I just found out there is an AT+CIOBAUD command which allows you to change the baud rate.
This will change the pcb design because previous posts I had read on this subject assumed a baud rate of 115200. This forced me to connect D0 (Arduino RX) to ESP8266 TX (using a transistor) and D1 (Arduino Tx) to ESP8266 Rx (using a transistor).
But now with the reduced baud rate we can use softserial to connect to ESP8266 rx/tx and save standard serial (D0,D1) for debugging. I think this will make the final solution much more user friendly.