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How Much Does It Really Cost to Build a WordPress Website? How Much Does It Really Cost to Build a WordPress Website?

One of the questions we often get asked is: how much does it cost to build a WordPress website? While the core WordPress software is free, the cost of a WordPress site depends entirely on your budget and goals. In this article, we will break it all down to answer the ultimate question: How much does it really cost to build a WordPress website? We’ll also show you how to avoid overspending and minimize cost when building a website.
How much does it cost to build a WordPress site?

What Do You Need to Build a WordPress Website?

WordPress is free for anyone to download and use. It is an open source software which gives you freedom to install it on any kind of website.
So if WordPress is free, then where is the cost coming from?
The cost of a WordPress site can be broken down into following categories:
  • WordPress hosting
  • Domain Name
  • Design
  • Plugins and Extensions (Apps)
To create a self hosted WordPress site, you need web hosting to store your files. Every website on the internet needs hosting. This is your website’s home on the internet.
Next, you will need a domain name. This will be your website’s address on the internet, and this is what your users will type in the browser to reach your website (example, wpbeginner.com or google.com).
With WordPress, there are tons of free website templates available that you can use. However if you want something more advanced / custom, then you can purchase a premium template or have one custom made which will raise the cost.
There are 40,000+ free plugins for WordPress. These are apps and extensions for your websites. Think features like contact form, gallery, etc.
So while you can build a website with just the hosting and domain cost, based on your situation, you may end up paying for additional tools and services. That’s why it’s often confusing for people to find out the real cost of a WordPress website.
Let us walk you through the real cost of building a WordPress site.

Estimating The Real Cost of Building a WordPress Site

Calculating cost of building a WordPress site
Depending on your needs, your cost to start a WordPress website can range from $100 to $500 to $3000, to even as high as $30,000 or more.
It’s important to know what type of website you are building, and what you’ll need for it because that will directly affect your cost.
But don’t worry, we’ll show you how to avoid a financial disaster and make the best decisions.
For the sake of this article, let’s break down websites into different budget categories:
  • Building a WordPress website (low budget)
  • Building a WordPress website (with more features)
  • Building a WordPress eCommerce website
  • Building a custom WordPress website
Now let’s see how much each of these projects cost and how you can avoid spending any more than necessary.

What’s the Cost of a WordPress Website (Low Budget)?

Building a low budget WordPress site
You can build a fully functional WordPress website for yourself and keep your costs under $100. Here is the cost break down of a WordPress website on low budget.
First, you will need a domain name and web hosting.
A domain name typically costs $14.99 / year, and web hosting normally costs $7.99 / month.
Thankfully, Bluehost, an official WordPress recommended hosting provider, has agreed to offer our users a free domain name and over 60% off on web hosting.


→ Click here to Claim this Exclusive Bluehost offer ←


For more hosting recommendations check out our guide on how to choose the best WordPress hosting.
Next, you will need to install WordPress on your hosting account. See our step by step guide on how to start a WordPress blog for complete instructions.
Once you have installed WordPress, you can choose a design for your website using a free template.
There are thousands of free and professionally designed templates available for WordPress that you can install. See our expert-pick of 43 beautiful free WordPress blog themes for some examples.
Once you have chosen a WordPress template, follow the instructions in our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress theme.
Next, you may want to add certain features to your website like adding a contact form, a photo gallery, a slider, etc. Don’t worry there are more than 40,000 WordPress plugins available that will help you do that.
Plugins are like apps or extensions for your WordPress site. See our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Below is our selection of the essentials WordPress plugins that you should install on your website. All of them are available for free.
Features
Website Optimization
Website Security
There are many more free WordPress plugins to add different features and extend your WordPress site. See our best WordPress plugins category where we have reviewed hundreds of WordPress plugins.
Total Cost of website: $46 – $100 per year

What’s the Cost of a WordPress Site (with More Features)?

