Are you looking for ways to encourage customers to spend more money in your online store? You should immediately start tracking the average order value (AOV) metric.
Focusing on AOV is an effective way to grow a business, especially if you are running an eCommerce store. While working closely with numerous online stores over the last decade, I have tested a ton of strategies to see what increases AOV and what doesn’t.
From this experience, I can show you 14 ways that are sure to increase average order value with WordPress to improve your bottom line.
Note: This is a guest post by Chris Klosowski, the president of Easy Digital Downloads, the best digital eCommerce plugin for WordPress. This is an expert column that we publish every other Thursday, where we invite a WordPress expert to share their experiences with our readers.
What Is Average Order Value (AOV)?
Running an online store is all about meeting the needs of your customers while covering your costs and making a profit. Luckily, there are quite a few ways you can increase your bottom line.
For example, you can try to increase the amount of traffic coming to your website or encourage more of your visitors to make a purchase. This will increase the number of conversions or transactions in your store, leading to more revenue.
A different approach is to try to increase the amount of money you make from each individual transaction. This is known as ‘average order value’ or AOV and is the topic of this article.
AOV is all about how much your customers are spending per order. You can calculate it by dividing your total revenue by the number of orders you received.
Here’s the formula for calculating AOV:
AOV = Total Revenue / Number of Orders
For example, let’s say your online store generated a total revenue of $10,000 from 200 orders in a month. Your AOV would be:
AOV = $10,000 / 200 orders = $50 per order
Understanding and analyzing your AOV can help you gain valuable insights into your eCommerce business. You can then use these insights to make data-driven decisions that improve your profitability and overall success.
Overall, if you sell multiple digital products, then focusing on increasing your average order value can be an easy way to grow your business.
With that being said, to increase your store’s average order value, you simply need to give your customers a reason to spend more.
Let’s take a look at 14 ways you can increase average order value with WordPress.
1. Track the Average Order Value (AOV) Metric on Your Online Store
Your first step is to start tracking AOV on your WordPress website. You can use this data to learn which strategies are working and which aren’t.
My team makes this simple in Easy Digital Downloads by offering built-in reporting so that you don’t have to set up separate tracking software and analytics solutions. All you have to do is go to Downloads » Reports in your WordPress dashboard.
WooCommerce also lets you easily find AOV within their dashboard.
For eCommerce tracking, I highly recommend setting up eCommerce tracking using Google Analytics on your WordPress site.
2. Get Your Pricing Structure Right
Finding the right pricing structure for your products is crucial. It needs to cover your costs and let you make a profit while also offering fair prices that encourage customers to make a purchase.
Optimizing your pricing structure may involve some experimentation. Sometimes, you might find that lowering your price raises your AOV because it makes it easier for your customers to purchase more products.
But you won’t know what is working if you don’t measure it. Tracking your store’s AOV metric is a great way to discover what is working and what isn’t.
3. Offer Product Bundles
When considering the pricing structure of your store, don’t limit your thinking to individual products. Bundling different combinations of products can help your customers feel they are getting extra value.
In my last expert column, I mentioned that product bundling makes it easier for customers to make a purchasing decision. Better still, it can encourage them to purchase more, increasing your average order value.
For example, one of our customers, SmashBalloon successfully uses bundling to encourage their customers to try their products in a bundle for a heavily discounted price.
Bundles offer your customers a bulk discount that typically costs 60-80% of the total value of those products. The right combinations of products will cater to the user’s tastes, needs, and budget.
For instance, you could bundle products that are often purchased together. A gaming store might bundle a console together with a game and controller, or you could bundle an eBook with its audiobook version.
Bundles can also encourage customers to purchase more products than they were planning. Someone who just wants to purchase a few stock photos of home offices may be tempted by an affordable ‘Home Office Bundle’.
4. Offer Payment Plans
Sometimes, your customers can only make a small purchase simply because they don’t have enough money to buy more right now.
’Buy Now Pay Later’ payment plans allow users to make the purchase now and pay for it over time. At the same time, your store will receive the full amount right away.
Currently, 35% of consumers use pay-later plans for most of their purchases.
Because they make it easier for your customers to make a purchase, these plans help improve conversions and your store’s AOV.
If you’re selling digital downloads, you can use payment options like Klarna and Afterpay to set up Buy Now Pay Later with Easy Digital Downloads. Alternatively, you could use the WP Simple Pay plugin to offer a pay-later payment option with other eCommerce solutions.
5. Make It Easy to Check Out
A lengthy or confusing checkout process can overwhelm customers, meaning they spend less time and effort on their purchases or even quit before completing the payment. An easy checkout process encourages customers to spend more.
Simplifying the process reduces the cognitive load on customers by reducing the amount of brainpower needed. It lets buyers focus on completing the purchase without feeling overwhelmed, which may lead to them adding more items to their cart.
You can reduce friction by offering multiple payment options in various currencies, allowing your customers to check out as guests without needing to create an account, and including clear instructions.
EDD includes these options on its fast-loading checkout page. You can choose an extension to add the payment methods you wish to use, including Stripe, PayPal, and many others.
You can also customize the checkout page in WooCommerce and other eCommerce plugins to optimize it for conversions and increased AOV.
6. Offer Upsells and Cross-Sells
In my experience, one of the most effective ways to encourage customers to spend more money when making a purchase is using order bumps. This is when you offer the buyer extra products or deals during checkout.
