question “How much does it cost to build a WordPress website?” One of the most common questions among beginner writers who want to start a blog, and business owners who want to take their business and commercial projects online, whether in order to sell products and services, or establish a website for their company and brand.
In this article, we will answer this question in detail, and we will review the costs of creating a WordPress website at all its stages, starting with the cost of the domain and hosting, through the cost of the template, plugins, and hiring a developer, all the way to the cost of complementary services.
Is WordPress really free?
Although WordPress is a free and open source content management system , creating a professional website using it requires allocating some material costs, as the website requires many elements in addition to WordPress, including hosting, domain, plugins, and template. Some of these items are free, some are paid, and some are available in free and paid versions, depending on the tools they include and the features the version provides.
Therefore, the difference between creating a website using the WordPress content management system and creating one using another paid content management system is that in the first case you will not pay to get the content management system, while in the second case you will need to pay money to purchase the system. In other words, you will save on the cost of the content management system when you use WordPress for your website, but you will still have to pay for other site requirements if you want to come up with a distinctive, professional website.
Costs required to create a WordPress website
The costs that you may encounter in the journey of creating your professional website on the WordPress platform are divided into two main parts:
Required costs: These are the costs you must pay if you want to create a simple website, with some basic functions and elements. The total of these costs is the lowest cost of creating a website on the WordPress platform, and these costs include: hosting and domain
Possible and optional costs: These are costs that are not a prerequisite for launching your own website, meaning that the decision to pay the costs will be optional. However, exceeding these costs will make you miss out on many of the strengths and distinctions that you can obtain through WordPress. There is no specific list of these costs, but they may include but are not limited to:
- The cost of the template.
- Cost of plugins.
- The cost of hiring people to manage different aspects of the site (developers and managers).
- Costs for ancillary services, such as logo design and content addition.
When creating a WordPress website, you may need the following elements: hosting – domain – content management system – WooCommerce (if you want to create an online store) – template – add-ons – hiring a developer – complementary services. Below we will explain the cost of each of these elements individually.
Website hosting cost (starting at $35 per year)
In general, the cost of obtaining hosting for your site ranges from tens of dollars to thousands of dollars annually. The price of hosting depends mainly on its type ( shared – virtual – dedicated – cloud ), the characteristics it has, and the advantages it provides to website owners, in addition to the services provided with it by the hosting company, such as the domain name, SSL certificate, and backup. , etc.
In general, the higher the price of the hosting plan, the better the overall performance of the WordPress site, but you do not have to subscribe to the more expensive hosting if you do not need it. Low-priced hosting may provide the same actual performance as another expensive hosting if you plan to launch Simple website with traditional features.
Read also: Explaining the concept of hosting and how it works for beginners
It should be noted that there are very cheap hosting that can be used to create a WordPress website, as well as free hosting , but they come with many drawbacks and limitations, as well as that their performance will not be acceptable for most website owners, so relying on them to launch a good website would be a wrong decision.
To know how to choose the appropriate hosting for your website, see our article ( The Best Hosting Company and Criteria for Choosing the Best Hosting ), in which we talked about the best hosting companies that you can rely on, and about the things that you must take into account to choose the best hosting for your website.
Domain name cost ($12 per year)
Some hosting companies include the “domain name” service in the hosting plans that they offer for free for a full year. Meaning, if you purchase a hosting plan that includes a domain name as part of the plan’s benefits, you will not need to pay any additional costs to obtain a domain name for your site during the first year.
If the hosting service provider you relied on does not offer a domain name for free, you will have to purchase one from a site that sells domains, such as namecheap, godady, name, domain.com and other service providers that provide you with a domain name with many extensions for an amount ranging from Between $3 and $15 during the first year depending on the extension type.
Read also: What is a domain? A comprehensive explanation for beginners
It is worth notihttps://www.wpar.net/what-is-domain-name/ng that domain prices vary depending on their top-level domain, or what is known as the extension. The price of a .net domain, for example, differs from the price of a .com domain. Also, some premium domain names that are highly sought after by people may have a price of thousands. Or even millions of dollars. You can view the prices of some premium domains on domain selling platforms.
Cost of WordPress CMS (Free)
The first step to building your own website is to install a content management system on the hosting on which the site’s data will be stored. Here, WordPress will be the content management system we are targeting. Downloading and installing this system is completely free, as we mentioned previously. WordPress system files can be installed on the hosting in many ways, perhaps the most prominent and simplest of which is installing the system through the web hosting control panel with one click.
If you want to learn more about how to install WordPress for free on your web hosting, see our next article ( How to download and install WordPress on hosting ), in which we explain in detail and through pictures how to do this in two different ways.
WooCommerce cost for online store owners (free)
You can install the WooCommerce plugin on WordPress if you want to create a free online store instead of a regular website or blog. Installing and installing the WooCommerce add-on is done in the same way as installing any other add-on on WordPress and without the need to pay any costs to use the basic features of the add-on, but you may need to purchase a template and add-ons and hire a specialized developer if you want to come up with a distinctive and professional store to increase the chances of the success of your business on the Internet.
WordPress theme cost (free or paid)
WordPress includes thousands of free WordPress templates that you can browse and choose the appropriate template for your site. These templates can be easily installed on your site using the WordPress control panel. If you are hesitant about installing a specific template, you can view user reviews for it on the site. This is a useful way to help you decide to install the template or choose another option.
If you do not want to use a free WordPress template because you want the appearance of your site to stand out from other sites that use free templates, you can purchase a template for an amount of money ranging between $2 and $200 from one of the sites that provide paid WordPress templates, such as the Picalica website. .
