What a WordPress website really costs

The lines nobody quotes you

A quote for a WordPress site usually covers design and build. What it rarely covers is the running cost, and the running cost is where small businesses get surprised in year two.

Hosting

$60 to $600 a year. Budget shared hosting starts near $3 a month and is cheap for a reason; managed WordPress hosting is $30 to $100 a month, and a slow site costs you more than the difference.

The domain

$12 to $40 a year, depending on the ending. Check who it is registered to, not just who bills you for it.

A premium theme

$50 to $100, often once, sometimes annually for updates and support.

A page builder licence

$59 to $99 a year for one site, more for several. This is the line that most often renews quietly.

Plugins

Forms, backups, security, SEO. Free tiers exist; the versions you end up wanting run $100 to $400 a year in total.

An SSL certificate

Should be free, and is on any decent host. If you are being billed for one, ask why.

Maintenance

$50 to $200 a month for somebody to apply updates and fix what they break. Or your own Sunday.

Changes

$75 to $150 an hour after launch in the United States, $50 to $120 in Canada, unless you can edit it yourself.

Three routes, year one and year three

Assume a small one page or five page site for a local business, and no shop.

• Do it yourself: roughly $300 in year one and $900 by year three, plus somewhere between twenty and sixty hours of your own time, and a site that looks like it took twenty hours.
• Freelancer or agency: $2,000 to $8,000 in year one, and $3,000 to $12,000 by year three once hosting, maintenance and a few changes are counted.
• Here: $199 plus $15 a month plus the address from $35 a year. Editing is included because you do it yourself in plain language, and there is no hourly rate for changing a phone number.

Where the money actually goes in an agency quote

It is worth understanding, because it explains when the quote is worth paying. Most of an agency's cost is human time billed at $75 to $150 an hour, and most of that time is not design. It is meetings, chasing you for content, revisions, project management and the risk margin for a project that runs long.

When you need bespoke work, that process is exactly what you are buying and it is good value. When you need a one page site that says what you do and how to reach you, you are paying several thousand dollars for a process, most of which is waiting.

What you actually end up owning

Most ways of getting a website end with you renting one. Cancel a builder subscription and the pages stop existing; there is nothing to take with you because there was never a file. That is the trade you make for the monthly price, and plenty of people make it knowingly.

This is not that. What gets built for you is a WordPress theme: a real folder of files, with its own style.css, index.php and functions.php, that installs through Appearance, Themes, Add New, Upload Theme on any WordPress host in the world. We host it for you at $15 a month so you never have to think about it, and the web address is registered in your name, not ours.

If you ever want to leave, ask for a copy and it is yours: the theme file, the address, the content. You can hand it to any developer and they will recognise exactly what they are looking at, because it is an ordinary WordPress theme and not a proprietary export nobody else can open.