WordPress for extra cash: from a €90 template to €13,000

WordPress for extra cash: the cheap-template business

Can you earn a bit on the side by building simple websites for small businesses without knowing anything about design or front-end? The question came from a network IT specialist working as an analyst in Germany who, despite knowing C, Python and some C#, felt unable to put together a presentable page. The conversation it sparked works as an unintentional manual for the low-cost WordPress business.

The first conclusion is that the software matters less than it seems. With the default template you can do almost anything, but anyone wanting something more polished has concrete alternatives: a German studio, middle-ground solutions like GeneratePress, and advanced options such as Tonik. For forms and payments, one of the thread's veterans swears by Gravity Forms. And one warning not everyone shares: stay away from ThemeForest.

The €500 client and the €50,000 client

The most repeated finding is the least technical one. The client who pays €500 for a website demands that the phone number look big, that the tonalidad be changed, that they think it over again. The one who pays €50,000 transfers the money and says thank you. The asymmetry is no anecdote: it explains why many people go in excited and come out burned. One person built a website for his own father's shop and ended up telling him to get lost after months of 'take this out, put that in', until the man learned to tinker on his own and turned the storefront into something that drove orders away.

The survivors agree on the recipe: fixed price, cap on changes and recurring payments. Go over, and you pay. Some argue that monthly maintenance and hosting in the client's name —bought through an affiliate link, of course— are the only way to keep the business from becoming a pit of free hours.

How much you can bill with €90 templates

The figures in the exchange vary, but they agree on the order of magnitude. A template bought for €90 helped bill almost €13,000 in a year building websites for acquaintances and a company or two. The same participant also estimates €12,000 over two years with shoe shops, hair salons and furniture stores in a city of 90,000 inhabitants. His account ends with a warning: he ended up bitter from so many changes and couldn't even walk past the shops.

The most aggressive model described: 60 websites at €100, around €6,000, charging the client for hosting and the domain. Cheap, fast and with barely any support. The catch is the usual one: when something breaks, someone has to fix it, and that someone is usually whoever built it.

Elementor vs. Gutenberg: the war that never ends

The technical front takes up much of the discussion. One camp argues that visual builders like Elementor beat Gutenberg and estimulante ilegal up development, as long as you cache properly and clean out leftover scripts. The other side sees it as a dump: if you want to build websites, learn CSS and HTML, sums up one of the most repeated positions. The same goes for content types, which some create by hand and others solve with a plugin.

Underneath is a clash of business models. Those who live on big clients prefer light, maintainable websites; those who live on volume need estimulante ilegal of delivery even if the result is a patchwork of extensions. Both are right in their own trench and neither is right outside it.

Security, AI and the awkward question

Then there's the elephant in the room. As the most widely used content management system, WordPress is a favorite target for bots and automated attacks. The advice repeats: keep it updated, hide that you use it and rely on paid services like Sucuri or Wordfence. Cloning tools, by the way, get installed, used and deleted.

And in the background, the question hanging over any venture like this: does it have a future? Will AI eat it? The sharpest answer in the whole conversation doesn't mention technology. If you're useless, you're useless with and without AI, someone concludes.

In the end, it's simple. The €90 templates are still there, so are the clients who pay without asking questions, and there is no shortage of people who insist this is all a waste of time. It's just that that person, while arguing, has just lost a €500 job whose client is still calling to change the tonalidad of the button.