Cost of WordPress plugins (free or paid)
If you have no idea what “ WordPress add-ons ” mean, they are additional tools and components that are installed on the WordPress system and perform one or more tasks within the website. It is quite similar to downloading various programs on the Windows system, and they are either free or paid.
Paid plugins range in price from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars, and many paid plugins have free versions that are simpler and offer fewer features than paid versions.
Free and paid plugins for WordPress can be installed through the WordPress administration page, and you can browse the plugins available in the WordPress store by visiting the plugins section on the WordPress.org website. Regarding paid versions of paid add-ons, you can purchase them from their official websites.
It is worth noting here that paid subscriptions are divided into two types, either purchased; So you buy the add-on with all its features for one time and you will not have to pay any additional fees later, or you can subscribe; Meaning, you will need to pay a monthly or annual subscription to take advantage of the add-on features.
There are no specific plugins to install on your site, because it depends on the nature of the site you plan to launch, but there are some basic plugins that you may need to install on your WordPress site, which include:
- Yoast SEO : Costs between $0 and $89, and helps set SEO Title, Meta Description, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
- Contact Form 7 : Free, used to manage contact forms in WordPress.
- Akismet : Costs between $0 and $5 per month, filters and blocks spam from contact form messages, comments, and more.
- UpdraftPlus : Costs between $0 and $195, and enables you to backup and restore your site.
- AddThis : It is free and allows you to add social media sharing buttons to your website pages so that visitors can easily share them.
As we mentioned, paid and free add-ons are not an absolute choice, meaning that you have complete freedom to decide to purchase paid add-ons or limit yourself to free add-ons. It depends heavily on the nature of the site you are about to launch, but take it as a general rule: Do not bother buying an add-on that will not provide Your site will provide little or no benefit to the site’s features.
Read also: How to create a professional WordPress website that keeps pace with 2022 technologies
Hire a web developer
Although WordPress is a simple and easy-to-use platform that does not require that deep programming experience, you may need to hire a web developer to prepare, design, and code your website for you in many cases, including the following:
- You don’t have enough time to set up the website yourself.
- The website you are planning to launch is complex, and needs a lot of additional functionality.
- You want to design a custom template that is unique to your site. Although free and even paid templates have many customization options, because they are available to everyone, your site may ultimately be similar to many other sites that have adopted the same template and customization options that you have chosen.
- You would like to make some advanced modifications to the site after you have set it up yourself.
Because the reasons why you should hire a web developer are different, the amount of work they will do, and the effort they will put in, will be different.
You can hire a freelancer from freelancing platforms to help you develop your WordPress site .
Costs of supplementary services
There are some services that you may need to obtain to prepare and prepare your site to its fullest, and they vary depending on the type of site you plan to create. The extent of your need for these services is relative, so the decision to adopt these services or not is up to you. Additional services that you may need on your WordPress site after it is created include the following:
- Logo design : It often starts from $10 for creative designs from freelancers or a company. Of course, if you have experience in logo design, you can design your own logo and save the costs of hiring a specialized designer.
- Entering product details : Online store owners who sell products need this service, as it provides the visitor with the ability to know the products you sell, the characteristics that distinguish these products, in addition to their prices and other details, and its cost depends on the number of products and the size of the details you want. Enter it.
- Writing explanations explaining how to use the site, as this helps the user or customer purchase and benefit from the various services you provide, and shows him the correct way to do what he wants. The cost of this service depends on the size of your site and the number of operations that can be performed on it by the user.
- Create videos explaining how to use the site, as some users prefer watching videos rather than reading text explanations, and for this reason you can provide them with explanations in the form of video files explaining how to carry out operations on your site, such as the correct way to purchase a product in a practical way, so that you purchase a product in front of them in the video. As with the textual explanations, the cost of this service varies depending on the size of the site and the number of operations it provides the ability to perform.
Thus, the minimum cost for supplementary services is $0, and the upper limit is not specified according to your expectations in your location
The minimum cost to create a WordPress website
Now that we have highlighted the various costs related to creating a WordPress site, we will show in the following table the minimum total cost of creating a site, remembering that you may need to pay costs much more than the costs mentioned here, depending on the requirements of the site you want to create.
| Required item | Minimum cost amount |
| Hosting cost | $35 annually |
| Domain cost | $10 annually |
| The cost of the WordPress system | Free ($0) |
| WooCommerce cost | Free ($0) |
| Mold cost | Free – or $59 |
| Cost of add-ons | Free – or paid |
| Cost of hiring a developer | Free – or paid |
| Supplementary services | Free – or paid |
In the beginning, the $35 in the previous table may be sufficient to create a small WordPress site in the beginning, but you will soon have to pay additional costs as the site grows. You’ll need to upgrade your hosting plan and use paid plugin features, and you may need to hire a developer at some point, so creating a WordPress site can cost you more than that even within the first year.
It is worth noting that creating a professional website with many features, adopting a paid template, using free and paid add-ons, and choosing premium hosting may cost you between $500 and $1000 annually, depending on what you need for your site. While creating a custom WordPress website with professional-level features may cost more than $15,000. [
As you can see, there is no specific cost to create a WordPress website. There is a minimum cost. Yes, you can start with it and create your first simple website, but you should know that the site may not meet your aspirations.
If you want to calculate the cost of creating a WordPress site with the features you want, you must look at the cost of subscribing to the add-ons, services, and other elements that you need and calculate their total costs, then combine them with the minimum necessary to create a WordPress site, to produce an initial estimate of the costs that you will incur to create your own WordPress site