Cost of WordPress site with more features
We always recommend our users to start small and then add more features as their website grow. This way you will not be paying for anything that you don’t really need.
As you add more features to your website, your website cost will start to increase.
You can continue to use Bluehost for WordPress hosting to keep the cost low and get a free domain name.
However since you will be adding more features to your website, it may make sense to get a more powerful hosting configuration like SiteGround’s GoGeek plan. This will cost you a little more, but it comes with premium features like staging, faster performance, and can handle up to 100,000 visitors per month.
You can use our SiteGround coupon to get 60% off for the first year of your hosting.
You can also go for a premium WordPress template for your site. Unlike free WordPress templates, these templates come with extra features and priority support. See our expert selection of 40 best responsive WordPress themes for some great premium templates that you can use.
For more website features you need to use a combination of free + paid plugin addons.
Here are some essential premium WordPress plugins and extensions that you’ll need as your site grows:
Features
Marketing
Security
There are many more WordPress plugins and services that you can add. Each paid service or addon that you add will increase the cost of your WordPress site.
Total cost of website: Depending on the premium WordPress plugins and services that you add, it can be anywhere between $500 and $1000 per year.

What’s the Cost of a WordPress Ecommerce Website?

Cost of building a WordPress eCommerce website
WordPress powers millions of eCommerce websites around the world.
The cost of building a WordPress eCommerce website can be significantly higher, but we will show you how to build a WordPress eCommerce website while avoiding potential losses and overspending.
In addition to hosting and domain, your eCommerce site will also need an SSL certificate which costs around $69.99/year. SSL is required to securely transfer customer data such as credit card information, usernames, passwords, etc.
We recommend using Bluehost Ecommerce plan. It gives you a free domain and SSL certificate, plus discount on hosting.
After that, you need to select a WordPress eCommerce plugin.
There are several eCommerce plugins for WordPress, but none comes even close to WooCommerce. It is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin that allows you to build robust online stores to sell your products/services.
Next, you will need to install WordPress and WooCommerce on your website. We have a step by step guide on how to start an online store.
While WooCommerce is free, you will need to use paid addons for additional features. The cost of your website will go up depending on how many addons you need to add on your website.
Once you are up and running, you will need to choose a WooCommerce ready WordPress template for your site. There are several paid and free WordPress templates with full WooCommerce support. Choosing a premium or paid template gives you access to support and extra features.
We have a list of the best free WooCommerce addons, but depending on your needs, you may have to use some paid extensions as well.
Here are some other paid services that you’ll need on your eCommerce website.
Features
  • WPForms – To add customer inquiries and feedback forms
  • Beaver Builder – To create stunning landing pages using a drag and drop page builder
  • Soliloquy – Create beautiful product sliders with their WooCommerce addon
Marketing
  • OptinMonster – Convert visitors into customers with this powerful lead generation tool
  • Constant Contact – powerful email marketing service
  • MonsterInsights – Ecommerce tracking with real time stats using Google Analytics
Security
  • BackupBuddy – Automatic WordPress backups
  • Sucuri – Website firewall and malware scanner
Remember the best way to keep your costs down is by starting small and adding extensions and services as your business grows.
Total cost of building a WordPress eCommerce website: $1000 – $3000. It could be higher depending on how many paid addons and services you add to your site.

What’s the Cost of a Custom WordPress Site?

Cost of a custom WordPress website
A custom WordPress site is when you hire a WordPress developer to create a unique design and build specific features for it.
Usually well established, large to medium sized businesses choose this route.
To support a custom WordPress site, you may also want to go for a managed WordPress hosting provider. This is WordPress centric hosting environment, with managed updates, premium support, strict security, and developer friendly tools.
In addition to your hosting and domain name, you will also be paying the developer that’s building your website.
The cost of a custom website depends on your requirements, budget, and the rates of the developer or agency you hire.
A standard custom WordPress theme alone can cost you upto $5000. More robust WordPress sites with specific custom features can cost up to $15000 or even higher.

How to Avoid Overpaying and Cut Down Spending?

