WordPress pricing is not as straightforward as it seems on the surface, though it is touted as a free platform. You may certainly create a free account on WordPress.com, but the service comes with several restrictions that many serious users will quickly find limiting.
Then there’s the well-known WordPress.org software, which is free, open-source, and self-hosted. To be clear: although the software is free to use and download, you must (at the very least) pay to have your website made publicly accessible for it to be seen by others.
Over time, it is virtually probable that you will want to invest in a premium theme, plugins, and even bespoke development or support services as well. The point is that while evaluating WordPress website costs, you cannot only look at the marketing materials used to promote the website.
To help you budget for your self-hosted WordPress website, we’ve broken down the actual costs associated with running a WordPress website in this post.
And because WordPress powers more than 35% of the world’s websites, it makes sense to create a WordPress-powered website for your business. Nonetheless, the issue remains as to how much a WordPress website will cost and which costs you will need to pay for on a one-time or recurring basis.
In this blog post, we’ll tell you how much it truly costs to build a website so you can plan your budget accordingly.
6 Expenses to Keep in Mind When Budgeting
1. Pricing for Domain Names
Your website must have a domain name, regardless of the rest of its features. The domain name is the most fundamental portion of your website’s URL—the part that ends in.com—and as such, it is a required expense.
Unless, of course, you choose a hosting platform that provides a “free” domain registration as part of the package. However, you should use caution while accepting such offers.
They often need you to pay a yearly renewal price that is more than the amount charged by many registrars, such as NameCheap or Google Domains, to maintain your domain name.
Consider using a platform such as WordPress.com or Wix, which provide a gratis URL that looks like yoursitename.wordpress.com or yoursitename.wixsites.com as a starting point for your site. If you’re utilising the website for anything other than a transient online presence, the freebies won’t be of any use to you.
In general, the prices of registering a domain name are inexpensive for almost everyone, which is why we always advocate registering your domain name via a third-party registrar rather than through your hosting provider. You retain complete control in this manner.
2. Pricing for a WordPress Hosting Plan
Good hosting can make or break a website in terms of speed, dependability, and the simplicity with which it can be administered and maintained.
Generally, you get what you pay for. There are two primary options for WordPress hosting: managed hosting (provided by companies like Digital Rescue) and shared hosting from companies that you would purchase your domain name from.
While certain high-traffic and corporate websites may be hosted on a virtual private server (VPS) or in the cloud, the number of websites hosted on managed or shared hosting is far greater.
Managed Hosting Services
If you’re considering managed hosting, this implies that your hosting environment has been optimised for WordPress and is being maintained by WordPress pros. All of the backend, maintenance, and administration tasks will be handled by the service provider, and you will most likely be provided with a dedicated dashboard that is designed specifically for site management rather than site upkeep.
As a result, your servers will be walled off (virtually) from other users, and since you will be operating inside your container, you and your data will not be exposed to malware or other disasters caused by your neighbours.
Additionally, you will not share CPU cycles or bandwidth with anybody other than the websites that you own (if you have multiple).
Hosting on a Shared Server
Shared hosting is the most popular kind of WordPress hosting, mostly because it is much less expensive. When used in this context, “shared” simply implies that several users’ data is housed on the same server and, as a result, you’re sharing the same resources (e.g. CPU cycles and network bandwidth) with everyone else.
That does not necessarily imply that it is a terrible thing. In reality, if you choose the correct hosting service, shared hosting may be extremely beneficial.
The distinction between shared and managed hosting may be so imperceptible that some customers may never notice. Although shared hosting technology has advanced much in the last couple of decades, if your neighbour on the server is using too many resources, your website or websites might still fail.
3. The Cost of a WordPress Theme
The fact that there are so many WordPress themes to pick from is maybe the most compelling reason to use one. Depending on the theme you choose, you may create any kind of website you can imagine.
From a magazine, blog, boutique, portfolio, event registration, picture and video gallery, game demo, or anything else you want done, WordPress surely has a theme that may be up to task with what you aim to create.
However, there is a cost associated with this degree of adaptability. While the WordPress.org theme collection has some very fantastic themes, the majority of them are pretty simple and have limited functionality. Luckily, that is all that is required for some sites and a free theme will suffice in some cases.
For the majority of WordPress users, determining the cost of a premium theme should be high on their priority list. However, the word “premium” may refer to a variety of other things. For example, the flagship theme, Divi, is available as part of a membership plan that can be bought either yearly or for a certain time.
And that’s just for the theme licensing portion of the business. If you want a unique design or development, you will have to make a large additional expenditure on top of the theme licensing fee. Those investments, on the other hand, are usually always worthwhile in the long run.
4. The Cost of Designing and Developing a Theme
Because WordPress is so widely used, there is a common misconception that design and development expenses are on a downward spiral as a result of a “race to the bottom.”
Because there is a large number of WordPress specialists available, they will all compete with one another on pricing to get work for their businesses. This is categorically false.
What it does is to provide many individuals with the opportunity to earn a livelihood while also making their services more inexpensive and accessible since the work is consistent and they are not forced to significantly increase their fees because employment in the industry is scarce.
Yes, there are a large number of WordPress specialists available, which is wonderful news for customers who are trying to employ one. It translates into fewer delays in getting projects up and running, better assistance and direct engagement with the freelancer or agency, and a far greater selection of skills and abilities from which to choose.
5. Hourly vs. Flat-Rate
WordPress pros’ charges will vary and rely on the precise jobs and site development that you want done. However, other elements influence the price, including experience, present workload, the scope of the project, and the skills that are employed.