Industry reports estimate that order bumps contribute to 35% of Amazon’s total revenue. They do it well, and it pays off.
Take a look at a screenshot of how a WordPress theme company can upsell a related product.
The main types of order bumps are upsells and cross-sells. Here are some examples to help you see the difference:
In a paint shop, an upsell would be to encourage a customer to buy UV-resistant paint instead of normal paint. It costs more initially, but lasts much longer, offering better value and saving money in the long term.
A cross-sell would be to offer the customer other products they will need while painting their house. These might include paint brushes, rollers, drop sheets, paint trays, and more.
This is simply good customer service. You are making sure the customer purchases the product they actually need, and they have everything they require to do the job. They appreciate it.
It also helps you increase the visibility of products that aren’t purchased frequently. And because the customer spends more money on the order, it increases your AOV.
It’s easy to add order bumps to your online store using the Easy Digital Downloads cross-sell and upsell extension, which is available for paid members.
It lets you add other digital products to your product pages and checkout page. This can generate some impulse purchases, allowing you to boost the average order value.
While you are recommending products to your customers, it helps to showcase and promote items with higher profit margins.
Compared to your other products, high-margin products will generate more profit per unit sold.
By promoting them strategically, you can increase your overall profit even if the sales volume remains the same or even decreases slightly. This can lead to a higher AOV without requiring an increase in the number of orders.
If you have a digital product store, then you can use the EDD Recommended Products extension to prominently display your high-margin products on your downloads and checkout pages.
Amazon does something like this on its product pages by displaying ‘People who viewed this also viewed’ and ‘People who bought this also bought’ recommendations. These can encourage customers to purchase additional products they are interested in.
Another approach is to bundle high-margin products with related lower-margin ones. This can incentivize customers to purchase the bundle and potentially increase their overall spending.
8. Offer Smart Coupons
Smart coupons are a great way to get more sales, keep your customers happy, and encourage brand loyalty. They can motivate your customers to add more items to their cart so that they qualify for a discount.
For example, you could encourage customers to spend more by offering a free gift or free shipping when their cart total reaches a certain amount.
Or you can create ‘buy one get one’ (BOGO) coupons to convince shoppers to add more items to their cart. Or when they buy a certain item, you can offer them a second item at a discounted price instead of free.
The EDD Discounts Pro extension lets you create advanced discounts that are automatically applied to the checkout screen based on specific conditions.
Alternatively, if you have a WooCommerce store, then you can create smart coupons with the Advanced Coupons plugin. It lets you create all kinds of coupons, rewards, and discounts to get more sales and grow your business.
9. Optimize the User Journey
I have already touched on improving the checkout experience in your online store, but there are plenty of other ways you can optimize the user journey to improve customer experience.
A smooth and positive customer journey fosters a sense of trust and satisfaction. This can encourage customers to spend more and return for future purchases.
FunnelKit, formerly WooFunnels, is a WordPress sales funnel builder that lets you optimize the path users take on your website to become customers. It lets you improve your checkout, offer one-click upsells, use beautiful page layouts, and much more.
Customers have a positive experience on a website that’s easy to navigate and find the products they need. This helps them feel more confident about their purchases and complete larger orders.
10. Use of the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) to Create Urgency
Creating a sense of urgency and excitement can encourage customers to purchase immediately to avoid missing out on a valuable opportunity. This is known as FOMO, or the fear of missing out, and is a well-known sales tactic.
When using FOMO strategies, you need to be genuine and transparent. If your customers sense that you are trying to manipulate them by creating a false sense of urgency, then you may lose their trust.
Urgency is typically created by running a limited-time holiday sale, such as on Black Friday. The customer needs to make a purchase before the sale is over to get the discount.
When running a limited-time discount, I recommend displaying a countdown timer to make sure customers act before the offer expires.
Scarcity is another way to create a sense of urgency. For example, you can inform customers when stock is low or offer exclusive limited edition products.
11. Use Social Proof to Earn Trust
New customers may be reluctant to spend much money in your online store. They simply don’t have a reason to trust you yet.
In fact, 92% of consumers are hesitant to make a purchase when there are no customer reviews available.
This is the power of social proof, where potential customers can be strongly influenced by the experiences of people who already made a purchase and had a good experience with your store.
This means that you can earn the trust of new customers by displaying product reviews and testimonials on your website from genuine customers. Once you gain the trust of new visitors, they will be much more confident about adding items to their carts.
EDD users can do this using the Reviews extension. This lets you enable customer reviews with star ratings on the products you choose.
Many of my customers successfully use loyalty programs to encourage shoppers to spend more. When you award extra points for orders over a certain amount, you can increase the average order value just as effectively as cross-selling and upselling.
Think of a Starbucks Rewards card. Every time you buy a drink, you are closer to a free coffee.
EDD offers several extensions that can help you create a loyalty program, such as the Purchase Rewards extension.
This lets you reward customers with a discount code after making a purchase. You can set a minimum purchase amount that will encourage them to add more to their cart.
Most online stores have huge numbers of users leaving their sites from the checkout page. On average, a massive 69% of shoppers are abandoning their carts. Why not try to get some of them back and recover those lost sales?
These customers showed genuine interest in your products, which makes them valuable leads. Remind them of their abandoned cart and offer some incentives to complete the purchase. You might successfully convert them into paying customers, and this can contribute to your AOV.
You may be able to catch them just before they leave your site. OptinMonster’s exit-intent technology studies mouse movements to know when someone is about to leave your site, and shows a popup at that exact moment.