We always recommend our users to start small and then scale their WordPress site as it grows. In many cases you don’t need all the premium features that you see on many well established websites in your industry.
Keep in mind that those websites had a head start, and it likely took them time to figure out how to manage costs and grow their business.
You can start with a budget website using free plugins and template. Once you start getting visitors, you can consider adding premium features like a premium template, email marketing, paid backup plugin, website firewall and so on.
Same goes for your eCommerce website. Start with bare minimum and then as you start selling, you will find out exactly the tools that will help you and your customers.
Look for best WordPress deals and coupons to get additional discounts whenever you can.
Even for robust WordPress sites you don’t always need to hire a developer. We have step by step tutorials on how to create different types of WordPress websites such as:
We hope this article answered your questions about how much does it cost to build a WordPress website. You may also want to see our list of 25 legit ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.
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Expand your reach and create a new stream of income with a dedicated site for building your user base. There are pre-styled MarketPress and WooCommerce page layouts that enabled you to get a shop up and running without any customization, so you can start selling everything from downloadable sheet music to physical copies of your latest album. Interested in Gillie? DETAILSDEMODOWNLOAD Issue This magazine-style design is ideal for taking your print publication to a digital audience. Issue will make it easy for your subscribers to find articles that match their interests thanks to its strong use of typography, image buttons and simple search, giving readers quick access to blog posts and articles. Issue includes space for advertisement strategically placed throughout the site. Run a special, promote a local business and generate additional income. The included contact page provides a simple way for users to get in touch. The big interactive Google map, built-in contact form and stylish social icons are both visually appealing and functional. Interested in Issue? DETAILSDEMODOWNLOAD Make Make is a free open source builder theme that – according to its developers – has been refined over 5,198 times. Okay, that’s a lot of development time, but what makes it special? Its biggest feature is its intuitive Make Layout Engine, which is basically a page builder for WordPress. It’s designed to work like a native component of the WordPress page editor, so if you feel comfortable writing a post, it won’t be much of a learning curve getting used to building pages. You can take care of all customizations using the Theme Customizer in WordPress. Every detail, big or small, is yours to customize, including fonts, line height, spacing, even word spacing. Make is WooCommerce compatible, so if your plan is to build an online shop you won’t have any trouble selling physical products. If you want to sell digital goods, Make is compatible with Easy Digital Downloads. And if you want to add forms to your site, simply drop in Gravity Forms. This theme is also responsive, SEO-friendly and retina-ready. Interested in Make? DETAILSDEMODOWNLOAD Seriously, when did the standard of free themes in the WordPress Theme Directory suddenly get so good? This list is a collection of our favorites. If you have a favorite that we missed, share the link below in the comments! Raelene Morey: View a list of posts by this author. Rae is the managing editor at WPMU DEV. When she’s not picking apart other people’s words or working on websites, she enjoys brunch, biking and bushwalking. Fancy some more reading? READ ARTICLE WORDPRESS DEVELOPMENT FOR INTERMEDIATE USERS: THEME DEVELOPMENT IN DETAIL READ ARTICLE WORDPRESS DEVELOPMENT FOR BEGINNERS: BUILDING THEMES READ ARTICLE 10 HOTTEST WEB DESIGN TRENDS YOU GOTTA KNOW FOR 2017 Or how about trying out our plugins and themes for free? Try (and keep) all WPMU DEV plugins, themes, services and full 24/7 support, free for an entire month - no catch! SPIRIT A professionally crafted, high-end portfolio theme with a fresh, natur LEARN MORE FIXER A flat and vibrant business theme for selling your services and standi LEARN MORE PANINO A friendly one-pager theme inspired by the delicious coffee, tasty foo LEARN MORE LUKE + SARA Let your images speak for themselves with Luke + Sara, a contemporary LEARN MORE 4 Responses Youri Regular Joe: Earn your WPMU DEV membership 51 pts: Hero points 7 pts: Rep. points LEVEL 0 Very useful post but I think you miss one of the best free themes with a pro version; GeneratePress. It’s super fast, clean code and for just $ 39,95 you can use it on unlimited sites with almost customizing every pixel. I use it on 45+ websites now :-) May 15, 2017, 5:19 pmMay 15, 2017, 5:19 pm: Link to comment Log in to Reply Click to visit Google Plus profile Click to visit Twitter profile Raelene Morey Author: Earn your WPMU DEV membership 9 pts: Hero points 644 pts: Rep. points LEVEL 6 Cool, I’ll check it out :) May 16, 2017, 2:36 amMay 16, 2017, 2:36 am: Link to comment Log in to Reply Tony Site Builder, Child of Zeus: Earn your WPMU DEV membership 242 pts: Hero points 233 pts: Rep. points LEVEL 4 I’ve recently had to look through themes for three completely different types of businesses. One site is for a café, another for custom jewelry, another for software. There are themes slightly targeted to these “vertical” applications. (Note the awesome evolution of WP here where blogging is now just a feature, not the primary application.) The more time I spend looking at themes the more I’m able to differentiate them based on immediate suitability for the application, ease of use, customizability without getting into code, and basic functionality. Some free themes are really just a tease for an up-sell. Others are so good that I feel like paying the developer, even for their free theme, just so they don’t lose interest in their work. My approach is to install a theme, spend about 30 minutes in the Customizer, and see what it takes to modify the home page, a single post page, and the various widgets and menus. If it’s not feeling good in 30 minutes then it gets uninstalled. And for me that’s really at the heart of all of this. I no longer look for great themes. I look for themes that serve the immediate purpose adequately. Theme developers get bored. They move on to the next fun project. They don’t want to look back and maintain what they’ve already created. WP changes frequently and developers are looking to create new themes, not to retrofit existing ones. So, as much fun as it is to look for great themes, the reality is that “good enough” is acceptable. We shouldn’t spend too much time looking for “great”, because we’re going to have to do this at least once per year if we’re going to keep a site fresh and functional. There is a never-ending stream of “high quality themes for 2014/15/16/17/+..”. It does help to look for consistent developers who produce a new good theme with each new WP update. In business terms, getting a completely new theme from a new developer is going to cost time=money. Developers come and go so (unfortunately) if you’re doing this for a living it probably makes good sense to align yourself with a single theme publisher where there is more than one developer. This helps to get the consistency of the vendor, not the individual. I’m really sorry WPMU DEV, but I recently spent a lot of time with Upfront/Parrot and was not impressed. This is at least the third time that I’ve given this parent theme an opportunity for a new site. It failed in many ways when editing individual pages, and was frustrating and inadequate to create a common multi-page site. I absolutely will not install Upfront or related child themes for at least another year. Perhaps by then you’ll have worked out the multitude of usability issues and overall inadequacies. Please don’t ask what the problems were. I started to document the issues in my 30 minute re-review but after spending 2+ hours with more note taking about problems than progress on a web page I decided my time needed to be redirected to current efforts rather than doing QA for someone else’s theme. And that’s precisely my point about theme selection and these frequent reviews of current themes. If you spend too much time fighting with a theme, chuck it and go for something else. Our task is to create websites, not to debug other people’s software. There are plenty of themes to choose from. Don’t waste time=money on themes that might look great and have a lot of nice features, but they’re a pain to use. Add that to your criteria for choosing a theme for your next project.