You may be able to hire someone for less money for a short CSS modification than you would for a PHP template redesign, for example. You should keep in mind that the more particular designs and customisation your task demands, the more you should expect to spend.
Considering eCommerce Costs
You may virtually double any hourly pricing if you need to integrate eCommerce design and development (often WooCommerce or Shopify integration).
A flat charge from both contractors and agencies is more difficult to negotiate since there are so many changing pieces in an eCommerce site that it is difficult to determine the scope of the project.
Because there are so many various linked systems in an eCommerce site, it may be difficult to get everything just right. The right things must be done while safely dealing with people’s money and this requires ability, expertise, and experience to ensure that this will be the case.
Furthermore, customising WooCommerce is not a simple task to do. It’s a terrific piece of software, but it doesn’t always work well with other themes and design applications when it comes to deviating from the default templates and creating something unique. To completely modify WooCommerce, you’ll need to be familiar with PHP templates and how to work with them.
6. WordPress Plugins Cost
The cost of WordPress plugins is one of the more difficult aspects to determine. The reason for this is that each website will need a unique set of plugins to meet its specific requirements.
Although an eCommerce website will need substantially more WooCommerce extensions and addons than a magazine or news website, the latter will require editorial and publishing capabilities to compensate for the resource discrepancy.
That being said, several plugins should be installed on every WordPress-based website. Or, at the very least, a set of plugin types that any plugin should be able to support.
Although not every plugin type is required to be premium, the most strong and successful ones are often those that are. Depending on your site, you may be able to get by with a freebie or freemium plugin (or five) without ever needing to use a premium plugin—or at the very least, with just a limited number of premium plugins.
In the end, you want to see the cost of some of the most important plugins for your WordPress site so you know exactly what you’re getting into before you pay for anything. Because plugins are required for any WordPress website, the ones you choose will be determined by your financial situation, though.
Backup Plugins
Everyone should have a backup plugin installed on their computer. It is UpdraftPlus that is the most often used backup plugin and the free version of this plugin performs well. The premium upgrade provides several convenience features such as free backup storage, support, and all of the available add-ons and extensions. It also includes sophisticated database choices and cloud storage compatibility for a dozen different platforms, among other things.
The free version, on the other hand, offers the same backup and restore features, but the data is stored on your local computer rather than on a remote server. For the vast majority of individuals, the free version is sufficient until you discover that you are at the mercy of some limitations.
Caching Plugins
Given that page speed is such a significant ranking component in search results, it is strongly advised that one gets WP Rocket. It is among the quickest and most comprehensive site caching and performance plugins as many long-time users will claim. Its rating even improves to A/97% just by disabling SGO and enabling WP Rocket and doing nothing else more.
SEO Plugins
An SEO plugin, like the other sorts of plugins mentioned above, is very necessary for any website. Whether or not you use the premium version is entirely up to you.
While there are other choices available, Yoast SEO and Rank Math stand out as being much superior to competitors. They provide both free and paid versions that are completely usable for practically all websites, regardless of how much money you have to spend.
Search engine optimisation and research may be accomplished with the free versions, as can organising your site and assisting in communication with Google and other search engines. You may also use it to double-check that all of your links and URLs are functioning properly.
eCommerce Plugins
When it comes to plugins, here is where the real punch is delivered to your pocket. Ecommerce plugins aren’t exactly inexpensive. Plugins like WooCommerce are free to use, but if you want to extend or personalise what you can do and provide with them, you’ll have to pay for it on an individual basis, as opposed to everything at once.
Miscellaneous Plugins/Integrated Services
And when you’ve installed all of those “necessary” plugins, you’ll want to think about what extra features you’d want your WordPress site to include. The truth is that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corruption.
However, they are some of the most frequent miscellaneous plugins and services that are incorporated into WordPress via plugins and that should be taken into consideration as well as the others. Furthermore, all of these functions may be gotten via free plugins as well, but with somewhat reduced feature sets.
Manpower
You certainly have to take into consideration the human cost of maintaining your WordPress website, which is completely different from anything else.
You may either be scrappy with your website development, relying on volunteer labour and contributions or ad-sharing revenue to survive but you could also decide to have a full-time content team of staff writers.
Whatever your circumstances, you have to appreciate the value that individuals and their time provide to your site overall. It is not insignificant and it may well account for the majority of your expenditures.
You need to consider your own time a resource while you analyse the remainder of related expenses. In true measure, the price you pay for many WordPress features is proportional to the amount of additional time you gain as a result of someone else’s hard work.
A successful WordPress site may be managed by a single individual who just uses free plugins to do it. Alternatively, it may be managed by a team of specialists who will use top-of-the-line premium software to achieve success.
In most cases, it might fall anywhere in the centre of the spectrum. No matter where you fall on the said spectrum, bear in mind that the expense of a WordPress website isn’t restricted within the confines of the computer screen.
Summary
You now have an idea of how much it truly costs to build a WordPress website, regardless of the sort you want to build. Just taking a look at the WordPress pricing, you may realise that it may not suffice in meeting your organisation’s specific needs. If you want to get the most value for the money you’re investing, working with a web design business is your best bet.
Are you still on the fence in search of a Melbourne web design company that can meet all of your requirements? Digital Rescue has acquired more than a decade’s worth of experience in the field and understands which web design trends would be most beneficial to your company. If you want a WordPress website that is SEO-compliant and functional, just give us a call.
