How much does a WordPress website cost? From our published price list: a customization or fix from $500, a custom plugin from $1,500, a WooCommerce store customization from $1,000, and a custom-built WordPress website from $4,000. Most projects we take on land between $1,500 and $6,000. Hourly WordPress developer cost with us is $90 for a senior developer, or a partner rate, on request, for agencies buying white-label hours. What moves a site from $4,000 toward the upper end is not the number of pages; it is custom functionality, integrations and content that has to be migrated or written.
How much does a WordPress website cost, by what you are buying
"A WordPress website" covers everything from a five-page brochure site to a store with an ERP feed. The table uses our starting prices, which are public on the pricing page, and adds the situations that push each one higher.
| What you need | Starts at | What pushes it up |
|---|---|---|
| Fix or customization of an existing site | $500 | Undocumented previous work, edited core or theme files, no staging site |
| Site rescue (hacked, broken, abandoned) | $300 diagnosis, then a fixed repair price | No clean backup, multiple entry points, outdated PHP |
| WooCommerce customization | $1,000 | Block checkout (React) instead of classic, many product variations, B2B pricing rules |
| Custom WordPress plugin | $1,500 | Admin screens, external APIs, background processing, multisite |
| WooCommerce checkout project | $2,000 | Custom payment flows, subscriptions, address validation, multiple currencies |
| Shopify to WooCommerce migration | $2,500 | Large catalogs, order history, app features that need rebuilding |
| CRM or ERP integration | $2,500 | Two-way sync, field mapping across systems, duplicate handling |
| Custom WordPress website | $4,000 | Custom post types, membership or gated content, multilingual, content migration |
| Web application (React or Laravel) | $8,000 | Anything over $10,000 starts with paid discovery |
Those are starting prices for fixed-price work against a written scope. The scope is what makes a fixed price honest: it lists what is included, what is excluded and what "done" means, and the price attaches to that document rather than to a phone call.
WordPress developer cost by the hour
Our senior developer rate is $90 per hour. Agencies buying white-label work get partner rates on request. Every developer here is senior, the person who scopes a job is the person who builds it, and a second senior developer reviews the work before it reaches you. That last part is included in the rate; it is not a line item.
Hourly makes sense for open-ended support and for work that cannot be scoped until someone has looked, such as a performance investigation. For a defined build, ask for a fixed price. Hourly on a defined build puts the schedule risk on you.
For context on where these rates sit: we have run 805 projects for 368 clients on Codeable, a WordPress-only platform where developers are vetted, at a 4.95 out of 5 rating, and have been Toptal Verified Experts in Engineering since 2019. MagniGeeks has been building WordPress since 2014, and the founder has worked on WordPress since 2007.
What makes a WordPress site cost more
The number on the quote is mostly explained by six things. Pages are not among them.
Custom functionality. A booking system, a member area, a quote calculator, a directory: each is effectively a small plugin. Our WordPress development service builds these as proper plugins using documented hooks so that WordPress and plugin updates do not break them. Doing that properly costs more than pasting code into the theme's functions file and less than fixing the site after the paste breaks.
Integrations. A CRM, an accounting package, a shipping provider, a payment gateway beyond the defaults. Each is its own API with its own authentication and failure modes, which is why integrations start at $2,500 on their own.
Content. Migrating hundreds of posts or products from another platform, or writing copy from scratch, is work someone has to do. Wix and Squarespace export content but not design, so a move from either means rebuilding the layout. Shopify cannot export customer passwords, so a store migration always involves a password reset for every customer.
Design. A custom design from a blank page costs more than adapting a well-built theme. Neither is wrong. A brochure site for a professional services firm usually does not need a bespoke design; a product company whose site is its main sales channel usually does.
Performance and scale. A blog and a store with ten thousand products are both WordPress, but the store needs work the blog does not. WooCommerce stores product data in posts and postmeta, which gets slow to filter at scale, and cart, checkout and account pages cannot be page-cached. Speed optimization for a store starts at $900 for that reason.
The state of what exists. A site that was built by someone who edited core files, skipped updates for two years and left no documentation costs more to work on than a clean one. This is the hidden variable in most "why is the quote so high?" conversations, and it is why a rescue starts with a $300 diagnosis rather than a guess.
Why page-count pricing misleads
Many agencies price by page: a ten-page site for one number, twenty pages for another. It is easy to explain and almost meaningless. Twenty pages that share one template cost barely more than five. One page with a configurator that pulls live pricing from an ERP can cost more than the rest of the site combined.
Page-count pricing also creates the wrong incentive on both sides. The client trims pages that should exist to lower the quote, and the agency has no reason to build the templates well, because it is paid per page rather than per system. Pricing by functionality, with pages as content that flows into templates, is the honest model. If someone quotes you by the page, ask what happens to the price when you add a booking form to one of them.
What the site costs after launch
A WordPress site is not finished at launch, because WordPress ships several core releases a year, plugins update weekly, and PHP versions reach end of life on a published schedule that hosts enforce. Budget for it. Our maintenance plans start at $59 a month, and the Care plan at $99 adds 30 minutes of changes: tested updates, daily off-site backups, uptime and security monitoring, one hour of changes and a monthly report. Stores need the Commerce plan at $299, which adds a test order after every checkout-related update and monitoring for failed orders and payments. Unused hours roll over one month, and any plan can be cancelled at any time.
Over a site's first year, a $4,000 build plus twelve months of Care comes to $5,188. That is the number to compare against a cheaper build with no maintenance, because the cheaper build with no maintenance usually becomes a rescue.
Common questions
Can I get a WordPress website for under $1,000?
Not from us, and rarely from anyone you would want to keep working with. A theme installed with your logo and content pasted in can cost less, and for some businesses that is the right purchase. It is not development, it comes with no scope and no review, and it usually costs more later when something needs to be built on top of it.
How much does a WordPress developer cost per hour?
Our senior rate is $90 per hour, with partner rates on request for agencies. Cheaper rates exist and so do more expensive ones. What matters more than the rate is whether the developer is senior, whether someone reviews the work, and whether you own the code afterwards.
Is a fixed price or an hourly rate better for a new site?
Fixed price against a written scope, for anything you can define in advance. It puts schedule risk on the developer and gives you a document to hold them to. Hourly is for support, investigation and work that genuinely cannot be scoped until someone has looked at the site.
Why does a WooCommerce store cost more than a normal WordPress site?
Because a store has a checkout that must not fail, data that must not be lost, and pages that cannot be cached. Customization on the block checkout means JavaScript extensions rather than PHP hooks, order and product data need care at scale, and every update has to be followed by a test order. Those are real costs and they are why store customization starts at $1,000 and store maintenance at $299 a month.
Does the price include hosting and the domain?
No. Hosting and the domain are in your name and paid by you, which is the arrangement that keeps you in control of your own site. Ask for a hosting recommendation if you need one, but keep the account in your name.
Next step
If you can describe what the site needs to do rather than how many pages it has, start a project and the developer who would build it will come back with a written scope and a fixed price.
Want a senior developer to look at your site?
Tell us what you need. You get a written scope and a fixed price, usually within one business day.
