging through the Wayback Machine and find old, unrelated content on this domain from years ago, that’s why. It was a different site, written by the same person, at a different point in life.

What Changed Between 2016 And Now

When I first registered this domain in 2016, I was writing part time, in Hindi, with no real strategy. I didn’t understand SEO, I didn’t understand hosting, and I definitely didn’t understand how to run a WordPress site properly.

By the time I deleted everything in 2022, I had already been running WP Blogging 101 for a couple of years. I understood the difference between a site that grows and a site that just sits there, and the old content on this domain fell firmly into the second category.

The gap between those two versions of me is really the whole reason this page exists. I’m not pretending the early years didn’t happen. I’m just being upfront that this site today is a fresh start, built with everything I’ve learned since.

Why I Am Back, Writing Here Again

I kept paying for this domain for years even though I wasn’t using it. Partly out of habit, and partly because a domain carrying your own name is hard to walk away from once you’ve had it for a while.

By 2026, I had years of experience running WordPress sites, testing plugins, and writing SEO content across my other properties. It made sense to finally put that experience somewhere that carries my own name directly, instead of only under a brand name.

So this time, there’s an actual plan behind it. Real content, published consistently, instead of another half finished blog that goes quiet again after a year.

What You Will Find On This Site Now

This site is focused on hands-on WordPress development, SEO, hosting, and blogging content. Not beginner fluff, and not the same Thrive Themes alternatives content I already cover on wpthrivealts.com.

• Plugin and tool reviews, built from actually installing and using the product, not just reading its marketing page.
• Practical WordPress development notes, the kind I’d want to read myself while building something.
• Hosting and SEO guides based on what I’ve actually run across my own sites.

Every review on this site is scored the same way, across four categories: Features, Ease of Use, Pricing and Value, and Support and Docs. If I haven’t tested a category myself, I skip it instead of guessing at a number.

For paid or pro-only features, I try to actually reproduce the claim on a real test install rather than repeating what the pricing page says. You can read the full breakdown on the Methodology page.

How I Work

I write everything on this site myself. No ghostwriters, no content teams. If I mention a tool, it’s because I’ve actually installed and used it, either on this site or on one of my other properties.

Some links on this site are affiliate links, and I may earn a small commission if you buy something through them, at no extra cost to you. That never decides what I recommend or how I score it. You can read more on the affiliate disclosure page and the privacy policy.

I explain things in plain language, without unnecessary jargon. If something is bad, I say it’s bad, even if it costs me a commission.

Frequently Asked Questions

Let’s Talk

If you have a question, spotted something outdated, or just want to say hi, you can reach me directly on the contact page. I personally check that inbox.