How Much Cost To Build and Run WordPress Website

Why your Business should have a website and how much cost to build a WordPress website?

With the likelihood that you’re missing out on customers without one, here’s why every start-up needs a website and the benefits of creating your own. So let’s keep this simple, should your business have a website?

The long and the short of it is YES, every business needs a website to have any chance of surviving in this financial climate.

Still to this day I hear businesses giving excuse after excuse as to why their business doesn’t need a website. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, online or offline, you still need a website.

Credibility is one of the most important aspects

Nowadays, we are connected 24h/7 on the internet. A website helps to build trust in your business and will enable people to find or contact you. According to Forbes, “One of the main reasons you should have a website for your business is to increase your organization’s credibility. … Without a website, people may question your legitimacy as a business. Having a website is an opportunity to make a great first impression and give people comfort that you’re a real business.”

Google searches are now the first port of call for the majority of people across the world. On average Google now process over 63,000 search queries every second which translates to over 5.6 billion searches per day and 2 trillion global searches per year worldwide. It’s a severe understatement to say that by not having a website you could be losing out on customers.

How Having a Website Can Benefit Your Small Business

According to Oberlo, 65.6 percent of the entire world’s population has internet access. There are 4.28 billion unique mobile internet users worldwide, which makes up 54.6 percent of the global population. Without a website your business is potentially missing out on a substantial amount of business which is too valuable to lose.

Below we will post a few of the reasons why having a website is crucial in this tough economy:

Credibility. Again, this is maybe the most important aspect. Having a professional website helps your business gain credibility, which in time helps build trust with your customers as it will give the impression you are a successful business.

Ease of access. No one likes to be hunting around for ages looking for something which should be so simple to find, having a website makes it easy for your potential customers to find you.

Go big! Whether you provide products or services, your website is a great place to sell your products to a wider market helping you grow right in front of your own eyes.

Borderless Access. You can reach audience from each corner of this World and from each continent. It is just depending on what kind of product or service you provide. But you got the idea.

A website enables you to charge higher prices thus increasing profits because of the professionalism presented. Without a website you must incur the added cost of extra sales force. The money made by having a website for your business will always out way the cost of having a website built by a professional web designer.

Cost of Building a Website With WordPress

Being an essential business asset,  you should hire a professional to build your business website. A correctly built website will generate a positive ROI, so don’t go cheap. When I say “cheap”, I mean you can find people who will built your business site anywhere between $100 and $1000, but you know that quote: “You get what you paid for.”. A WordPress developer may charge for a small business site anywhere between $1500 and $5000.

Cost of Running a Small WordPress Business Website

Beside the website, you have to pay for other services, such hosting, maintenance and SEO. I will try to split the cost, to help you make a better estimation:

1. WordPress Development – A WordPress site’s cost for a small business should start from $1,500 and can go up to $5000 (and even more, depending on the niche, complexity, competition, and so on). And I am not talking about anything custom (I wouldn’t touch a custom build for less than $10k. It’s just not worth it.). For this amount of money, you should expect your site will be beautiful, fast, secured and SEO optimized.
2. WordPress Hosting – A well-optimized WordPress site will have low performance if you host it on a bad cheap shared hosting, and your business will lose potential customers. Speed is now a landing page factor for Google Search, so if your site is fast, it will rank higher and reach more potential customers. How big is your website? How many unique visitors will be there daily? You should invest at least $50/month in your website hosting.
3. SEO – SEO is expensive. But hiring the right specialist, you should expect a big ROI. This is another area where you should not going cheap at all. It’s hard to estimate an average price for SEO, because it depends on your site industry, competition, etc. You should expect to pay at least $100-$150/hour for SEO. Generally speaking, for a small business, the local SEO would cost around $2000 – $5000 per month.
4. Website Maintenance – Keeping your site online is, first of all, a time consuming task. If you don’t know how to administrate your site, you buy a WordPress Maintenance Service. Why is WordPress maintenance vital for your business? Just think about it: If your site will crash because an update goes wrong, or even worse, your site have been hacked, you will be put offline, and you will lose potential clients. I charge my clients from $87/month to $348/month for regular WordPress site maintenance.
5. Social Media – Beside SEO, you probably heard about Social Media. You should hire a Social Media assistant to administrate your business accounts on Social Media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. Your budget for this should start anywhere between $500/month and $2000/month, depending on the required hours of work, handling other areas (graphic design, copywriting, etc).
6. PPC Management – You can skip the SEO and the Social Media promotion (not recommended) and hire an advertising consultant, for site promotion. You can use Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, and so on. Here, you have to setup 2 budgets: one for the consultant and one for the campaigns.  The PPC consultant may charge you for a fixed monthly rate, or for a monthly rate + x% (between 10% and 25%) from the monthly campaign budget. If you want to learn more about how Google ads works, read here: I’m an Adwords certified professional. AMA about Adwords or PPC
7. Website Content – Content Writing is another essential aspect of your website. The rates are paid per 1 word, per 100 words or hourly. The website industry have a big impact over the prices. A law content writer will charge more rather than a plumbing content writer.

Conclusion

One time fee

The cost to build a WordPress website starts from $1500 + website content for 10 landing pages $850 ($85 per 400-1000 words) = Minimum $2350

Monthly fees

$50 (hosting) + $2000 (SEO) + $87 (maintenance) + $500 (Social Media administration) = $2637/month

or

$50 (hosting) + $87 (maintenance) + $1500 (PPC Campaign) = $1637/month

So, if you want to build and run a small business website, the minimum approximative costs in the first month would be around $4987 or $3987.

In the first year, for running a small business site, your budget should be at least $30, 000, with an expected ROI of at least 2x yearly investment (for each $1 invested, you get $1 profit). These are indicative numbers, calculated at the minimum prices, for a generic business niche. There are businesses where you will get a much better ROI.