If an abandoning visitor has already left your site, then you can send them a push notification using PushEngage. Or you can send an automated email using EDD’s Recapture extension to regain their attention.
You can offer the customers an incentive to complete the purchase and present them with relevant upsell or cross-sell options, such as adding complementary products to their cart or offering a bundle discount. This is particularly effective if you use a personalized approach.
These targeted suggestions can encourage them to spend more, potentially increasing the overall order value.
Now that you’ve seen my list of ways to increase your store’s AOV, you can get to work and start testing multiple strategies.
But don’t try them all at once.
It’s better to make one change at a time and measure the effect it has on the value of your orders. This will let you see which approaches work and which don’t so that you can make data-driven decisions for your business.
Remember, increasing AOV is an ongoing process. By using a combination of these strategies and continuously monitoring and analyzing the results, you can effectively raise your average order value and boost the overall revenue in your online store.
Want to give your website a fresh new look? This month, we’re showcasing four new themes designed by the WordPress.com theme team for personal portfolios, creative projects, startups, and podcasting. These new designs are both beautiful and functional, sharing a focus on setting your work, business, or podcast apart.
As a reminder, you can access a range of beautiful premium themes on the Personal plan and above, or you can even add your own third-party themes with the Business and Commerce plans. So it’s worth taking a look at the WordPress.com hosting plans and checking out all available themes in case there’s an even better fit for your site.
Let’s take a closer look at this month’s featured themes:
Dossier brings a sophisticated, minimalist design to your site, making it perfect for professionals looking to showcase their skills and accomplishments. The theme emphasizes clean typography and ample white space, creating an elegant digital portfolio or resume. With customizable sections for projects, skills, and testimonials, Dossier puts your work front and center with a polished, modern layout.
StartOrg is designed for nonprofits, startups, and organizations looking to make a strong impression. The theme’s structured layout, vibrant accent colors, and intuitive design help you communicate your mission, highlight team members, and share updates. Whether you’re showcasing research, community projects, or educational programs, StartOrg’s versatile sections make it easy to connect with your audience and grow your reach.
Inspired by the Impressionist art movement, this theme offers a refined space for visual storytelling. With a minimalist layout, delicate typography, and emphasis on white space, Impressionist is ideal for showcasing artwork or creative content. The design draws from the aesthetics of an art gallery, allowing your visuals to take center stage. For artists, designers, and historians, Impressionist provides a beautiful online gallery to exhibit your creations.
Podbase is designed specifically for podcasters who want a sleek, modern platform to host their episodes. Its dark theme with vibrant accents highlights podcast cover art and episode descriptions, creating a visually engaging experience. Integrated features like an audio player, episode lists, and subscription buttons make it easy for listeners to navigate your content. Podbase is a great choice for podcasters looking to build a dedicated following with a professional theme that reflects the quality of their content.
Ready to give your site a makeover? Try any of these themes on for size by clicking the Demo button on each theme page to see which one speaks to you. Whether you’re showcasing professional achievements, building a community, sharing artistic creations, or launching a podcast, you might just find the perfect starting point with one of these themes.
Most premium themes are available to use at no extra charge for customers on the Personal plan or above. Partner themes are third-party products that can be purchased for $99/year each on the Business or Commerce plans, so if you haven’t found what you’re looking for today, there are plenty of alternatives available.
You can explore all of our themes by navigating to the “Themes” page, which is found under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard. Or you can click the button below:
-WordPress powers 478 million sites, dominates the CMS niche
-WooCommerce is used by 9.2% of all e-commerce sites
-It is built with search engines in mind
-Responsive website themes and designs are built into it
-You don’t need to know a programming language
-It’s not the best choice if you have very complex requirements
According to a NetCraft report in August 2024, there were 1.1 billion websites online, ranging from social networks and stores to company sites and blogs. 43.5% of all sites run on WordPress, which comes to around 478 million.
This system also dominates the CMS niche market with a share of almost 63%. It is followed by Shopify and Wix with just 6.5% resp. 4.2%. Almost a third of websites do not use a recognized CMS.
More than 30,000 WordPress themes and 70,000 plugins are available. According to the latest data, 13,292 websites use Hello Elementor, which has a 1.33% share. Divi and Astra come next, appearing on 10,183 and 10,155 sites.
WooCommerce, the CMS’s e-commerce plugin, leads the market with a 36.42% market share, ahead of Shopify and Custom Cart with 18.54% and 13.24%.
In September 2024, WooCommerce’s role in e-commerce remains profound. It is used by 9.2% of all e-commerce sites (more than 101 million sites) and 13.2% of those with a known CMS. There’s also great WordPress hosting for WooCommerce.
Technological advantages
The first and main benefit of WordPress is that it is built with search engines and SEO in mind. Each post gives you important SEO information like the meta title, meta description, slug, how many characters they should be, and tips on how often keywords should appear in the text. WordPress has tips for external and internal links, images in the text, the keyphrase in the introduction, and more, all of which are critical for rankings.
It features links to posts with in-depth SEO information. The green dot is a clear and simple sign that you’ve done everything right. Red means your text needs more search engine optimization, and WordPress makes suggestions for improvements. Orange means your text is ok for SEO but not great.
The only reason you wouldn’t care about SEO is if you were creating a website for yourself, which most people aren’t. Your website should be easy for Google, Bing, and Yahoo to crawl through. This comes built-in with WordPress. Potentially, you can get a lot of search engine traffic.
