Design your way

Monday, May 8, 2017

When going to a professional web designer or agency, you’re likely to be recommended a WordPress website.

Most of the agencies we work with and talk to are either WordPress only or they use it as their primary CMS.

Even if WordPress allows you to create a website basically for free, businesses are sometimes paying $10k and more for their WordPress websites.

But how do you know if to expect a $500 proposal or a $10,000 proposal when you go to an agency?

This article takes you through some of the main factors behind the pricing of WordPress websites: 1) the agency you work with, 2) the content on your site and 3) the features you need.

The agency you hire

The agency you hire
Image source: Goutham

To start with, digital agencies have different sizes and business models.

Some are young startups, or a developer making extra money from his college dorm room, while others have Mad Men style offices in Manhattan with experienced professionals.

This is one of the main drivers of cost – you pay for the experience of the people building your site.

The reason for paying more is that you expect their experience to help make your site more valuable, as an investment in higher conversion rates and better SEO. Depending on your business, this may be overkill or a great way to get an advantage over your competition.

The agency you hire for a WordPress site
Image source: Michał Roszyk

Let’s assume that you want a simple brochure site, with a landing page, 6 internal pages of content and a blog.

You can probably get it from around $500 from a fresh web designer who doesn’t feel comfortable charging more, or who is starting out helping companies that otherwise wouldn’t afford to get a website. A typical local web agency would charge around $3,000 – $5,000 maybe.

But, you can also go to a large agency and get a well-branded and optimized site for $10,000 or more, with no extra features that are visible to the untrained eye.

The main difference will be the content on the site. The agency would create better copy, professional images, and a smart user experience that helps your site convert.

Further, the site will probably load faster, be more resistant to hacking attacks and won’t crash when you update your WordPress install.

Wordpress update

For you, you can also leave the job to the agency to figure out what you need – they know from experience what will work for you, and the process will manage itself.

On the other hand, this may be well more than you need. Getting a site up there that works is way better than defaulting a company with the most beautiful site ever made.

Besides the small and large spectrum, there’s an agency business model that helps you bring down the costs for you sites, to get a product that’s better than what you pay for. Many agencies sell websites without a profit, because their main business is managing your digital advertising and SEO.

In order to provide those services, they need to sell you a website too – and with a low price tag, it’s more likely you’ll become a customer of their main services on a monthly plan.

The content on your site

The content on your site
Image source: Elegant Seagulls

Some businesses prefer to write their own content and provide images to their websites, while others leave that work to the agency. According to a pricing guide from American Writers & Artists Inc., the brochure site from our previous example would cost around $1,500 – $3,500 to get copy for by a professional.

The number of pages also affects the amount of design and development work to be done. But not always, which is obvious to some but news to others.

A page in WordPress only needs to be designed and developed if it has a unique page template. Most of you have probably either used or built WP sites, and you know that for each page you select a template. These templates are what need to be designed and developed, and then you can create as many pages as you want based on those with only some copy-paste magic and the visual editor.

A page template can take 1-20h to design depending on how long and complex it should be, but we develop almost all page templates in 4-12h once the designs are done.

This means that the brochure site we mentioned earlier (with a landing page, 6 internal pages and a blog) if developed by a typical local agency could be $2,000 if all the internal pages use the same page template, and $6,000 if they all have unique designs.

I based this calculation on each page template taking 12h to design and build at a rate of $75/h, i.e. $900 per page. Remember that these are ballpark estimates just to give you an idea of the impacts of unique page templates.

If you are OK with sticking to the pre-made page templates of a premium theme, you only need to configure them with your content, which means you save $900 per page template.

Many businesses prefer to have custom made templates, but there are many themes to choose from if you’re on a low budget. Especially if your web developer is not primarily a designer, this can help to get a decent looking site up and running while focusing more on e.g. the content and SEO.

The features you need

The features you need
Image source: Edyta Kostańska

Finally, let’s talk about the main driver of cost for a WordPress website – the features. Now we have to pimp our example of the 8 page brochure site and see where it takes us.

Many websites serve more purposes than providing information. The visitor might need to be able to schedule an appointment, fill out a contact form, find a store on an interactive map or search functionality, or make a purchase on the site.

There are plenty of plugins for WordPress that lets you do this things quite easily, but it always requires some thinking to go into it. Hopefully not too much customization, since plugins are rarely easy to tweak without running the risk of breaking them.

Wordpress Plugins

Developing (i.e. the coding part of the job) a feature like an interactive map, a gallery, a custom contact form or a search functionality would probably take a good 5-20h or so.

It would increase the cost of your $2,000 to maybe $2,500 or $3,000, much depending on how much time the agency needs to spend with you to understand how you want it to work.

Getting into more details here is beyond the scope of this post, but you can find more about development time for different elements in this article on WordPress costs.

If you want a webshop on the other hand, there are plenty of rules to set up for how it should work, add products, configure the checkout stages etc. So even with the widely used WooCommerce plugin to take care of most of the coding, you’re looking at a site that’s now $6,000 – $10,000 at least depending on how advanced your store needs to be and the amount of products and their specification.

However, you’re not only buying a website – you’re building an online store. The value of this investment should pay off, given that your products sell.

In summary

In the same way that a $500 watch can tell the same time as a $10,000 watch, your business can get a WordPress website at different price levels that in essence tell your visitors the same information.

However, its features, appearance and effect on the visitors will be different, so you need to adjust what you buy to your wallet and your goals.

Here’s a quick summary of the two extremes that we’ve discussed in this article:

Getting a WordPress website built for you at a cost of $500 requires that you:

  • Go to an individual website developer who has yet to learn how to charge for his/her services
  • Use a premium theme and stick to the page templates available
  • Write most of the texts and supply most of the images yourself
  • Don’t include any extra functionality that’s not already available in the premium theme.
  • Or, you get a more exclusive site but you sign up for a monthly subscription for other services, such as digital marketing and SEO

If your proposal from the digital agency lands somewhere around $10,000, this is probably why:

  • The agency has been around for a long time and know how to build you a site that converts to give you return on the investment
  • A professional copywriter and photographer helped you with the content
  • The site is custom designed for your needs, using multiple page templates to make each page specific to its purpose
  • There’s much additional functionality on the site, like galleries, custom forms, maps, and animations
  • You are not just getting a website, you’re building a webshop
  • Note: If you got all of the above, you’re over $10k already…

If you have experience buying or building WordPress websites, please use the comment section to tell us what you paid or quoted for different types of WordPress sites to help extend the knowledge base.



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