How Much Can a Compelling WordPress Website Cost you?

What can a product built on a free platform can actually cost you? Well, quite a lot if you are not careful. WordPress is a free platform with close to 60,000 free plug-ins. Considering the average hourly rates of developers, your average website could cost you around $500  to $700 in total. The price that you end up paying to get your website made on it depends on what your developers do with it.

Apart from the obvious costs of skills of developers, there are some costs that are less factored like the cost of plug-ins or themes used if they are chosen from the paid ones, the annual cost of hosting and domain name & costs of updates and maintenance. These are the types of costs that can vary by a great margin depending upon what kind of website and subsequent services you choose. 

Why WordPress?

The popularity of WordPress and an elite clientele speaks volumes of the quality that the platform has. The fact that some of the most popular websites in the world like PlayStation, Time, Disney, BBC, and The White House use WordPress should be enough for anyone to opt for wordpress development service. Here are some core reasons why WordPress remains ever so popular for everyone even after almost a couple of decades of its launch.

Free For All

One of the biggest benefits of using WordPress is that it is free for all to use. All of its core functionalities are open source & the founders converted the company into a non-profit organization in 2010. 

Large Community Support

The rising popularity of WordPress generated a ripple effect across and organically resulted in a large community of developers using the platform. Due to a large user base, WordPress today has millions of community members and support forums that help budding developers address their concerns within minutes.

Easy To Manage

WordPress is one of the easiest platforms to use. It has had a trajectory of 19 years of user feedback which has made it simpler to use over the years. Posting & managing content on your WordPress website is a matter of just a few clicks or taps. It has a dedicated mobile app that allows website owners to access the core backend features on the go.

SEO Friendly

WordPress for years has had a disciplined system to post content on your website. Features like title and meta description to better organize content have been there at WordPress for years. WordPress was the pioneer in introducing features like image description which further enhanced the SEO friendly nature of the websites. Apart from its own capabilities to optimize your content, WordPress also has a number of plug-ins dedicated to SEO that help you rank higher. 

Easy to Update

Updating a website’s backend on WordPress is as simple as updating an app on your mobile. All it takes is one click to update your website. You probably won’t even need a click if you have auto-update on. This makes your website more secure than ever with WordPress working continuously to improve the security of its codes and libraries with their regular updates. 

Safe Transactions

WordPress acquired the most used eCommerce tool WooCommerce back in 2015 and thus introduced a medium of their own to perform safe and secure transactions. WooCommerce holds more than 36% of the total market share of eCommerce platforms used worldwide. WordPress’s ownership ensures safety and support to all your transactional queries.

Now that we know a few of the most popular reasons behind WordPress’s unmatched success, let us consider some factors that define WordPress website development cost. As mentioned earlier, there are two kinds of costs that you need to factor.

Factors Affecting cost of WordPress website

Every process has some hidden aspects that define the overall cost. Building a website can sometimes get overwhelming especially if you have a short hand at technology. Right from choosing the right platform to deciding how many add-ons you need, everything can affect your overall cost. While you fairly consider WordPress website design prices in the beginning, what you would not expect is the cost to actually keep your website running and that too while attracting maximum traffic on it. With a proper understanding of the standard project lifecycle, we can narrow down the costs in two different parts.

Tangible factors

Development Cost

Development costs are the costs that you have to pay to the development agency or developers directly. These costs could be on project basis or sometimes on hourly basis. The hourly rates of a standard WordPress developer could be anywhere around $15-25.

Hosting Costs

Hosting costs are the costs that you pay to servers that host your website. It is like an amount that you pay every month or yearly to rent a place. Hosting costs can be somewhere around $25 to $500 a month depending upon how big your website actually is. 

Domain Name Costs

There are domain hosts that help you book and manage a domain name that identifies your website. These hosts use DNS (Domain Name System) to connect your domain name with email address, websites and other web services. You have to pay a certain fee to them as well to continue using that domain name. Domains can cost you somewhere around $12 to $30 a year depending upon the exclusivity and extension you choose. 

Intangible Factors

After a thorough conversation with professionals, you change your question from how much does it cost to build a WordPress website to what factors affect my costing? Here are some intangible factors that influence your overall cost.

Themes & Plug-ins Used

Though WordPress has a large number of free themes and plug-ins, you may end up liking a theme that costs something. Similarly, for most common features on your website, there are plug-ins and most of them are free. You may however require a certain plug-in that comes at a cost. An average cost for the WordPress theme is somewhere around $55 and you could do with a couple of paid plug-ins, both averaging a cost of somewhere around $60 (as per theme plug-in).

Maintenance 

This is the cost you bear to keep your website well maintained. Standard maintenance practices include managing the loading speed of the website, focusing on security, updating the libraries & maintaining compatibility across various screen sizes. Experienced agencies charge from $50 a month to $200 a month depending upon how big the website is. 

Content

Content is the single most important thing that drives traffic on your website. Without regular content posting, your website will just be a piece of furniture out there. Good content writers cost around $25 per post and you are going to need at least 10 posts a month to attract traffic on your website. 

APIs

APIs are third party interfaces in your website that make certain features feel authentic. For instance, for navigation, you can use Google Maps API. These APIs come at a fixed cost. It’s practically impossible to measure costs of popular APIs as they charge per session. For instance, Google Maps charges $0.017 per session. It is a cost worth considering when you develop a website. 

Subscription

Apart from all this, WordPress could charge for certain premium features that you don’t get with the standard free version. WordPress offers features like unlimited plug-ins and premium expert support for a certain subscription fee.

Based on these numbers, you can work out a ballpark figure for yourself. Of course the clear costing only comes after you finalize your needs and document the project. But in general, next time if you wonder how much does WordPress website cost, you can consider a standard WordPress website to cost you approximately $1000 in the first year and then on, somewhere around $5,000 a year.

Conclusion

The ideal way to figure out an accurate cost for a WordPress project is to document the needs and finalize an agency. Every use needs are different. Some enterprise or eCommerce websites could cost in the higher region of $20,000 while some basic blogging websites may not exceed the $10,000 mark. A deeper understanding of WordPress web development guide explains to us that with the wealth of integrations, plug-ins, themes and a community support like no other, it is a no brainer to choose WordPress as your platform for your website. As far as the costing is concerned, you must get in touch with experts now to get a clearer idea.

Nandan Goda

My name is Nandan, the Owner at Gtech Web Infotech Pvt. Ltd.. I’m also a designer and developer. I’ve been working in the web development field for last 12+ years. Developing and implementing small to large-scale projects and everything in between. Currently working on a lot of CMS, dev-tooling projects. Furthermore focusing on combining Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with emerging technologies.