How much does a WordPress website cost?
“How much for a website?” is the first line of most messages I get, and the honest answer is a question back: what has to be on it? Two sites with the same number of pages can differ in price several times over.
So instead of a number pulled out of the air, here is what actually goes into the price of a WordPress site. It will help you plan a budget, and compare quotes that look nothing alike.
Two kinds of cost
There is the build, which you pay once: design, development, content, launch. And there are the running costs, which come back every year whoever built the site. Quotes often mention only the first, so start with the second.
What it costs to run, every year
Add care if you don’t want to do it yourself: updates of WordPress, the theme and the plugins, backups, and someone to call when something breaks. It can be a monthly plan or a few paid hours when needed.
What changes the price of the build
- Unique layouts, not pages. Ten service pages that share one layout cost far less than ten different designs. When you count pages for a quote, count how many look different.
- Custom design, or a theme restyled. A bought theme with your logo on it is quicker to set up. A design made for your brand takes longer, and it is also what makes the site look like yours and no one else’s.
- Features. Contact forms are simple. Online booking, a shop, memberships, several languages, or a link to your CRM are each a block of work with its own testing. A shop is the biggest: products, payments, delivery, taxes and order emails all have to work on a phone.
- Content. Who writes the text and who provides the photos. Content that arrives late, or not at all, is the most common reason a project stretches. If the text is ready before the design starts, everything goes faster.
- The old site. Moving pages, posts and images, and setting up redirects from the old addresses so you don’t lose what Google already ranks.
- Speed and SEO from the start. Image sizes, caching, titles, descriptions and schema. Building them in costs less than fixing a slow site later, which is a job of its own (mine starts at $250).
- Who will edit it. If your team will update the site in the page builder, it needs clean, native sections and a short editing guide, not pasted code that only a developer can touch.
How I price it
Every new site gets a fixed quote after a written brief. You describe the business and what the site has to do; I reply with questions, a page plan, and a price with a timeline, before any design starts. You know the total before you agree to anything.
Some jobs are standard enough to have fixed prices: speeding up a WordPress site from $250, moving WordPress to Astro from $450, and a Telegram car catalog for $300 to launch plus $30 a month. Ongoing changes after launch can be hourly.
For scale, a real example: the one-page landing website for Global Cars Korea, a used-car exporter, was $250. That is one page, not a whole website: more pages, a shop or several languages cost more, for the reasons above.
Three mistakes when comparing quotes
- One quote includes design, content upload, speed work and an editing guide; another is the build alone.
Ask each one what is inside, line by line.
- A theme with forty demos and twenty bundled plugins loads all of them, and the site gets slower.
Pay for what the site has to do.
The third: forgetting the running costs. A cheap build on a plugin that renews at $250 a year is not cheap in year three.
What to send for an accurate quote
The more of this a brief has, the closer the first quote is to the final price:
A budget range is not a trap. It tells me whether to propose a lean version or the full one, and saves a round of messages.
Prices checked on 12 November 2026: Elementor Pro pricing (Essential plan, one site) and Elementor’s WooCommerce cost guide (domain, hosting, extensions and card fees). Third-party prices change; check them before you budget.