Hostinger Takes Website Building to New Heights With AI Assistant and Affiliate Plugin and Theme

TL; DR: 2024 has been an eventful year, and the Hostinger team can attest to this. Hostinger rolled out a series of product releases that would meet demand in the spheres of affiliate marketing and AI assistance. Joining its product lineup this year were an Amazon Affiliate plugin and theme for WordPress and what may be its biggest launch yet — an AI companion named Kodee. In this article, I’ll explore these launches and what they mean for the Hostinger platform.

In life, roadblocks can appear out of the blue. In those moments, you can either take a detour or let the obstacle in your path impede your journey.

Sometimes, though, we get lucky and find a shortcut. I remember I needed a shortcut when building my first real website. In my naiveté, I thought the experience of creating a WordPress site would be just like those Weebly sites I created in computer classes in junior high.

But it turned out designing and publishing a fully equipped website was a whole other beast. This website was a crucial piece in my job/internship hunting season. I found it was taking me longer than I expected to build.

Luckily, I learned about a little thing called plugins and how they can speed up the website-building journey. Plugins allowed me to add functionality to my website without trekking through lines of code and helped me complete my site much faster.

If your situation is anything like mine, and you’re not relying on a website builder to create your site, you may find plugins just as helpful.

As it happens, the popular budget host Hostinger had a few huge releases this year that included a WordPress plugin and theme. Hostinger’s mission as a web hosting company is to help users easily launch websites. And these two newly released features do just that.

The team also launched an AI companion to assist customers along their hosting and website journey. Below, I’ll dive deeper into these releases and how they can help you simplify your website building. Stay tuned for more.

When creating a site, we all have an end goal in mind. It might be to market yourself, boost sales for a brick-and-mortar store, or set up bookings for your day spa. No matter what you choose, your website will be the most effective if it reflects your brand.

Hostinger allows you to personalize your websites and blogs with themes and plugins. As I mentioned above, its latest theme release focuses on affiliate marketing. That is because the team seeks to meet the growing demand for this type of marketing.

Most of us who have a web presence seek to monetize it in some way. One of the most popular ways to do so is through affiliate marketing. According to Hostinger, the affiliate marketing industry is currently valued at $15.7 billion and is expected to grow at an 8% to 10% annual rate.

That’s some big figures. It’s no surprise that users are rushing to create affiliate partnerships.

Luckily, Hostinger gives you the tools not only to set up your affiliate links but also an entire affiliate marketing website. Its custom-built theme enables you to launch your affiliate site faster with templates and content designed to help you rank higher and drive more organic traffic. The theme also has a built-in integration with Amazon marketplace.

As for the plugin, it allows you to transport your Amazon marketplace to your site like magic. No more switching tabs between your WordPress dashboard and Amazon to pull products.

The plugin connects Amazon to the WordPress block editor using the Amazon Product Advertising API. From the block editor, you can simply search for affiliate products and add them directly to your web pages.

The plugin also helps you add affiliate links in various display formats. Both of the tools together pack a double punch to give you enough power to kick-start your affiliate journey.

Instructions for Implementing the Plugin and Theme

Websites have made life easier for all of us, from sourcing information for our research papers to placing our shopping experiences at our fingertips. But creating a website requires much more effort than pulling up a browser and searching for the best bicycle repair shop in town.

Thankfully, Hostinger’s plugin and theme has made building an affiliate marketing site that much easier. I’ll share with you the steps for setting up the Amazon affiliate plugin below.

Amazon Affiliate Plugin steps:

1. First, log into Hostinger’s control panel, hPanel.
2. Navigate to your hPanel’s WordPress Overview page from the sidebar.
3. Install the plugin from the Suggested plugins section.
4. Once installed, connect your Amazon account by inserting the API code inside the Amazon Product Advertising dashboard. You get the API code from Amazon after joining its Amazon Associates program.
5. Next, create the post or content you want to link your Amazon products to.
6. Search for the Link to Amazon Products block in the WordPress editor, find the products you want to link, and add them to your post.
7. Publish your post and start earning commissions — simple as that.

The Amazon affiliate theme offers three templates for presenting your affiliate products on your site. You can choose from a single product card, multiple products list, or a comparison table for a side-by-side review of similar products.

There are a couple things to note about the theme and plugin. The Amazon plugin is only available to WordPress users who select the Affiliate Marketing or Blog website type. Both the plugin and theme are free with Hostinger’s managed WordPress Business and higher-tier hosting plans.

Did you know the name Cody means “helpful person” in multiple languages? Well, neither did I. The Hostinger team did, however.

Hostinger put a lot of thought into creating its AI companion, even down to its name selection. Kodee, a composition of code and Cody, symbolizes the AI assistant’s role — to provide guidance to users in all aspects of their online endeavors — in the Hostinger journey.

The Hostinger team launched Kodee in mid September 2024, announcing it as its biggest product release of the year. And we can see why.

Kodee can help you with everything and has the answers to all your questions, even down to what pair of shoes you should choose for your night out (OK, maybe not that). Kodee is ready to help with a wide range of queries, starting from the beginning of the hosting journey.

You can ask Kodee about domain transfers, hosting plan options, editing websites, navigating the hPanel, and server administration, among other topics. Since its beta-testing phase, the average percentage of fully answered queries has more than doubled from 20% to 50%.

Today, Kodee fully resolves about 5,500 customer inquiries via live chat support on a daily basis, with an average response time of 20 seconds. It can also communicate in more than 50 languages.

Users can find Kodee throughout the Hostinger platform, including in the hPanel, the website builder, the WordPress admin dashboard, VPS hosting dashboard, and the Hostinger website.

How Hostinger Built Kodee

The Hostinger team has a lot of plans and aspirations for Kodee. It’s not done building out the unique AI companion, as it seeks to elevate its functionality. At the moment, Kodee primarily answers queries, but soon enough, it will help users solve all kinds of problems and even complete website tasks for them.

Hostinger shared some insight into its backstory with AI to shed light on how it will continue to upgrade the assistant as time goes on. At first, it leveraged Rasa, an open-source conversational AI software, to create the foundation of its prototype.

Finding holes in the Rasa framework encouraged the team to add a large language model and bolster Kodee’s response process. If Rasa couldn’t answer a question, the LLM would step in.

After a round of testing, the Hostinger team decided to remove Rasa and go ahead with a LLM-only solution. The team did so because it needed a solution that could address the depth and complexity of its operations and customer interactions. Rasa was better for more deterministic conversational flows.

Hostinger’s journey shows that the team is willing to overcome challenges and mistakes and go another route to create a better solution for its users. The team prioritizes testing and ensures users receive the best product, whether that extends the effort and timeline on its part.

Hostinger has had an eventful year. It released an Amazon affiliate plugin and theme and a fully trained and tested AI companion. Although we’re racing toward the end of 2024, the year isn’t yet done, and neither is Hostinger.

The Hostinger team recently released an AI website builder for WordPress. In one minute, you can have a complete WordPress site built from a single prompt, which you can also edit to your liking. The tool is currently free with the Business web hosting plan and all cloud hosting plans.

The site builder joins Kodee and Hostinger’s other WordPress AI tools in streamlining the website journey for the WordPress community — the largest CMS platform in the world.