How much a well-built WordPress website costs (and why)

In short: a WordPress website doesn’t have a price, it has a cost structure. The range you find on the market, from a few hundred to tens of thousands of euros, doesn’t separate those who rob you from those who give it away: it separates different products that all go by the same name. The argument of this piece: as long as the quote stays a round figure at the bottom of a page, comparing two offers is impossible. So we open it up, line by line, including the lines you usually don’t see.

“So, roughly, how much does it cost?” It’s the question that comes up in almost every first call, usually after about ten minutes. And it’s a fair question, but one we always answer with another question: what does the site have to do? Because a website that presents a professional practice and a website that sells are not the same product at different prices. They’re different products.

When we started working with VolumeBK, the project wasn’t “build an e-commerce”: it was merging two existing businesses, a bookshop and a record shop, into a single ecosystem with over twelve thousand items in the catalogue, plus courses and events to manage alongside the physical products. The cost of that project couldn’t be estimated by counting pages, because the pages were the least of the complexities. And this, on a smaller scale, holds for any website: the price tells you what’s underneath, not how long the navigation menu is.

Why quotes for the same website are so far apart

Anyone who asks for three quotes for the same website often gets three figures that seem to refer to three different projects. That’s because they really do refer to three different projects. On the market the ready-made theme adapted in a few days, the bespoke work of an expert freelancer and the multi-handed process of a studio all coexist. On how to choose among these roads we wrote an honest answer in the article on who to turn to for building a website; here we’re interested in the economic point: each price band buys a different scope of work, and the range is rational, not scandalous.

At the low end of the range you buy the installation of a theme and the entry of content supplied by the client. At the high end you buy research, strategy, custom design, development, content, SEO, accessibility, testing and a supplier who answers for all of it over time. The problem isn’t that both exist: it’s that quotes rarely state where on the range they sit, and why. So the client compares figures, when they should be comparing scopes.

The items that make up the price (the ones you don’t see in quotes)

When we prepare an estimate, the final price is the sum of distinct blocks of work. Here they are, in the order in which they happen.

Strategy and co-design

The work that comes before the design is the one the market struggles most to recognise as work: understanding goals, audiences, existing content, the systems the site will have to talk to. In our projects this phase runs through the strategic co-design workshops with the client, out of which come the information architecture and the priorities on which everything else is built. Skipping this phase doesn’t remove it: it moves it inside the project in the form of revisions, second thoughts and pages remade twice.

Design and development

This is where the biggest difference between the price bands sits. Adapting a ready-made theme costs little because the design was already done by someone else, for a generic site that isn’t yours. Designing the interface and backend to measure costs more because every choice is made on your content and your users. In our quotes this part is broken out in full: navigation tree, wireframes, grid and layout design, programming a theme built ad hoc, training on backend use, content entry, testing and debugging. Every line is work that someone will actually do.

Content, SEO and accessibility

These are the invisible crafts of the quote. A website can be online and formally complete without getting found by anyone, without converting and without being usable by a portion of its visitors. Copywriting, semantic structure, search engine optimization and accessibility requirements are hours of specialist work: when a quote is very low, it’s usually because these items aren’t there. They haven’t been discounted. They’re absent.

How concrete should these items be? In our quotes we go as far as stating the range of Lighthouse score we commit to reaching and the hours included for accessibility fixes after the audit. Not out of pedantry: because anything that isn’t written down becomes, mid-project, a negotiation.

What happens after go-live

The purchase price isn’t the cost of the site. Hosting, professional plugin licences and maintenance are recurring costs that last as long as the site does, and that have to be factored in from the start: on what a properly done WordPress maintenance means, and why a site without maintenance silently accumulates technical debt, we’ve written a dedicated article. How much they weigh depends on the infrastructure and the service level chosen: what must not depend on anything is that they’re declared in the quote from the start, with their conditions (in our support packages, for instance, the hours bought and not used don’t expire, and that’s written down). A website’s price is judged on its useful life, not on the day it’s delivered.

The per-page price: the wrong metric the whole market uses

“How much does a 10-page website cost?” is one of the most searched questions on Google about websites. It’s also the wrong question, and it’s worth explaining why.

A 5-page site with a booking system, an integration with the management software and a members’ area costs more than a 30-page static site. The page is the most visible and least meaningful unit of measure of a web project: what determines the cost is the complexity of what the pages have to do, the number of systems they have to talk to and the responsibility the supplier takes on for how they work. On VolumeBK, the single product page is one page: behind it sit the catalogue with over twelve thousand items, the handling of physical products and courses in the same purchase flow, and the performance to keep under control with every release.

A recent example: a client asked us to add a page for open positions to their site. One page, exactly. The quote contained two versions of it: a basic solution, a module with the position cards to update by hand, and an advanced solution, a dedicated content system with one page per listing, automatic expiry dates and links shareable on social media. Same item in the menu, two different products, two different prices. The client chose knowing what they were buying: that’s all you should ask of a quote.

