WordPress Pricing: It’s Free!
The WordPress pricing is simple. It’s free! There are no limits to the number of pages or blog posts or users you can have. (Keep in mind, we’re not talking about the WordPress.com pricing.)
However, you will still have costs associated with your WordPress website, including:
- Website hosting
- Domain registration
- Premium plugins and themes
- Web design / development
- Website maintenance / support
You’ll need to pay for website hosting. Costs for that can vary, but a typical marketing website will have hosting costs of around $15-30 per month.
We recommend Flywheel because of their great technical support and security and Bluehost because they are really affordable. Both of these hosts have a free SSL certificate, which is great for search engine optimization and security!
Read What is Web Hosting and Why Do You Need It?
Domain Registration
You need to buy a domain in order to have a web address to send people to your website on the internet. Your domain may look something like yourbusinessname.com or yourbusinessname.net. A domain typically costs on average $16/year. However if you want a domain with very few characters (or one that someone else is already using), you may pay much more for it. Those are called premium domains. For example, our domain is bizzybizzycreative.com. Bizzybizzy.com was actually available at the time, but it cost $4,000 so we didn’t get it!
If a domain is available (congratulations!), you can usually buy it from any domain registrar. There are hundreds of domain registrars on the internet, and the pricing will be comparable at all of them. We typically recommend that you use an independent domain registrar like namecheap.com because you can point your domain to any website hosting platform on the internet and they offer free domain privacy, which means they won’t publish your contact information.
We always recommend that you purchase your domain with your own credit card or billing information (rather than having your web designer buy it), so you can have total control over it. You might not realize it now, but your website domain is a very valuable business asset, and having to change domains later is — at the very least — a royal pain and — at worst — can cost your business thousands of dollars in rebranding and lost search engine ranking.
Premium Plugins and Themes
We’ve already discussed how premium plugins and themes can help add features and functionality to your website that you need as well as save you or your web developer time. When you buy a premium plugin or theme, be careful to pay attention to the licensing agreement. Many premium plugins will have an annual license fee. So if it looks like you are paying $149 for it, you may actually be paying $149/year for it. Big difference.
Premium themes often have a one-time cost, but if you want to have continued support or set-up help, you may need to renew the licence.
It goes without saying, keep track of all these expenses carefully. Make sure your billing and contact information is always up to date, and then make sure to cancel any recurring billing later if you stop using one of them.
Web Design and Development
If you decide to build your website yourself, we highly recommend taking a WordPress class instead of just diving in. WordPress can be overwhelming to newcomers, and you’ll spend hours spinning your wheels if you don’t know the correct terminology on what to Google. If you hire a web designer or agency to build your website, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and frustration — not to mention the website will likely be a lot higher quality from a design, marketing, technical and search engine standpoint.
The cost of having someone build your WordPress website varies wildly from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the size, scope and functionality of the site and the experience and business model of the website design company. Read How Much Does a Website Cost to learn more about the cost of having someone build a website for you.
Website Maintenance / Support
One of the most overlooked parts of having a website is the ongoing cost of website maintenance and support. With WordPress, one of the most important aspects of security is continually updating the WordPress software, plugins and theme. You can do these updates yourself, but we find that many of our clients either don’t have the time or don’t like doing this type of work. Of course, you can always hire someone to help you with this.
In addition, your website should continue to evolve and grow over time. You should be adding content and making it a dynamic place for your potential customers to go.
Read 10 Things to Do After Your Website Launch.
The great thing about WordPress is that you can easily add blogs and change your text and images. If you don’t know how to do this, you might just need a little WordPress training. But you will eventually come across things you don’t know how to do or can’t do without the help of a developer. You’ll want to have a WordPress guru who can help answer some of those questions for you.
We recommend budgeting 10-15% of the cost of your initial website development project per year for website maintenance and support. So if your website cost you $7500, you should plan on about $100/month for maintenance. It’s great if the person who built your website also offers support, but unless you signed a contract with them, the nice thing is that you can always hire any other WordPress developer for ongoing support.
