How Much Does it Cost to Build a WordPress Website?

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  • If you’re building a new WordPress website, the first question that likely comes to mind is how much it’s going to cost. 
  • The average WordPress site costs $6,500 and takes 43-hours to develop
    • This data is predicated based on 100’s of sites we’ve built for our clients and our standard hourly rate of $150/hour. 
  • 43% of the world’s websites are built with WordPress [source]
  • When determining how much a WordPress site will cost to build, it’s important to understand the time requirements and the full scope of what’s involved in the project. 
  • If you have more complex requirements or more customization, the scope and costs can increase. 
  • A WordPress development firm should be able to map out the estimated hours. 
  • Most WordPress themes cost between $29 – $99
    • A theme will ultimately save you time and money as the entire site isn’t custom coded. 
  • Competent WordPress development firms will have a project manager, designer and developer on your team. 
    • Without each of these components, you may find a cheaper alternative but lack in quality of the finished product.

Related Blog: The importance of a wireframe for your site build.

What You Get for Your Money

Your Team

  • The project manager will be your main point of communication and manage your project from start to finish. This is the person who will ensure we are meeting deadlines, go over changes with you, and will work with our designer and developer to relay your feedback.
  • The designer will work with you on your brand standards and the vision for the website. They will ensure that the site looks exactly as you want it to, while also giving their two cents from a design perspective. They will put together all mockups for your site, which outline what each page of the site will look like prior to going into development. The whole look and feel of your site will be determined by the designer, so this is an extremely important role within your website project.
  • The developer will take the designs from the mockup and bring this to life on your live site. Any functionality that needs to be added to the site, such as a member login portal, a checkout process, etc. will be built by the developer. 

Unlimited Changes

  • A really important question that you should ask when you’re interviewing web development companies is whether or not you have unlimited changes to your site prior to going live. 
  • You want to make sure that when your site launches it is 100% to your liking and that you’re not restricted when it comes to the number of changes you can make. 
  • The reason we structure our pricing based on hours is so our clients never feel that they are being restricted when it comes to the changes they can make. 
    • We want our clients to be 100% satisfied with their site upon completion. This is your baby and we want you to be so proud that you’re showing your site off to everyone you know.
    • If you have a $5,500 site, you’ll get about 35 hours of time. If you add additional functionality than what we originally discussed or you want to go back and forth 10 times trying new colors and fonts, you are more than welcome to do so. If we go over our initial 35 hours of time, we will send you a package for additional time.

What You Get For a $5,500 WordPress Site 

  • 10-15 page site 
  • 35-hours of time 
  • Less than 3-hours of customization support 
  • URL Structure, Wireframe, mock-ups, mobile optimization, light SEO. 
  • Verbiage already provided by the client or the client responsible for this. 
  • Bi-Weekly Meetings 

Example of $5,500 Website: 

  • The example below is for a client called Mojo Simple. They sell different sauces for Mexican cuisine. 
  • This client has about 8-10 different pages on their site. Since they only have two products, this site was on the easier side to build.
  • They do have eCommerce functionality on their site, meaning that we had to build a cart page and a checkout page on their site, so this does increase complexity slightly. 

What You Get For a $15,000 WordPress Site 

  • 30-50 page website 
  • 100-hours of time 
  • Approximately 20-hours of customization 
  • While some verbiage is provided by the client, project manager would work with you to help gather content. 
  • Weekly meetings with your project manager 

Example of a $15,000 Website

  • The example below is for a client of ours called THE Foundation. This is the non-profit NIL Collective for The Ohio State University.
  • This website has approximately 20-pages but there was a lot of customization required so this was a more complex project. 
  • Based just on the number of pages alone, this would have been closer to a 50 hour project, however, because they had a lot of requirements surrounding their donations, the project ended up taking us around 100 hours to complete.
    • They wanted to offer both one-time and recurring donations.
    • They have certain packages for anyone who donates $75 on a recurring bases, where these donors are sent a monthly gift.

What You Get For a $25,000+ WordPress Site 

  • 100+ page website 
  • 165-hours of time 
  • Approximately 30-hours of customization 
  • While some verbiage is provided by the client, project manager would work with you to help gather content. 
  • Weekly meetings with your project manager 

Example of $25,000 Website 

  • For our agency, The Media Captain, we redid our website. We have over 200 pages, consisting primarily of service pages and blogs. 
  • We reformatted all of the blog posts and created new graphics for each blog post. 
  • We also redesigned the homepage and all service specific pages 
    • One of the main reasons for rebuilding our site was to enhance the blog to take our agency from having a strong local presence to more of a national one. 
      • For many sites with a large blog, the route they take is importing the entire blog as is, which saves time. 
  • For our website, we also have a lot of backend forms for new clients and team members, which had to be carried over. 
  • While there wasn’t much customization on this site, the project required three project managers, three designers and three developers. 

In Closing

  • Keep in mind, different agencies charge different hourly rates and have different pricing structures. 
  • If you are seeking a website under $5,000, there are plenty of solo shop operators that do a great job, specifically on UpWork. 
  • When thinking about your website, hopefully this article helped you better understand what pricing structure you would fall underneath. 
  • WordPress allows you to use themes and plugins, which ultimately saves you time. 
  • When thinking about the long term future of your site, the fact that so many developers are familiar with WordPress is a benefit when thinking of any transition. 

If you would like a website design quote, you can contact The Media Captain

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