How to resell more WordPress hosting

This is part 3 of our guide to becoming a reseller of web hosting. Here, our Customer Services Manager offers suggestions for reselling WordPress hosting.

We’ve all heard the stats. WordPress now powers around a third of websites on the internet, with a 59.4% market share across the most popular CMS. This means there’s a huge market for selling and designing WordPress websites.

We give our Resellers the best WordPress Hosting available, ensuring you can be the most competitive in what is a very competitive market. No one’s as committed to producing value for Resellers as 20i.

Here are some of the ways 20i WordPress Hosting sets your hosting apart from the competition and what you can do to encourage people to choose your business for their hosting.

Communicating the product – WordPress hosting that’s *actually* optimised

It may sound obvious, but when you’re marketing 20i’s WordPress Hosting (under your own brand of course), you’re marketing a platform that’s been developed from the ground-up to run WordPress quickly, reliably and securely.

It hasn’t been bundled together using existing hardware and software. It’s been written with WordPress as the central focus since day one. Your potential customers should know about this!

White Label: Reseller WordPress hosting with your brand

As a Reseller, you get access to our free White Label Marketing Copy. This outlines key benefits of the WordPress platform plus some FAQs to help with any sales questions. You can use this freely on your own website, ensuring that customers sign up with you for their WordPress hosting.

You can find this within your My20i Reseller account by selecting Free Resources > White Label Marketing Copy.

WordPress features & upsells

We develop some features exclusively for our Resellers. Because StackCP is a custom-written control panel we can implement features upon request and demand, a luxury that simply isn’t possible with hosts that provide other ‘off the shelf’ control panels.

An example of this is the WordPress Tools and Staging facility that we’ve developed for use with WordPress websites. These tools can be provided to your clients, either at the going rate that you choose for your hosting, or as ‘addons’ or ‘upsells’.

Here’s some of the key features you can offer your customers:

• WordPress Tools
• WordPress Staging
• Automated WordPress Migration using the 20i migration centre
• Automatic WordPress Updates
• StackCache (our caching plugin that speeds up your site)
• Timeline Backups
• Mailbox Upgrades
• SSL Certificates
• On-demand malware scans
• FTP/SSH access
• Scheduled tasks

You can decide which features you want to include within your core package, and which you’d like to leave as potential upsells (or upgrades).

What shouldn’t I include in my cheapest hosting plan?

Timeline Backups is a good example: you may decide that these should only be included in a higher tier package, or available only as an addon product. In this scenario, your customer can still make backups, but they’re not created automatically on a daily basis.

You might also want to simplify things for them: non-technical users can find a web hosting control panel overwhelming! To avoid this (and to prevent them accidentally deleting something they shouldn’t…), you might disable web tools like the File Manager, Git version control or phpMyAdmin.

If you have any ideas about what you’d like to see added or developed, feel free to let us know.

Create great packages

WordPress users have a variety of different technical needs and requirements from their WordPress hosts. Some just require WordPress for a small blog or information-only website, whilst others will run a high-traffic ecommerce store.

Putting together the right packages for your target customer will instantly make your offering more attractive.

While you can create bespoke packages for each customer, we’d recommend offering a limited number of different tiers. Too many options can lead to a ‘paralysis of choice’ and end-up with a potential customer looking elsewhere.

So try to strike a balance between having ‘one size fits all’ plans, and more specialised WordPress hosting.

Create WordPress hosting plans to suit your customers

Here are some examples of packages you could create:

WordPress Small

Perfect for small-low traffic WordPress sites.

Features: 10GB web space, 50GB bandwidth, 10 mailboxes, WordPress Tools
Price: £5.99/pm
Potential Upsells: WordPress Staging, Timeline Backups, SSL Certificates, Mailbox Upgrades

WordPress Medium

Great for regular sites with a steady amount of traffic.

Features: 35GB web space, 100GB bandwidth, 50 mailboxes, WordPress Tools
Price: £12.99/pm
Potential Upsells: WordPress Staging, Timeline Backups, SSL Certificates, Mailbox Upgrades

WordPress Large

Ideal for heavy usage sites with high traffic and higher loads.

Features: Unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited mailboxes, WordPress Tools and WordPress Staging
Price: £18.99/pm
Potential Upsells: Timeline Backups, SSL Certificates, Mailbox Upgrades

If you’re specialising around a particular industry or type of website, you can create ‘template packages’ in My20i. These templates can include pre-installed WordPress – obviously – but also set themes and plugins.

For example: you could have a ‘WooCommerce package’ which will include that plugin, but also a selection of ecommerce themes and other plugins that will help run and secure an online store. This will save your customer (and you) lots of time!

You can read more about cloning templates here: Creating a package with a set theme and plugins.

Stand out from the crowd

WordPress’ popularity also means that you may have lots of competition. We’ve already mentioned the products you can upsell, but there’s also many other ways to keep offering value, putting you well ahead of your competitors.

Offering personal support goes a long way, especially when it comes to new WordPress users who are getting to grips with the basics.

Here’s a few further ways you can add value to your offerings:

• Have a specific target market, for example, photographers
• Write support articles that are specific to that audience
• Pictures and videos will help make your support articles clear and stand-out with the added benefit that they promote self-service support
• Offer free WordPress themes. You could create your own or look to resell licences for existing ones.
• Provide website and database backups using Timeline Backups
• If you’re an SEO or marketing professional then you can bundle your expertise into your packages, offering a unique selling point over competitors

There’s more to come…

We understand the importance of WordPress so we’ve just published a comprehensive guide to WordPress security. This resource will help you to protect your site from the threat of hackers and what preventative measures can be taken to secure it.

Keep an eye out for our newsletter and updates to the blog for more WordPress content, and for new features to the WordPress platform.