How much does it Cost to Develop a Custom WordPress Website?

WordPress is a CMS platform that is an open source in nature and based on MySQL and PHP. This powerful and flexible CMS can be used to develop website solution for any kind of businesses and today, it covers around 34.6% of the websites which are present on the internet (source). There are a number of reasons why WordPress is today selected by businesses to build websites. Some of them include the use of a large number of plugins and themes, SEO-friendly features, built-in update management systems, etc.

In case if you are planning to develop a fully-customized and fully-functional WordPress website for your business, you need to spend money in these areas for sure:

Here is a list of things you should consider while considering your WordPress Development Cost.

• A domain name
• Web hosting
• Plugins or extensions
• Website design or theme
• Cost of hiring developers
• Other expenses

A domain name

Before going live on the internet, every website needs to have a domain name. Such a name will be all about defining your business in the market, along with your products or services. When choosing the name, you need to carry out some in-depth research so that the name you choose for your website will have a lasting impact on the business.

Domain names come from different people. You can either choose to buy the domain name from the domain name providers in the market like GoDaddy, DreamHost, BlueHost, etc. which is available with them or can buy a brand new domain name for yourself.

How much it will take to register any domain name depends on the registrar, the age of the domain and the keywords or phrases you want to add in there. The price of the domain name can be around some hundreds or millions of dollars. On average, the estimated cost to buy a domain name for your business can go around $10-15 per year.

You need to buy a hosting package once you have purchased your domain name. Once you have done that you will have to have your hosting account installed with WordPress.

To get started, you can follow the instructions which have been provided in there to download and install WordPress. Once the WordPress download has been completed, you can choose a design for your website using the free templates provided in there or can hire professional designers, to get a unique design for your website.

Web hosting

When you plan to develop a website for your business, you will also need to have a server where you can store all the files. On an average WordPress hosting cost can go around $3- $25 per month and this will depend on different services which include customer support, contract period, storage limit, domain name registration, SSL registration and shared or dedicated hosting.

Here is the list of top hosting service providers in the market:

• Bluehost – $2.95/month
• GoDaddy – $6.99/year
• Site5 Hosting – $6.95/month
• Hostinger – $0.80/month
• HostGator Cloud – $2.99/month
• DreamHost – $2.59/month

Designing the website

When you are using WordPress, once you have chosen the right layout for your website, you should go ahead with choosing the right theme. With WordPress, you can easily find a large number of free and paid themes ready to be used. Now, based on your business needs and justifying its identity, you can choose a theme that very well goes with it. The paid versions of the themes are available for a range of $10-300 . On average, it can be said that the WordPress theme costs around $59.
Popular free WordPress themes are:

Popular paid WordPress themes are:

When you plan to build a custom theme for your website, you need to hire a WordPress designer. You need to be sure that you are hiring a highly talented and experienced designer for the job who has worked on similar projects in the past. There are a number of web designing companies who can offer you the service for a reasonable rate without compromising your development package completely.

Use of extensions or plugins

WordPress comes with a good collection of extensions and plugins. You can find here right from free plugins with simple features to the ones with advanced premium features. You will have to make use of these plugins in your WordPress site in order to improve the security and performance of the site.

Some of such paid plugins or extensions which you can make use for the project is:

• Sucuri used to enhance website security. ($0-500 per year)
• Jetpack for improved performance and security. ($39-299 per year)
• A visual builder. ($49-399 per year)
• MonsterInsights used for web analytics. ($0-800 per year)
• Yoast for implementing Search Engine Optimization functionalities. ($0-89 per year)
• WPForms to include web forms in your project. ($39-600 per year)

Just keep in mind that these are a few of extensions or plugins which you can use for your WordPress website. No doubt there are more than 53 K + plugins available on WordPress.org which you can search and go through based on your project needs.

Cost of hiring WordPress developers dedicatedly for your project

It is a fact that you cannot have a great website without hiring great developers. You need to come up with a custom WordPress website if you are planning to offer a unique experience to your website visitors. It is important to concentrate on frontend and backend development when you are developing a custom website.

The area on the website where the visitors get to interact with the buttons, dropdowns, menus, etc. is called as the frontend. The part of the website which makes it function well with the use of databases, servers, applications, etc. is called the backend. So if you are planning to develop a custom WordPress website, you need to hire developers who can seamlessly work across the frontend and backend of the website.

When it comes to hiring developers, basically you have two options. You can either go for an agency or a freelancer. Now when you compare the overall WordPress Development costs, hiring an agency will be expensive compared to going for freelancers. An agency has much going on in the background, and they have a team to look after and are concerned regarding the cash flow – which altogether makes them an expensive choice.

However, it is also a fact that you have meager chances of failing when you choose an agency for your WordPress website development. Again, the project progress will be a bit slower as they will be handling different clients and their projects.

Working with freelancers has its own risks like; you can never know when the developer disappeared during the project. For the same reason, you must adequately assess the developer before hiring his or her services for your business. Again, it has to be said that when you choose a freelancer you will be able to get the project done quickly as they work on a single project at a time.

Development rates: freelancer v/s agency

When it comes to custom WordPress development, the project progresses based on the specific needs of the business clients. Now, this clearly means that different businesses will have different needs to be addressed and so specifications change too. This will alter the price of the project completely. Before you try to get the price for the development, keep one thing in mind that whichever developer you will choose for the project it is important that he or she has proficiency in PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, and CSS.

Based on the type of website you want to get developed for business, the development rate will be decided.

Here are some of the kind of websites you can have developed based on complexity:

Other expenses

Developing a WordPress website is a thing, but you need to carry out timely maintenance of your website if you don’t want to face hacks, slow load times, downtime, etc. The website maintenance involves tasks like ensuring website security, taking a backup of the files, and making the upgrade of the website completely. In order to carry out the maintenance work regularly, you must hire a WordPress developer. Hiring such a developer will cost your business around $50 – $100 per month. Now the cost to hire WordPress Developer may vary depending on the skill level of the developer and time take for upgrading the site, securing or taking backup.

Every business website needs to have some meaningful content and so the next area where you need to spend money in custom WordPress website development is on content creation. You can either write your own content for the website or plan to outsource the work. Outsourcing can save you time but hiring such content writers will charge you on per word basis. Having great content on the website is very important when it comes to engaging them and retaining them. So if you need to have quality content, you should be ready to shell out some money.

It is not possible to give a final rate for developing a custom WordPress website for your business. It depends on a lot of factors like what kind of website you plan to develop, what are your target audience, whether you plan to integrate it with other eCommerce platforms or not, the experience and expertise of developers, etc. Those entire factors combine together to help you know what can be the charge of developing the WordPress site. You can keep the expenses to a minimum and have an ordinary WordPress site developed with simple features. Now if you want to develop a website with exceptional features and with proper optimization, you can use the best of WordPress as well as your budget to get an appealing result in the end. It is all up to you to decide what you prefer to have!