The Cost of Building a Professional WordPress Website

There is a lot of mystery around how much building a website with WordPress would actually cost. But it depends mostly on who you ask and what your needs are. Naturally, if you’re looking to build your own social media site or a massive online marketplace, you won’t get off cheap. But if you’re only looking to build a professional looking website for your business and add in a few eCommerce features, you can get away with a couple hundred bucks.

Even though everyone is praising WordPress for being a free open source CMS, it isn’t as free as you think. Sure, you don’t have to pay to install the software. But there are plenty of other expenses such as web hosting, a domain name, a theme, plugins, other eCommerce features and your time to add all this. Furthermore, if you’re not one to tinker too much with a website, than you’ll have to hire a freelancer or a small firm to help you out.

So, the truth is, if you want to launch a WordPress site, you’ll have to have about $300 at hand. Maybe another $300 if you’re looking to add more sophisticated eCommerce features. The price for everything can be more, or less, it depends solely on your choices and needs. To help you get a clearer picture of how much you’ll have to spend and on what, we made this article. We’ll go through everything that you’ll have to pay money for and how you can determine how much you’ll have to pay. So, without further ado, let’s begin!

Price of a Domain Name

The price of a domain name is usually the same for everyone. Given you manage to come up with your own. In that case it costs about $10 – $30. But if you’re looking to buy a domain name that someone else already owns, or one that would be really catchy for a specific industry, prices can reach the sky. It can be anywhere from $100 to $500,000. But most of these come with a lot more authority and maybe a steady stream of organic traffic as well.

But like I said, most of the time you can get it for as cheap as $10 at GoDaddy or NameCheap.

Keep in mind that once you’ve registered your domain name, it will be valid for a year. You’ll have to register it every year and pay the $10 again. In any case, buying your domain name won’t bust your wallet.

Price of Web Hosting

Buying web hosting is like renting your very own space on the internet. Also, its price depends largely on what kind company you buy it from. This is the part of building a website where you should be very careful. You should go with a reputable company by all means. There are three things you should keep in front of you when buying a web hosting service:

• The specific needs of your website.
• The price and reputation of the company.
• The level of customer support they provide.

Some hosting companies promise plenty of bandwidth, hard disk space and other great specifications with their servers. But they turn out to fail miserably when it comes to customer support. You don’t want to wait three days for a company to respond to your query. So try to find a company that checks in both in terms of price and customer support service.

You won’t need more for a simple business website than a shared hosting plan. But if you’re looking to have an eCommerce site or something that demands more server resources, you’ll naturally have to buy a larger hosting plan. The price for basic shared hosting plans range from $2 per month to $10 per month. Some of the best among them is InMottion’s business plans and HostGator’s shared cloud plans. InMotion’s plan costs $6 per month and they offer superb customer support. HostGator’s customer support isn’t as good, but they provide cloud hosting which is super-fast. It’s up to you to choose.

If you need something more extensive, you should go for a VPS (Virtual Private Server) plan, which will give you more server resources. It usually has a cost around $30 – $50 in the first tier. Top-tier VPS hosting plans can have a cost anywhere between $200 and $500 or more.

Also, the amount of traffic you’re looking to build after the launch of your website is also important to keep in mind. The more traffic you’re going to build, the more extensive hosting plan you’ll have to buy. You don’t want your website to slow down after receiving 10,000 visitors.

If You Need an SSL Certificate

Most of the time, you’ll want to opt for some added security, especially if you’re looking to launch an eCommerce website. You can’t see many websites that work without HTTPS these days, which is mostly because visitors ignore any website that doesn’t have a secure layer of encryption. So, if you would like to make your website more trustworthy and established, buy an SSL certificate too. Depending on what hosting plan you use, the price of an SSL certificate can move between $9 and $40. The price varies for every company, so it’s best to look around or go with InMotion. They offer it pretty cheaply with most of their services.

Price of a Website Theme

Once you have your domain name and hosting set up, you have the choice to get a free design or create one yourself. But keep in mind that even more experienced web designers have an easier job with a proper WordPress theme and it will also make your site look a whole lot better.

For example the Avada Theme can help you build just about any kind of website. It costs only $60 to download and use and it will be very much worth it. Even if you don’t have any web design knowledge or a freelancer to help, you can use the Avada theme’s builder. It’s simple to set up and customize and will make for a beautiful professional looking website.

You also have thousands of other themes that you can use; it all depends on what kind of website you’re building. As long as you’re specific about your needs and goals, it will be fairly easy to find. Most other themes cost about $60 as well, so it shouldn’t be too expensive to get yourself a nice design. Yet, there are plenty of exceptions of course, because some themes on Themeforest, cost 13$ and some can cost $100 or even $1000 in the most drastic cases.

Price of Plugins

Now, this is where prices vary the most because they solely depend on what functionality your website requires. Do you need added eCommerce features or just the basic integrations like social media and MailChimp?

Well, luckily you can get a lot of powerful plugins for free, such as Yoast SEO, social media integrations and hundreds of others. But all of them have premium features and a lot of plugins can only be bought. Their prices can move between $10 and $100 per year. The price might get even higher in some cases, especially if you choose to have a developer create your own personal plugins (yes you can do that). It’s not a huge amount of money, but it still isn’t free, so keep that in mind.

Read: Must Have Plugins for Business WordPress Sites

Price of eCommerce Features

Since you’re looking to make some serious money off the eCommerce features of your site, you’re expected to pay a lot of cash up front. Most eCommerce features have a higher cost than other plugins out there. You can expect them to be around $300 to $1000.

WordPress doesn’t have any eCommerce features out of the book, but there are plenty of solutions available. For example you have:

• WooCommerce (Free)
• Easy Digital Downloads (Free)
• Inventory Source ($50 to $175)
• Recurring Payments ($199 per year)
• AffiliateWP ($99 per year)

Your Time

Time is money and you definitely have to factor that in when you’re looking to build a WordPress site. Even consulting everything with a freelancer and monitoring his work will take up some of your time. If you’ve chosen to build your site yourself, than you’ll have to spend way more time on it. So make sure you know how much your time is worth and factor that in accordingly.

So How Much is it In Total?

If you’re looking to build a truly decent WordPress site, the price can be anywhere between $300 and $50,000. As I said, it mostly depends on what kind of features you require and whether it’s and eCommerce site or not. It also depends on how safe you need it to be and how much traffic you are looking to build on it. WordPress is capable of handling traffic, but the amount it has to handle can greatly affect its speed. Your website’s speed has a direct effect on your conversion rates which will be your ROI for building your website. So don’t cut too many corners when you’re building your site and make it as fast and functional as possible. Around $500 should easily get you that.

Conclusion

Some of the most successful websites in the world are powered by WordPress. If they can use it to set their online presence up than you can do it too. You don’t have to be a massive company to make it happen; you only have to have a couple of hundred dollars in your pocket.

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this article and that we helped you learn something new today!