The “Hello, world” churn nobody budgets for

If you run a hosting business, you already know this story, even if you’ve never named it.

A customer buys a plan, logs into WordPress, clicks around for a minute… and then you see the ticket. “Please cancel.” When you check their site, it’s still the default post. Nothing built, nothing launched, nothing connected to a real goal.

Artur Grabowski – Co-Founder of Extendify, the guest Konrad introduced on the show, described it in a way that’s hard to forget: “You go look at this person’s site, and it still says, ‘Hello, world.’ Like, they got stuck on step one.” That’s not a WordPress problem in the abstract. That’s a hosting business problem with very real unit economics attached.

Activation is not a feature, it’s the moment retention is decided

In hosting, we love to talk about infrastructure. Uptime, performance, security layers, dashboards, automation. All important. But the customer doesn’t renew because your stack is elegant. They renew because they got something done.

What Artur keeps coming back to is retention through customer success: get people to a first outcome fast, and the relationship changes. He talks about focusing on “how do we activate customers and retain them,” especially now that acquisition keeps getting more expensive and hosts compete not only with other hosts, but also with proprietary website products like Wix and Squarespace.

There’s a practical hosting angle here that’s easy to miss. WordPress is not a side category. As Artur put it, for many hosting partners WordPress is “70-plus percent of their business.”. So if onboarding is leaky, the leak is in your main revenue engine.

Why users stall right after login

Most new WordPress customers aren’t trying to “learn a CMS.” They’re trying to open a shop, publish a portfolio, get phone calls, book appointments, or just look legitimate online. WordPress can absolutely do that, but the first touch is still intimidating if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

This is where the gap forms. The host sold “a website,” but the user feels like they were handed “a control panel.”

And once that gap opens, support gets dragged into a job it can’t win. Not because the team isn’t good, but because you can’t coach thousands of people individually into becoming confident site builders.

What better onboarding looks like for a host

The fix isn’t to drown people in documentation. It’s to guide them to a visible, meaningful first result.

In the conversation, Artur describes an onboarding flow that starts immediately after a customer enters WordPress: a few steps, some high-level inputs, follow-up questions, then a generated starting site. After that, the user can make changes without getting lost in the admin complexity.

Here’s the key hosting takeaway: the goal isn’t a perfect website. The goal is momentum.

When a customer sees something that resembles their business, in their language, with sensible structure, they stop feeling stuck. They start behaving like someone who owns a site. That shift matters more than any upsell banner you’ll ever place in a panel.

The hidden constraint: support has to be able to support it

Hosts don’t just ship onboarding. They inherit everything that onboarding creates. That’s why I loved one specific line of reasoning from Artur: the stuff created for customers needs to remain plain WordPress, not a strange layer that only one vendor understands. He put it bluntly: “Under the hood, everything Extendify creates is core WordPress… There’s no custom code, there’s no spaghetti code.”

For hosting, that’s not philosophy. That’s operations.

If onboarding produces something your support team can’t inspect, edit, or troubleshoot, you’ve replaced one churn problem with a support cost problem. And worse, you’ve taught customers that they’re dependent on a black box. That’s not a great long-term relationship.

Why this matters more now than it did two years ago

The competitive set for hosting has widened. Customers compare you to products that promise a site quickly, not to products that promise a server.

If your WordPress plan still feels like “here’s a blank install, good luck,” you’re forcing customers to do work before they feel value. Meanwhile, the market is training them to expect value first and learning later.

The most practical reframing is this: onboarding is part of your product, whether you treat it like one or not. It’s either designed, or it’s accidental.

Retention starts at the first click

If you want higher retention, don’t start by tweaking renewal emails or discount ladders. Start where the customer starts. Look at the first ten minutes after purchase. Ask what a non-technical person sees. Ask how quickly they can get to a moment that feels like progress. And ask whether your support team can still help when things get messy.

Because the “Hello, world” site isn’t just an unfinished website. It’s a warning sign that the customer never crossed the line from buyer to user.

This article was created based on the webhosting.today Podcast.

Why WordPress Still Wins? (with Artur Grabowski, Extendify)