Responsiveness and an excellent frontend and backend balance
Responsive website themes and designs are built into WordPress. Most of them adjust to all kinds of mobile screens automatically. WordPress websites have distinct advantages over websites built manually using HTML, JavaScript, or CSS. The front end often looks great, but clients and developers can forget to invest effort and time in the back end, resulting in a poorly held-together site. You don’t need to know a programming language to create a site with WordPress. Once you have, anyone you give permission to can log in and post. No technical background is needed.
WordPress might not be the best choice if you have very complex requirements. If content management is not your leading consideration, you would be better off with other options, like vue.js and Laravel or a similar framework.
Finally, imagine manually coding an e-commerce platform: the shop, the products, user logins, and payment gateways. If you have the skills, it can take weeks. In comparison, creating a working e-commerce site on WordPress takes a few hours.
Recap
-There are over 30,000 WordPress themes and 70,000+ plugins
Live chat service is primarily chatbot-run; speaking to a person can be difficult
Hostinger is a fast-growing website that recently landed on the official list of WordPress.org recommended hosts. I’d spent a little bit of time fiddling with Hostinger tools before, and I wanted to build a deeper understanding of how — and how well — they work.
To accomplish this, I purchased a Hostinger plan and tested the site creation tools for ease of use. I then hosted a test site for one week, using uptime monitoring and speed tests to determine server performance. Finally, I tested the customer service by reading the knowledge base and reaching out via live chat. You can learn more about the full process of how we test web hosting services.
Overall, I was impressed by Hostinger’s offerings. Despite providing low prices, both for the introductory term and for renewal pricing, Hostinger packs a lot of value. It delivers excellent site creation and management tools, exceptional server performance and impressive security features. The only drawback is the mediocre customer service. This makes Hostinger a great choice for simple sites, especially for-fun hobby sites and blogs but can make it a poor choice for business sites.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the Hostinger plans for each of these hosting types:
Hosting type
Best for
Price
Shared hosting
Hobby sites, blogs and small business websites using a CMS other than WordPress
Starts at $3 to $8 a month, renews at $8 to $20 a month
Managed WordPress hosting
Hobby sites, blogs and small business websites built with WordPress
Starts at $3 to $8 a month, renews at $8 to $20 a month
Managed WooCommerce hosting
E-commerce sites built with WordPress + WooCommerce
Starts at $4 to $15 a month, renews at $9 to $33 a month
Website builder hosting (regular)
Users who want to create a hobby site, blog or small business website without learning/maintaining new software
Starts at $3 to 4 a month, renews at $8 to $9 a month
Website builder hosting (e-commerce)
Users looking to build an e-commerce site without learning/maintaining new software
Starts at $4 a month, renews at $14 a month
Cloud hosting
Sites with very international audiences or teams
Starts at $8 to $30 a month, renews at $20 to $55 a month
VPS hosting
Sites that expect 400,000+ monthly visitors or require server customization
Starts at $5 to $20 a month, renews at $8 to $45 a month
Next, let’s take a closer look at Hostinger’s plans.
Shared hosting
Shared hosting divides the bandwidth, processing power and storage of a web server — a specialized computer built for hosting websites — between many websites. Each website gets a predetermined percentage of these resources, limiting the number of pages your site can store and the monthly visitors it can accommodate. Shared hosting is typically good for small-to-medium websites with 1,000 to 2,000 pages and 10,000 to 400,000 monthly visitors.
Shared hosting is also great for first-time website owners with a low budget, as the server’s configured for you and the cost is quite low, often $3 to $5 a month to start and $10 to $20 per month on renewal.
Hostinger’s shared hosting plans are particularly generous, including:
Comprehensive security: firewall, distributed denial of service — DDoS — protection, malware scanning and domain privacy
There are also some key differences, primarily in storage and the number of monthly visitors each plan can accommodate:
Plan
Storage
Bandwidth
Additional features
Price
Premium
100GB (at least 1,000 pages) across up to 100 websites
25,000 monthly visits
Starter WooCommerce support
$3 a month for the first term, $8 a month on renewal
Business
200GB (at least 2,000 pages) across up to 100 websites
100,000 monthly visits
WordPress AI tools and Basic WooCommerce support, website builder AI and e-commerce tools, free CDN, on-demand backups
$4 a month for the first term, $14 a month on renewal
Cloud Startup
200GB (at least 2,000 pages) across up to 300 websites
200,000 monthly visits
Dedicated IP address, priority support, Standard WooCommerce support
$8 a month for the first term $25 a month on renewal
All prices are based on a four-year term. Your per-month price will increase if you choose a shorter contract length.
Managed WordPress hosting
WordPress is a popular content management system, or CMS, for creating, organizing and maintaining blog posts and web pages without needing code. According to W3Techs, 43.4% of all websites use WordPress, and developers have created almost 60,000 plugins that make it possible to accomplish almost anything you can imagine with WordPress. This has led many web hosts to create WordPress-specific plans that include things like auto-updates to the CMS.
Hostinger offers three managed WordPress plans with the same prices and many of the same features as the shared hosting plans. In fact, the biggest differences are things you’ll get less of: managed WordPress plans start with just 25GB of storage — enough for at least 250 pages — and a limit of 10 websites. The highest-tier managed WordPress plan offers 200GB — enough for at least 2,000 pages — and lets you host up to 200 websites. Due to these limitations, I recommend that most WordPress users choose the shared hosting plans instead.