Theme shops have changed the game, lifting the standard of themes you’ll find in the free repository with free versions of their products. And these free versions come complete with features you would have previously only found in premium themes like WooCommerce support and responsive design. Gone are the days when downloading a free theme meant settling for a subpar theme. Now you can – and should – expect a well-coded theme that’s completely customizable using the Theme Customizer. Here’s our list of the some of the best free WordPress themes you’ll find in the WordPress Theme Directory that have been developed by premium theme shops, plus a few released by independent theme developers. Flash Flash is a good-looking multipurpose theme with a minimalist aesthetic – ideal for business and corporate sites. It features multiple pre-built demos, which you can import in seconds using the ThemeGrill Demo Importer plugin. The theme also integrates with the Flash Toolkit ...
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10 Quickie Tips and Tricks To Massively Increase Your Blog Traffic

Blogging is not hard, keeping up is. You can write anything, it’s your blog but when it comes to traffic, the ball moves to your audience’s court. If you want your blog to be flooded with traffic, you need to get into action now. Here are some of the best actionable tips and tricks to drive huge traffic to your blog. If you think writing awesome content alone is important to get readers glued, let me tell you, your content will be called “ awesome ” only when people read it and that is why this post on how to get those people to read your blog is crucial. So read mindfully. When it comes to increasing blog traffic there are millions of creative ways to increase blog traffic . And I am here to show you some sure shot methods to get the ball rolling. At the end of each point, I will point out some awesome actionable tips which will help you double or triple your traffic. 1) Let Alexa bring you traffic: We all bloggers are well aware of Alexa. Alexa ranking is measured...
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30 Best Blogging Tips

30 Best Blogging Tips – Take Your Blog from Zero to Hero Incredible Blogging Tips – Take Your Blog from Zero to Hero You are new to Blogging. Or you already have a blog, but not sure how to make money out of it. Or maybe you are making decent money online but want to take your blog to the next level. I could help you! If you want to take your blog from Zero to Hero, I have some incredible blogging tips for you. All the blogging tips mentioned here come from 7 years of my blogging experience so make sure to read carefully and implement them for best results. I have divided this guide into 3 sections: Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced bloggers. You can read this guide according to your needs. Shall we begin? Beginners Intermediate Advanced Before starting out, think about how to monetize your blog Stand out from the crowd Write in-depth articles Write lots of posts… for others Build some authority It’...
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