When a supplier prices by the page, they’re telling you something about their method: they’re selling containers, not a system. For a simple editorial project it can be fine. For a site that has to support a commercial activity it’s the first signal to look into.

How we build a quote at PaperPlane

For the reasons just described, we don’t give prices over the phone. It isn’t a sales technique: it’s that a price given before understanding the project would be wrong by definition, in one direction or the other.

The path starts from an introductory call and, when the project calls for it, from a workshop phase in which we map goals, content and constraints together with the client. From there we come out with a scope: what the site does, what it doesn’t do, which integrations are needed, who writes the content, which accessibility and performance requirements we set ourselves. The quote describes that scope line by line, with the recurring costs declared alongside the project ones.

Part of the cost, and of the value, sits in the stack we develop on. Our sites are born on Flying, the WordPress framework we maintain in-house: no page builders, a modular backend the client’s team uses on its own and markup looked after on a semantic level, which works for SEO and accessibility at the same time. For hosting there’s no single answer: we choose it based on the project’s requirements, and when traffic, criticality or performance needs justify it we propose Kinsta, which weighs on the recurring costs more than a shared hosting at a few euros a month and pays back in stability, speed and recovery times when it matters.

For the more involved projects, defining the scope is a job in its own right: an analysis phase made of interviews and workshops, which closes with a findings document and with the actual offer, and whose cost is deducted from the total if the project continues with us. It’s the most honest way we know of pricing uncertainty: the client pays for the analysis, not for an estimate pulled out of a hat. Even the leaner quotes state in writing the information they’re based on, meeting and date included: if the requirements change, the assessment changes, and that’s written down too. The precise timeline is defined together with the client after confirmation; we can anticipate that a process like this involves several people who hand the work over to one another, from project management to user experience, from design to development, over a span measured in months, not days.

On the figures, we choose to be consistent with everything we’ve written so far: we don’t publish price bands, because a band without a scope is exactly the round figure this article urges you not to compare. What we can give is the logic by which the price moves. A showcase or corporate site built with this method is the starting point. Custom features (integrations with company systems, members’ areas, booking flows) are the most frequent multiplier. An e-commerce adds the complexity of the catalogue, of payments and of the responsibility for every transaction, and it’s almost always the most demanding project. Two projects with the same number of pages can sit an order of magnitude apart, and it’s the scope that explains why.

A real limitation: a properly done website isn’t worth it for everyone

This is the part an agency usually doesn’t write. Our process has a minimum cost below which we can’t work well, and that cost rules out perfectly legitimate projects. If you need to publish a personal portfolio, validate an idea or give a web address to a business that has just opened, our method is oversized: a builder or a good freelancer are more fitting answers, and when we think so we say it on the call, before the quote. Paying for a multi-handed process to solve a problem that doesn’t call for one isn’t quality: it’s waste.

The picture flips when the website is a commercial channel, because at that point the price has to be compared with what the site produces, or stops producing. The cheap site that doesn’t convert doesn’t cost what was paid for it: it costs that figure plus all the revenue it fails to generate, every month, until someone notices.

What you really buy when you pay for quality

The most expensive items in a serious quote, the ones on strategy, performance and accessibility, are also the ones the market treats as optional. The data says the opposite. On speed, the case studies collected by web.dev have documented for years the correlation between Core Web Vitals and business metrics, from conversions to bounce rate; on what these metrics measure and what Google does with them we’ve devoted a deep dive into the Core Web Vitals.

On accessibility, what until yesterday was a quality choice is becoming a requirement: with the European Accessibility Act, in force since 28 June 2025, the accessibility obligation has extended to many consumer-facing digital services, e-commerce included. A site built well today has these requirements inside it, not to be added later at a steep price. It’s another way of reading a quote: quality is amortised, the saving is paid for.

Where to start: how to read (and ask for) a quote

Define the business goal before the budget. “I need a new website” doesn’t steer any estimate; “I need to generate qualified quote requests from my area” does, and it also changes the figures in play.

Demand quotes broken out line by line. A round figure can’t be compared with anything; a declared scope can. If strategy, content, SEO or accessibility don’t appear, ask whether they’re included: the answer says a lot about the supplier.

Calculate the total cost over 3 years, not the purchase price. Hosting, licences and maintenance add to the project: a low quote with opaque recurring costs can cost more than a high one with everything declared.

Compare like products, not figures from different products. Three quotes far apart almost never describe the same work: before choosing the cheapest, check that the scopes match.

If you want to understand which band your project sits in

We can’t tell you how much your website costs without knowing your project, and by now you know why. What we can do is help you define the scope: a 30-minute introductory call costs nothing, and sometimes the honest answer is that you don’t need a studio like ours. When you do, that’s where the quote stops being a round figure and starts being a plan.