Managed WooCommerce hosting
WooCommerce is a popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress that makes it easy to build an online store, with dozens of extensions for things like subscription services and paid communities. Hostinger offers three managed WooCommerce plugins with one-click WooCommerce setup and a variety of third-party integrations.
The lowest-tier managed WooCommerce hosting plan, Business, starts at $4 a month (renewing at $14 a month) with a four-year contract. The Business plan includes one-click WooCommerce setup, free store migration, limited third-party WooCommerce integrations, a free Amazon affiliate plugin and all of the WordPress features included in the Premium shared hosting plan. You’ll also get enough bandwidth for 100,000 monthly visitors and enough storage for at least 2,000 pages.
The highest-tier managed WooCommerce hosting plan, Cloud Professional, starts at $15 a month (renews at $40 a month) with a four-year contract. Cloud Professional includes everything from the Business plan, plus expert e-commerce tech support, AI tools, hosting for up to 300 websites and enough storage for at least 2,500 pages. Cloud Professional sites can accommodate 300,000 monthly visits.
Website builder hosting
A website builder is a visual tool for building a website without code. Website builders are typically proprietary, meaning they’re owned by individual hosting companies, so the company handles things like software updates and maintenance, leaving you to focus on the more creative side of things. Hostinger offers a particularly robust website builder tool, complete with an AI site builder that creates a site for you in seconds based on basic information about the purpose of your site and its brand.
Most Hostinger plans include access to the Hostinger website builder but you can access a more tailored hosting experience with the website builder plans. There are two of these plans, with starting costs ranging from $3 to $4 a month ($12 to $14 a month on renewal) with a four-year contract. The main difference between these plans is that the higher-tier option includes more AI content generation tools and some e-commerce functionality. There are no storage or bandwidth limits listed for these plans.
E-commerce website builder hosting
Hostinger also offers a specialized plan for users who want to build an e-commerce store with the Hostinger website builder. This plan starts at $4 a month ($14 a month on renewal) with a four-year contract for the website builder and all related AI content generation tools. You’ll also get e-commerce features like the ability to build an online store with product pages, payment processing with no transaction fees and basic inventory management tools for 500 digital or physical products. There are no storage or bandwidth limits listed for this plan.
VPS hosting
Virtual private server, or VPS, hosting divides one physical server into several isolated virtual servers. Each server has dedicated resources, like processing power and bandwidth, typically allowing VPS sites to host more web pages and accommodate more visitors than sites on shared hosting. A VPS also gives you more server customization options, like the ability to choose security software for your VPS.
Hostinger offers unmanaged VPS hosting, which means that you’ll be responsible for configuring and maintaining all digital aspects of your server. This includes installing software, making sure it’s up to date and monitoring/managing the security of your VPS.
The most affordable VPS plan from Hostinger starts at $5 a month ($8 a month on renewal) with a two-year contract. This plan includes enough storage for at least 500 web pages and enough bandwidth to accommodate up to 4 million visitors, making it ideal for static business websites and blogs that are just starting out. E-commerce sites, with their numerous product pages and large image files, may require more storage. Long-running blogs with thousands of blog posts will also need more storage.
The most expensive Hostinger VPS plan starts at $20 a month (renewing at $45 a month) with a two-year contract. This plan includes enough storage for at least 4,000 pages and enough bandwidth for 32 million monthly visitors.
Hostinger ease of use: Website creation has never been simpler
I started the hands-on portion of my Hostinger review by testing three key functions for ease of use: the purchase process, account management and website/server management.
Purchase process
The Hostinger purchase process is pretty simple. Selecting a plan takes you to a page where you can view the details of the purchase and change your contract length from the four-year default. Renewal pricing is listed under the contract selection process, a nice change from sites like HostGator — which lists renewal prices in tiny font — or A2 Hosting — which hides renewal prices entirely. Prices update automatically if you change the contract length.
Screenshot/CNET
Next, you’ll be asked to create an account. You can either create a unique account with your email address and a new password or log in with your Google account, then move on to the billing area.
Hostinger accepts several payment methods including credit cards, PayPal and cryptocurrency. Most web hosts accept only credit cards, making this a notable feature.
Screenshot/CNET
The other notable thing about Hostinger’s purchase process is the complete lack of upsells. Where most hosts encourage you to buy add-ons — and some, like HostGator, even pre-select add-ons for you — Hostinger doesn’t even display other services for sale. For context, A2 Hosting is the only other host I’ve worked with that didn’t have any upsells whatsoever.
Account management
Hostinger’s account management area is also easy to navigate. Your hosting package and domain are clearly listed in the center of the page, along with a box encouraging you to use Hostinger’s AI tools. The sidebar includes links to areas for essential tasks like website, domain and email management. You can even access billing management (a feature hidden in a drop-down menu by companies like HostGator) from this sidebar.
Screenshot/CNET
Website and server management
Hostinger offers a few options for website creation, including AI-powered tools that build a website for you — using either WordPress or the Hostinger website builder — based on information like your site’s name and purpose.
I decided to build my site from scratch, clicking the Manage button next to my hosting package. This leads to a page with links to essential hosting features, like email setup, and an Auto-Install button for installing WordPress (or your preferred CMS) on your site.
