How Much Does a WordPress Website Cost?

How much does a WordPress website cost? Every business should have its own website, but there are a number of ways this goal can be achieved. WordPress is one of the best, most versatile and user-friendly platforms to use for your website. According to the most recent usage stats published by W3Techs in December 2017, WordPress accounts for almost 1/3 of all websites on the internet – that’s over 100 million websites running WordPress as their CMS. Of course one of the key questions many people ask is ‘how much does a WordPress website cost?’

What is WordPress?

Before discussing WordPress website cost in more detail, it’s important to know what WordPress is. Put simply it is a tool that allows you to create a website or blog, providing a complete content management system (CMS) as well. Its open source nature means anyone can access the basic source code and use it to create and develop various themes and plugins to further enhance the WordPress experience. Some of these themes and plugins are free while others require a payment to access. You can also pay a WordPress website cost for a site created from the ground up, creating one that is unique to your business.

A rough guide to costing a WordPress website

There are several ways to get a WordPress website at a lower cost. You can opt for a free site hosted by WordPress but this is best reserved only for casual bloggers. Your own dedicated domain name and hosting is always the preferred solution as you have total control over your site and its content.

An off the shelf WordPress template can have a lower website cost. It may cost as little as a couple of hundred pounds. However it doesn’t always look professional. You may also be limited in what you can do with a single theme. This would require you to adjust the look of your website to fit in with the theme, instead of achieving the exact site you want.

A realistic rough guide would be between £1,000 and £5,000 for a small business’s WordPress website cost. The exact figure would depend on the quality required, the amount of content and the number of pages required and the depth of functionality. The more complex the WordPress website is, the more likely the cost will increase. A larger business would expect to pay a minimum of £5,000 for their WordPress website cost and often much more.

The importance of paying for quality

The true test of any WordPress site is whether or not it is capable of attracting the desired audience. It must be professional and a unique theme that is designed with the needs of the business in mind will go much further in achieving that aim. It is tempting to opt for the cheapest solution for your WordPress website cost but it rarely equates to outstanding quality. Investing more in your website upfront is likely to generate far better result – and monetary returns – further down the line. It will also get rid of any danger of other websites cropping up that use the same theme you have chosen for your site.

It is possible for an individual to create a WordPress website for a low cost. This may be someone within the business with some experience of creating websites or an individual hired for that specific purpose. However, the results will not be as reliable nor as professional as those delivered by an agency. Agencies have extensive experience of creating websites of all shapes, sizes and demands with WordPress. They can take your goals and translate them into a website that works on every conceivable level. Thus it makes sense to allocate a budget for the creation of a professional WordPress website that meets all your demands and also the continuing expectations of your customers.

A user-friendly content management system

One of the most appealing aspects of WordPress is how straight forward it is to use. The content management system makes light work of adding new pages and content (posts) once your site is live. It is also easy to add images and other media, enabling easy and fast updating of your site whenever the need arises. Another advantage of using an agency is that you have someone to go back to if you should experience any issues with your site.

You also have the ability to add various plugins to give your site more functionality. At the time of writing there are more than 30,000 different plugins to choose from that fall into various categories. You can install plugins that make your site more secure, automatically update your social media sites whenever you publish new content, and even provide Google Analytics content on the dashboard of your WordPress site when you log in.

As you can see when we are discussing how much a WordPress website may cost, we should really focus on how much you should invest in a site rather than speaking of cost. A good investment will always bring better rewards.