The Ultimate Guide to Building a Subscription Box Website

Whether it’s for daily household consumables, or gadgets or forms of media, more and more consumers are signing up for subscription boxes. But an important part of the subscription process is the website. If you’re thinking about starting a subscription box business then you need to read upHost’s ultimate guide to building a subscription box website now… 👇👇👇

The growth of subscription box businesses

Let’s begin by setting some context. Subscription box businesses are becoming more and more popular. 📈

By offering consumers convenience, value for money and (in many cases) novelty, subscription boxes are becoming a familiar part of many households across the UK and elsewhere. 🏠

In fact, research from Invesp, shows that: 🔎

• Over 50% of regular online shoppers have signed up to at least one subscription service.
• Around 20% of male consumers and 7% of female consumers have signed up to six or more subscription services.
• The subscription box market has grown by more than 100% a year over the past five years.

So, it’s a growing, yet competitive market.

In that case, if you’re going to be setting up a subscription box website, you’re going to have to make sure that it’s fast, functional, easy to use, attractive, and reliable. If it doesn’t meet those requirements, then you’ll quickly lose your customers to a competitor. 😔 💀

The best website builder for a subscription business

Where do you start? With a website builder of course! 🖥️ 👍

Now, this is probably an obvious point, but we’d highly recommend that you use a website builder rather than trying to build a subscription website completely from scratch.

In terms of which website builder to use, we’d always recommend WordPress.

Why?

Because WordPress has a wealth of benefits: 😀 😀 😀

• It’s the world’s most popular website builder with over 455 million websites based on the WordPress platform.
• It’s easy to use, with even amateurs able to quickly and easily make changes and edits to a WordPress website.
• It’s intuitive. WordPress is designed to be easy to understand. Everything is labelled and laid out simply. You don’t need to be a qualified programmer to understand how to use it.
• It’s open source. This means that the base code of WordPress is freely available to everyone. As a result, people are always developing new plugins, themes and tools, so WordPress is an ever expanding platform. You’ll be effectively benefitting from the collective ideas and inputs of hundreds of thousands of open source developers across the world.
• It’s versatile. Thanks to the constellation of plugins that are available for WordPress, it’s a highly-versatile website builder, meaning it’s easy to add new features like eCommerce functionality to your website.

As you can see, WordPress should be your ‘go to’ platform if you’re intending to set up a subscription box website. 💻 🖱️ ⌨️  🚧

Best WordPress plugins for subscription box websites

In order to create the very best subscription box website, you will without a doubt need to make use of some of WordPress’ many plugins. 🔌 🔌 🔌

A cursory search of the WordPress plugins shop will show you that there are tens of thousands of plugins available. Which of course, can make it a little difficult to know which plugins you should choose.

So, the upHost team has done the hard work for you and outlined the best WordPress plugins for subscription box websites below. 👇👇

WooCommerce

The first plugin you’re going to want to add to your WordPress website is WooCommerce.

This is a plugin which will add the all important eCommerce functionality to your website. It makes creating an online store simple and allows you to list products, manage inventory, include a shopping cart, include a checkout, take orders, process payments and more. 🛒 🛍️

In other words, WooCommerce allows you to add everything to your website that consumers expect from an online store.

WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce Subscriptions is an additional plugin which will complement the standard WooCommerce plugin.

Whilst you have to pay a fee to use this plugin, it’s well worthwhile as it helps eliminate many of the complexities that can arise when you’re trying to set up recurring payments for subscriptions. 🤔 🧠  💭

The WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin will enable you to:

• Manage automated and ongoing payment processing.
• Manage renewals (be they monthly or annual).
• Send automated invoices and receipts.
• Allow subscribers to manage their subscriptions.
• Keep track of the number of subscribers, revenue, sales, subscriber churn and more.

WooCommerce Subscriptions also integrates with over 25 payment gateways, so no matter what payment processor you’re using, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to easily integrate it with this plugin. 💵 🤑  💵

Paid Memberships Pro

If you’re intending to provide digital content to your customers as well as subscription boxes (e.g. if you’re selling subscription boxes of comics and want to also provide access to online versions of the comics too), then Paid Memberships Pro is a really useful plugin to add to your site.

This plugin allows you to place ‘gates’ across content. For example, only paid subscribers can access content on your website. 😎 😎 😎

With Paid Memberships Pro, you can also:

• Show ‘sneak peeks’ of content, thus helping to drive new subscribers.
• Allow people to pay per post of view.
• Create personalised member homepages, thus building loyalty to your subscription business and helping to build a community.

Whilst those are the top WordPress plugins we’d recommend for your subscription box website, they are only the tip of the iceberg. 🧊 🧊

We’d encourage you to explore the web for more. As we mentioned earlier, there’s a whole constellation of WordPress plugins available. So, if you need to add a very specific function or feature to your subscription box website, there’s probably a plugin out there that’ll do the job! 🔌 ⚡ 🔌

The best hosting for WordPress subscription box websites

Building your subscription box website is only one part of the equation. You actually need to get it live, and keep it live. 🎯 🎯 🎯

You can do that by choosing the very best WordPress hosting available – from upHost of course! 🔥 🔥 💯 💯

If you’re going to be selling subscriptions, particularly if you’re going to be offering gated digital content, then you’ll want to make sure that your website has the maximum possible uptime. ⬆️ ⬆️

You’ll have some very unhappy customers if they can’t access the content that they’ve paid for, or if they can’t access their account to make changes to their recurring subscription boxes.😡 😠

And, that’s just what we offer here at upHost. WordPress hosting with 99.99% uptime.

But that’s not all. Choose upHost to host your subscription box website and you’ll also benefit from:

• WordPress maintenance.
• Free website migration (if required).
• Free daily backups.
• Free SSL certificate.
• UK-based servers.
• UK-based support.

Like the sound of that? Then why not subscribe your subscription website to upHost’s WordPress hosting today? 👍 😎 😎

 

Find out more about our fully maintained WordPress hosting now

For more WordPress website and hosting advice, read the upHost blog…

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