Screenshot/CNET
The installation process takes only a few clicks and a couple of minutes for your server to set up your CMS. WordPress users are then greeted by a Hostinger onboarding process that guides you through basic site-building tasks like adding a new page. There’s also a Learn tab with WordPress tutorials and a Tools tab where you can see things like the version of WordPress you’re running. This makes it much easier for first-time website owners and is outmatched only by the A2 Hosting site assistant, which features direct links to more actions like editing your homepage.
Screenshot/CNET
WordPress installs from Hostinger feature a Tools plugin that monitors your site health and the LiteSpeed caching plugin for improved site loading times.
Server management is conducted through the hPanel, a proprietary system for managing your website(s), email, files and databases. The website management page I shared earlier is also part of the hPanel, so you can find everything in one place.
The hPanel offers a clean, visually optimized interface that’s easy to navigate for even the most tech-averse beginners. hPanel tools are also comprehensive, letting you do everything from basic site monitoring to complex tasks like managing the DNS — domain name system — records that let you connect your site to Google Search Console.
Screenshot/CNET
I found hPanel to be more user-friendly than the industry-standard cPanel or alternative proprietary tools like the Ionos server management system. There is a downside, however: most free website migration services can only move cPanel sites to a new host, so if you decide to switch hosts, you’ll need to transfer the site yourself. Figuring out how to do this may also be difficult, as most tutorials for manually transferring a site to a new host focus on using cPanel. You may also dislike hPanel if you’re used to cPanel and don’t want to learn a new system.
Overall
Creating a site with Hostinger is incredibly easy, from purchasing a plan to managing your server resources. In fact, it’s the most intuitive site creation process I’ve encountered with any web host, with no upsells during checkout, a simple yet comprehensive account dashboard and the equally uncomplicated Panel. This earns Hostinger a 10/10 ease of use ranking — the highest ease of use ranking I’ve given any hosting company so far. Only A2 Hosting has even come close, earning a 9/10 with its comprehensive guided WordPress install and site assistant.
Hostinger performance: Reliable and fast
There are two key metrics to consider when determining a web hosting company’s performance:
Uptime: The percentage of time your site spends online and accessible to visitors. Uptime matters because there are thousands of sites competing in every niche, so users who can’t load one site will often leave for another site, resulting in lost traffic and possibly even lost money.
Site speed: The number of seconds it takes your site to load. Browsers are used to instant connections and there’s a good chance they’ll leave your site if they can’t get one, making site speed one of the most important factors in a website’s success.
I spent one week testing my Hostinger site to see how well it performed on both of these metrics. I also examined Hostinger’s performance tools to understand how the company helps its users optimize site speed.
Performance tools
Hostinger primarily improves site speed through caching, a protocol that stores static information, like a website’s layout. With caching, information is housed in a data storage layer programmed to run at the speed of either your web server’s CPU — central processing unit — or a visitor’s CPU. Data stored this way can be accessed much faster than data stored using the typical RAM, or random access memory.
WordPress sites built with Hostinger come with the LiteSpeed caching plugin pre-installed. LiteSpeed offers multiple types of caching, image optimization and code minification, which is a protocol for reducing the size of JavaScript and HTML files to improve site speed. Users on higher-tier plans can access additional object caching tools for WordPress to further improve loading times.
There’s also a Cache Manager in the Advanced area of hPanel. You can use this tool to enable automatic caching with a refresh rate of every 30 minutes, regardless of the CMS you’re using.
Screenshot/CNET
Higher-tier users can also access a content delivery network, or CDN, that stores data in several networked servers around the globe. This ensures faster site speeds for international users, as pulling data from a server close to you is faster than pulling data from a server on the other side of the world.
Uptime
Hostinger offers the industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee, promising that server issues won’t cause your site to go down for more than 10 minutes per week. I hooked my site up to BetterStack monitoring for one week to see how Hostinger lives up to this promise.
My test site experienced no downtime during this week, suggesting that Hostinger manages its servers well enough to generally exceed its 99.9% uptime guarantee, earning Hostinger a 10/10 uptime ranking. This is similar to my experience with other top web hosts like GoDaddy and A2 Hosting, which both had 100% uptime during my test week. It’s also better than HostGator — which just barely lived up to its 99.9% uptime guarantee — and InMotion Hosting — which had multiple hours of downtime during my test week.
Site speed
Many experts recommend that your site should load in under 3 seconds, as bounce rate, or the percentage of users who leave your site after viewing only one page, increases by 32% when loading time goes from 1 to 3 seconds.
I spent five days testing my Hostinger site speed using WebPageTest, taking a few measures to maximize my tests’ resemblance of the average user experience:
Testing at different times of day to see if Hostinger’s servers perform well both during and outside of standard business hours.
Testing from different locations to estimate how international users would experience Hostinger site’s loading speed.
Testing on both mobile and desktop to estimate how users on different devices experience sites on Hostinger servers.
Using the built-in performance tools without modifying the built-in settings or adding extra performance tools.
I came up with the following average site speeds based on these tests:
California
UK
Germany
India
Dubai
Australia
Mobile
2.62
2.51
2.75
3.33
3.12
3.5
Desktop
1.41
1.43
1.42
2
1.86
2.35
I then further condensed these numbers into the following averages:
Average mobile site speed of 2.97 seconds
Average desktop site speed of 1.74 seconds
Overall site speed of 2.34 seconds
This makes Hostinger the second fastest host of all the companies I’ve tested so far, falling only slightly behind GoDaddy’s 2.29 second average and earning Hostinger a speed ranking of 8/10. I was pleased with this result, especially since I only used the LiteSpeed settings that were automatically enabled on installation. You may be able to improve site speed by turning on additional LiteSpeed features, such as object cache and image compression.
