Something we are often asked at Peacock Carter is how much a WordPress website will cost. As with any website, costs will vary greatly from project to project and form agency to agency.
In this article, we take a look at where the costs in a WordPress website project might come from, and what you’re likely to receive for certain project budgets.
Where the costs come from for a website project
The cost of a website design project is largely related to how long it will take to plan, design and build the website. This will include:
- Research and planning: your website likely has some goals or targets – to make more sales, or generate more enquiries. This phase looks at your existing website data, and competitors, to ensure what is being built will be suitable for your organisation’s needs.
- Design: the design component in a project isn’t just about making your website look “pretty”: true design encourages users towards a specified goal (such as completing your contact form, or ordering a product), and so incorporates information design as well as visual design for your website.
- Development: once the design is decided upon, the “build” of the website can begin. This typically includes building the visual design of the website as a mobile-friendly WordPress theme, and developing functionality for your website such as secure members areas, online shops, and more.
- Migration: if you’re moving from an old website system (commonly called a called management system, or CMS) to WordPress, existing content – text, images, users, products – may well need moving to WordPress. This process is known as migration, and for large sites only an automated process for this is worth considering to prevent human errors.
- Content: employing a professional copywriter and photographer can make a world of difference to your website, and these are worth budgeting for.
- Marketing / search engine optimisation: if the website being built is revenue or enquiries generating, an important element is ensuring it is working for your organisation in terms of your targets. Digital marketing may be an initial one-off fee for a consultation or website audit, followed by monthly costs for ongoing optimisation and marketing.
- Project management: it takes time to coordinate web designers, developers and marketing experts, so some design agencies will charge a separate cost for project management.
- Training: if you’re migrating your website to WordPress, or even if you’ve used the platform before, a training course for key staff is advisable to help you make the most of your new website.
- Ongoing costs for website hosting, support and maintenance, and license fees. With WordPress, there are no license fees for its use – a great benefit of the WordPress platform! You may need to pay annual, quarterly or monthly license fees for plugins for WordPress for additional functionality, but your agency should explain these costs to you.
Depending on your WordPress project, there may well be more costs involved, but the above is fairly typical for many of the website design and build projects Peacock Carter undertake.
Our guide to WordPress website pricing
Here’s a very rough guide to WordPress website pricing. Prices vary hugely between different web developers and agencies, and countries, too. These costs are provided as a guide only, and are based on U.K. WordPress developers and design agencies.
Free WordPress websites
You can create a free WordPress website by signing up to WordPress.com. These provide limited functionality, but are a good starting point if you’re not too familiar with WordPress, and have a small business idea you want to test. Note that you will have to pay if you want to run this website through a custom domain (e.g. yourwebsite.co.uk, rather than yourwebsite.wordpress.com).
What you might get with a £500 WordPress website
As we’ve said, costs vary hugely from developer to developer, and web design company to web design company, but for a £500 budget WordPress website, you might receive:
- installation and configuration of WordPress
- customisation of a pre-built or off-the-shelf WordPress theme to match your company colours and logo
- perhaps some basic onsite search engine optimisation
Bear in mind that website hosting for your WordPress website will likely be an additional monthly or annual cost.
WordPress website projects with a budget of £1000 – £4999
If you spend a little more, you can expect to receive a markedly better – and more customised – WordPress website for your money. With a budget of £1000 – £4999 or so, you may receive:
- A fully custom-built, mobile-friendly WordPress theme designed to match your existing branding / logo design
- Creation of custom post types to help you better manage your content
- Importing or migration of your content in to WordPress
- Consideration of search engine optimisation in the website’s structure and development
- Perhaps a short training course to help you and relevant team members become familiar with managing the website’s content via WordPress
- Perhaps some additional functionality such as a secure membership area or ecommerce store
£5000 – £20,000+ WordPress websites
Typically, larger budget projects require more customisation and thus more effort from marketers, web designers and web developers, increasing the project’s overall cost. With a larger budget, you may expect the project to include:
- fully custom theme design, with many template variations to provide different layouts for different situations across your website
- significant thought to search engines and how the website will be indexed by them
- migration of a significant quantity, or challenging types, of content in to WordPress
- great customisation of functionality to your organisation’s needs
If you’d like to discuss your next WordPress web design project, get in touch – we’d love to talk to you.