In this episode of Web Legends, we sit down with Héctor de Prada González, CEO and co-founder of Modular DS, a fast-growing WordPress site management platform that helps agencies, freelancers, and website professionals manage large volumes of client sites with more control and far less chaos. Before Modular DS, Héctor freelanced and co-founded an agency, where the pain of juggling updates, QA, and maintenance across dozens of installs led directly to the product.
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Building Modular DS on the Side
Héctor and his co-founder, David, the CTO, have known each other since they were five. They ran a web design, development, and web application agency together, but always dreamed of building a product. Modular DS started on the side, funded by their consulting income, until it grew enough to demand their full focus. It was not their first attempt at a product, and earlier tries had failed, but this one was different because they had talked to potential users first, confirmed the problem, and then watched people not only use it but happily pay for it.
Going all in was a bold move. Their agency in León, Spain, was doing a healthy 300 to 400k with a small team, and they chose to walk away from that to start again near zero. Around three years ago, once the pay plans launched and adoption outpaced expectations, it was clear the bet made sense.
The First Hundred Customers
Héctor can still name the first ten or twenty customers. Early on, the team simply reached out to agencies and freelancers they knew or found on LinkedIn, asking for a conversation and feedback, and many of those became their first clients. The biggest accelerator, though, was the WordPress community in Spain. Going to WordCamps and local events connected them with people who became clients, mentors, and partners, something Héctor says they will always be grateful for. It is a sentiment Gautam echoed, recalling that one of Seahawk’s largest ever accounts traced back to a tiny WordCamp in Boston.
Safe Updates and the Update Copilot
The feature that drew the most feedback is Modular’s take on safe updates, which pair an update with a backup so you can roll back if something breaks. The problem the team saw is that people are unsure when a safe update is warranted, and running every update that way wastes time and resources. So they built the Update Copilot, a scoring system that analyzes 17 factors, including a plugin’s version stability, reputation, code changes, and data from every site connected to Modular, then tells you how risky the update is and whether to use the safe path.
It is AI-integrated, so it explains its recommendation in plain language. Scheduled and automatic updates are next, with something more ambitious teased for early in the year. Keeping updates disciplined this way is exactly what reliable website care depends on.
Notifications, Backups, and Where Sites Get Hacked
Modular started with email notifications, added WhatsApp as SMS proved too expensive, and is rolling out Slack and Discord integrations. WhatsApp, Héctor notes, has become surprisingly popular. On backups, his core principle is redundancy: never keep them in only one place. He sees too many agencies relying solely on a host backup or an on-site plugin, only to lose access to everything at the worst moment. He recommends backups with the hosting provider, a tool like Modular, and cloud storage.
As for hacks, the culprits are usually old plugins, lingering scripts that reinfect a site a week or two after a restore, and shared hosting where one compromised site among thousands drags the rest down. His advice is simply to choose a well-managed WordPress hosting provider.
Fun Rapid Fire Round
Among the plugins he admires, Héctor pointed to the older site-management tools ManageWP and MainWP, which he used for years as one of their earliest users, along with Elementor, which set a new standard, and Patchstack, whose team he knows personally, and whose integration Modular added, since security is not their own area of expertise. On backups, daily is enough for most sites, with hourly or planned real-time incremental backups for the handful of e-commerce stores, triggered by each new order.
The biggest mistake he sees agencies make is not offering website care from the beginning. He meets agencies that have built two hundred sites over a decade with only a couple of care clients, when even half of those on monthly plans could fund several salaries. On WordPress itself, Héctor believes it is too big to be displaced within five years, expects innovation to keep coming from plugins and themes, and is genuinely excited for a more approachable WP admin, since newcomers still find WordPress overwhelming next to the polish of Shopify or Webflow.
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