Overall performance
Hostinger earns a performance ranking of 9/10 thanks to its spectacular uptime and good site speed. This is on par with GoDaddy’s 9/10 (the highest performance ranking of any host I’ve tested so far) and slightly above the 8.4/10 earned by Ionos (the web host with the second-highest overall ranking of the companies I’ve tested so far).
Hostinger security
Hostinger offers users a few layers of security:
Secure socket layer — SSL — certification: An encryption protocol that protects data sent to and from your site, such as contact information submitted through a form. SSL certification also signals that your site is safe. Some browsers and VPNs won’t even open a site without SSL certification. Google also penalizes sites without SSL certification, making it difficult for these sites to rank well.
Firewall: Software that filters out malicious data attempting to infiltrate your site or its server, similar to how a Brita filter removes harmful particles from your water. Firewalls can’t protect against every threat, but they can keep most malicious software at bay.
Distributed denial of service — DDoS — protection: Software that prevents malicious traffic from overwhelming your site/server and shutting it down.
Malware scanner: Software that scans your site for any malware that gets through the firewall.
Automated backups: Copies of your site stored on a different server, letting you quickly restore your site if it goes down. The lowest-tier plan includes weekly backups and higher-tier plans include daily backups.
Secure Access Manager: Software that lets you add collaborators to your hosting plan and control what they can access within your hPanel.
These security measures are similar to the security suites offered by top hosts like Ionos and A2 Hosting. They’re also more than you’ll get with HostGator or DreamHost, which offer only malware scanning through advanced hosting plans or add-ons.
Hostinger customer service: Mediocrity in action
Your web host’s customer service should be available 24/7, with both a knowledge base (an area where you can find tutorials on how to set up and fix things yourself) and direct communication options through live chat, email and phone. I explored Hostinger’s self-serve resources, then reached out to customer service to test the speed and helpfulness of its support team.
Hostinger knowledge base and tutorials
Instead of the usual knowledge base page with links to information in specific categories, like domain and website setup, the question mark in the top right corner of the hPanel takes you to a help page with three options:
Search the knowledge base for specific assistance
Access Hostinger’s tutorials
Start a live chat
Screenshot/CNET
I love how this minimalistic approach provides users with the tools they need to seek help without being overwhelming like the InMotion Hosting knowledge base. However, I personally would prefer to have two or three buttons leading to the most commonly requested topics, like domains and WordPress setup — especially since you can access an area just like this by clicking the Knowledge Base link at the bottom of the public-facing Hostinger site.
Screenshot/CNET
Searching for a topic opens a new tab with links to relevant articles. I would prefer having the search results show up in the same tab, particularly since I’ve always got too many tabs open to begin with. But the search results themselves are clear and well-organized.
Screenshot/CNET
The articles themselves are clearly laid out, with step-by-step instructions accompanied by images to show you how to complete basic tasks. My one disappointment is the lack of video tutorials in this area, which could complicate things for users who prefer to learn through video. Most of these articles also focus on granular tasks, like installing WordPress, rather than the whole process of building a website.
The Hostinger Tutorials area offers more complete walk-throughs for understanding things like how to build a WordPress site. You can either search these tutorials for something specific or scroll the Tutorials page if you want to establish a general understanding of website creation.
Screenshot/CNET
This area also includes several video tutorials on topics like how to create a blog with WordPress and how to build an e-commerce store. Hostinger offering these in-depth tutorials in both text and video provides great accessibility for anyone interested in learning about these topics.
Overall, I had a couple of minor quibbles with the functionality of Hostinger’s self-serve help tools, but the comprehensive coverage of hosting-related topics and the availability of in-depth tutorials earn Hostinger a knowledge base ranking of 10/10.
Direct communication
Hostinger offers customer support only via live chat, a stark difference from the combination of live chat, email and phone support offered by other web hosts I’ve tested. While some of those hosts, like InMotion Hosting, limit phone service to higher-tier plans, Hostinger is the first company I’ve tested with no phone service at all.
I tested Hostinger’s live chat by asking how to do a manual site backup and received step-by-step instructions within 5 minutes. However, the answers seemed like canned AI responses.
AI responses aren’t inherently bad — especially since the answers I received were helpful and comprehensive — but I wanted to see if I could communicate with a real person. I typed “Speak to a real person” and was connected to an agent within 2 minutes.
Unfortunately, that’s where my positive experience ended. I spent over half an hour waiting for the customer service representative to respond to my questions. This is the longest I’ve waited for any live chat service other than InMotion Hosting. In fact, I was about to close the conversation when a new customer service agent stepped in, sending step-by-step instructions for fixing the issue I mentioned.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about Hostinger’s live chat. The AI is fast and trained to answer a wide range of questions. Speaking to a person took a while, but the customer service rep also provided helpful answers, including links to more comprehensive tutorials. This led me to give Hostinger a live chat ranking of 6/10.
Overall customer service
Ranking Hostinger’s customer service is complicated. The knowledge base and tutorials provide comprehensive, step-by-step guidance for dealing with many simple web tasks. The live chat bot is trained well, providing instant answers to most simple questions — often by sending links to the knowledge base or tutorials. However, even the best-trained bot can’t answer every question or fix every solution, and connecting with a human to answer my questions took longer than it should have.
