Web Hosting for Copywriters

Short answer: a copywriter’s site is the lightest thing on this blog to host. It is text. That means there is no excuse for it being slow, and the only two things that genuinely matter are fast hosting with proper caching, and email that actually arrives, because almost all your work comes and goes by email.

Looking for plans rather than guidance? Our web hosting plans start at £39 a year and renew at £39, with email on your own domain included.

A slow copywriter’s website has no excuse

Every other business on this blog can blame photography. You cannot. If your site takes five seconds to load, it is because of the theme, the page builder or the lack of caching, and a prospective client who notices will draw conclusions about your judgement.

What actually causes it:

• A heavy multipurpose theme loading a large framework, sliders and icon libraries to render six pages of prose
• A visual page builder, which adds considerable overhead for a site that is essentially paragraphs
• No caching, so pages that never change are rebuilt for every visitor
• Web fonts, often four or five weights loaded when two would do
• Embedded social feeds and tracking scripts added over time and never removed

Strip those and a text site should load almost instantly on a decent plan. Our plain English guide to Core Web Vitals covers how this is measured.

Email is your business, so treat it as infrastructure

Briefs arrive by email. Drafts go out by email. Invoices go out by email. A deliverability problem is not an inconvenience, it is unbilled work and a client who thinks you ignored them.

Two things to get right.

Use your own domain. An address at yourname.co.uk rather than a Gmail account matters when you are invoicing marketing directors and quoting four-figure fees. It also means you keep the address if you change provider. Our email hosting plans include unlimited mailboxes with 10GB each, so separate addresses for enquiries and invoicing cost nothing extra.

Set up authentication. SPF, DKIM and DMARC records stop your legitimate email being filtered and stop anyone spoofing your domain. It is a ten-minute job that prevents a recurring and invisible problem. Our guide to SPF, DKIM and DMARC explains the records.

If you are weighing options, our comparison of business email hosting against Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 covers the cost difference for a sole trader.

Your contact form will fail silently unless you configure it

The single most expensive fault a freelance site can have. The form submits, the visitor sees a thank-you, the email never arrives, and you never know a brief came in.

WordPress sends mail through PHP by default, which is frequently filtered. Send it through authenticated SMTP instead, deliver to an address you check daily, and test it yourself monthly from a different device. Our guide to contact forms not sending emails covers the causes.

Consider whether you need WordPress at all

A copywriter’s site is a handful of pages, some case studies and a contact form. That is the textbook case for a static site: no database, nothing to update, nothing to hack, and it loads faster than anything WordPress can manage.

The trade-off is that publishing requires a build step rather than a browser login, which suits some people and not others. If you post regularly and want to write in a browser, WordPress is the sensible choice. If you update three times a year, a static site is less work and faster.

Our guide to static website hosting covers what is involved and how it is hosted.

File handling, if clients send you material

If you invite people to attach a brief or a document to your enquiry form, check your upload limit. A default WordPress install often caps uploads well below the size of a brand guidelines PDF, which turns into an email from a confused client.

Consider whether you want client files landing on your web server at all. For anything confidential, a link to a proper file service is safer than an upload sitting in your WordPress media library. Free SSL is necessary either way, and any decent plan includes it.

Backups matter for a reason people overlook

Your site is rebuildable, so backups are not about catastrophe. They are about the ordinary case: a plugin update breaks the layout on a Friday afternoon, or you delete the wrong page while tidying. Daily backups retained for a fortnight turn that into a five-minute restore.

The bigger continuity risk is the domain. Register it yourself, set auto-renew, and keep the registrar contact email on an address you will still control in five years. Our guide to what happens when a domain expires explains why that matters, and our complete guide to UK domain names covers registration and transfers.

What plan you actually need

Entry-level shared hosting, and there is genuinely no reason to pay more. SSD storage, a CDN, free SSL, daily backups, and email on your own domain. Around £39 a year.

The figure to check is the renewal rather than the first year. A plan at £2.99 a month renewing near £9 costs over £100 a year from year two, which for a site this light is money spent on nothing. Our guide to cheap web hosting in the UK covers what should be included as standard.

If you also host client sites, or run a separate site for a side project or newsletter, our multi-site plans handle several from one account.

Frequently asked questions

What hosting does a copywriter need?

Entry-level shared hosting with caching. Text sites are the lightest thing you can host, so the requirement is minimal and the standard for speed is correspondingly high.

Should I use WordPress or a static site?

WordPress if you publish often and want to write in a browser. A static site if you update rarely, since it is faster, cheaper to run and has nothing to maintain.

Why do my client emails go to spam?

Usually missing or incorrect SPF, DKIM and DMARC records on your domain. Setting those up correctly resolves most cases.

Do I need email hosting as well as web hosting?

You need an address on your own domain, and it is usually included with hosting. Whether you pay separately depends on the provider; our plans include unlimited mailboxes rather than charging per user.

Can clients upload briefs to my website?

They can, but check your upload limit and think about whether confidential material should sit on your web server. A link to a file service is often the better answer.

Explore more

Our guide to web hosting for professional services covers the requirements shared across independent professionals, and our guide to static website hosting is worth a look if you want the fastest, lowest-maintenance option.

Our hosting plans start at £39 a year and renew at £39, with a free trial if you want to test the speed yourself first.