Averaging out the knowledge base and live chat rankings gives Hostinger’s customer service a 7.5/10 customer service ranking, but there’s another catch: the lack of phone or email support. While this isn’t a huge issue for many users — a lot of us prefer live chat — it is enough to drop Hostinger’s customer service ranking to 6.5/10.
Unfortunately, poor customer service is common among web hosts. DreamHost earned a 3/10 due to its inaccessible live chat and phone service. HostGator earned 6/10 by failing to respond to email requests or follow through on scheduled calls. Even A2 Hosting, a company I otherwise loved working with, only netted a 7.5/10 customer support ranking due to its slow phone support. The only web hosts I’ve received consistently good support from were GoDaddy — ranked at 8/10 — and Ionos — ranked at 9.5/10 — thanks to their prompt live chat and phone support.
Reputation
My experience with Hostinger is only one experience, so I read numerous other Hostinger reviews to get a more well-rounded view of the Hostinger experience. I found over 32,000 Trustpilot reviews for Hostinger with an overall rating of 4.6 out of five stars. However, there are over 2,000 one-star reviews, many of them citing a lack of customer service. Some Trustpilot reviews also cite more serious issues, such as users being charged after they turned off auto-renew and websites being suspended with no warning or explanation. We’ve canceled our plan, so will update this section with our own experience about whether auto-renewal successfully shuts off.
Overall, it seems like the majority of Hostinger customers have a positive experience, but I’m far from the only one who’s experienced poor customer support. And some folks have experienced far worse issues.
Hostinger value: Ideal for low-budget projects
The next thing to consider is how Hostinger’s offerings compare with what you can get from other popular web hosts.
Here’s a quick look at what three of those hosts offer on their basic shared hosting plans:
Host
Plan
Features
Price
Additional notes
HostGator
Hatchling
10GB storage, pre-installed WordPress and HostGator site assistant, unmetered bandwidth, free SSL certification, free domain for first year, firewall with DDoS protection
Starts at $3.75 a month, renews at $10 a month (based on three-year term)
Customer service is poor for advanced queries and issues, performance is mediocre, no phone support on lowest-tier plan
GoDaddy
Web Hosting Economy
25GB storage, free domain for first year, free SSL for first year, site migration, automated daily backups
Starts at $6 a month, renews at $10 a month (based on three-year term)
Lacks key security protocols, lots of additional fees and upsells
A2 Hosting
Ignite
10GB storage, free SSL certificate, unlimited email accounts, free site migration, WordPress auto-install, WordPress auto-updates, security tools suite
Starts at $2 a month, renews at $13 a month (based on three-year term)
Phone customer service can be slow
There are a few conclusions we can draw based on this information:
Hostinger offers average introductory prices. The $3 a month introductory rate for Hostinger’s lowest-tier plan is higher than the $2 a month for A2 Hosting, but lower than the $3.75 a month for HostGator or the $6 per month from GoDaddy.
Introductory contracts at Hostinger are longer than normal. Hostinger requires a four-year contract to get the best prices for its shared and WordPress hosting plan, a full year longer than the three years expected from the other companies discussed here.
Hostinger’s renewal prices are low. At $8 a month on renewal, Hostinger’s basic plan is more affordable than the $10 charged by HostGator and GoDaddy or the $13 a month charged by A2 Hosting.
Hostinger offers great storage. The 100GB — enough for at least 1,000 pages — of storage on the lowest-tier Hostinger plan is higher than the base storage offered by HostGator, GoDaddy or A2 Hosting. This is an especially important consideration for e-commerce sites, as product pages and pictures require extensive storage.
Hostinger offers great WordPress features. Hostinger goes beyond the auto-updates offered in A2 Hosting’s basic shared hosting plan, including a specialized WordPress vulnerabilities scanner and LiteSpeed-enhanced servers. This also puts it miles ahead of GoDaddy and HostGator, which don’t even offer auto-updates on the lowest-tier plan.
Hostinger offers great security tools. Hostinger offers both the standard protections (SSL certification, firewall protection and DDoS protection) and additional tools like malware scanning and weekly backups. Of the three hosts discussed here, only the A2 Hosting security suite comes close to matching Hostinger’s security standards.
Based on all of this, I give Hostinger a 9/10 for value. The only drawback is that you’ll have to sign up for a full four years to get the best discount, resulting in a higher initial fee. However, the long-term savings — including those netted from the lower renewal pricing — more than makes
Hostinger: Is it worth it?
Let’s take a look at how well Hostinger performed so that you can decide if this is the right web hosting company for your needs and budget:
Ease of use: 10/10
Performance: 9/10
Customer service: 6.5/10
Value: 9/10
Averaging out these scores gives Hostinger an overall ranking of 8.62/10. This puts Hostinger slightly above our next-highest-ranking web host, Ionos (with its 8.45/10 ranking) and the third-highest, A2 Hosting (8.25/10). Based on this ranking, I can confidently recommend Hostinger if you’re looking for shared or WordPress hosting and you’re comfortable using live chat for all of your customer service needs.
If you prefer receiving customer support via phone or you just want to ensure you’re getting the fastest, most reliable customer service on the market, I recommend buying hosting from Ionos instead.
Hostinger is generally considered to be a reputable hosting service. However, there are some extremely negative reviews on Trustpilot, so your experience may vary.
