How much does it cost to self-host a website?

WordPress might be advertised as a free platform, but like with everything, the free part comes with limitations which most users will outgrow eventually. The free software that you will download will not be enough. You still need to purchase a domain and hosting plan, if you wish your website to be available to others (which is what most of us creates a website for). And that is just the beginning. Over time you will, most likely, want to purchase a premium theme, plugins, as well as custom development and support. It makes sense to take a look at the overall cost that a self-hosted WordPress website may incur in time to budget for it, if nothing else.

Let’s start with a domain name. It is the most basic part of your URL (the .com, .ca etc. part) and it is a necessary expense. There are some hosting platforms offering a “free” domain with a purchase, but it comes with renewal fees that are much higher than what many registrars charge. WorldPress and Wix have a default, free URL (yoursitename.wordpress.com or yoursitename.wixsites.com) but these will not work for you if you are going to use them for anything other than just a temporary web presence.
In most cases, the cost of a domain name is very affordable (no more than $12 per year for a typical .com, .net, .ca) unless you are going for a niche domain (such as .tv,.fm, .io, which may cost up to $200, with quite high renewal fees later every year).

Now, let’s talk about hosting. It is one of the most important aspects of a good websites, responsible for its speed, reliability and ease of administration and maintenance. WorldPress has two primary hosting options (majority of sites uses one of these options): managed hosting and shared hosting.
Managed hosting (uses dedicated CPU and is completely walled off from others) is typically more expensive than sharing hosting (where resources of a CPU are being shared by others). Depending on the provider prices for shared hosting may vary from $5 to $15 per month in first year and raises to $15 to $40 monthly after that (top end can go up to almost $500/month). Managed hosting (that provides support, security, and reliable servers) prices run between $50 and $500 plus or more monthly. Of course, if you are running more than one site these prices will increase. Thus, your yearly cost for hosting comes up to $200 – $1000.

Perhaps the biggest draw to WordPress is the plethora of themes to choose from. Depending on your chosen theme, you can have any kind of site imaginable. From a magazine, blog, store or boutique, portfolio, event registration, image and video gallery, etc…whatever you need. WordPress can do it. However, the free stuff offered in theme repository is quite basic and comes with limited functionality. That is why it is a good idea to budget for a premium theme. Depending on the theme you find the most useful it may cost you from $20 to $90 annually for just the license. If you need custom design or development the costs are becoming quite substantial. A basic webpage (5 pages: home, blog, contact, about, pricing) can cost anywhere from $500 to $1500 as a one-time fee, with rates increasing as more custom work needs to be done. A fully customized more involved work, can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000. Some developers charge hourly. Depending on experience, workload, depth of the project and skills the hourly charge can vary from $50 to $400 per hour (these are used, generally, to develop a specific feature on a website).
Including ecommerce, requires a lot more expertise, work and makes the project much more complicated. Thus, the fully commercial site may cost you anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000.

Then there are plugins. Let’s start with essential ones.
You need a backup plugin (some are free, some, if you need more features are not, and can cost $40 plus per year/ per site). Security plugin (a must have), depending on what you need, can cost from $0 to $300 per year / per site. Caching plugins (responsible for increasing a speed on your site) can cost between $0 and $250. And we cannot forget about SEO plugins. Again, there are free ones but if you need more, cost goes up to $90 per year / per site. Ecommerce plugins will cost you as follows: $100 to $1,500 per year for WooCommerce, $350 to over $1,500 per year for Shopify.

And after all of those “essential” plugins, you need to consider what other features your WordPress site will have. You might need to have premium forms and opt-ins through Gravity Forms ($60 per year for 1 site). MailChimp or other email contacts runs upward of $50 per month for 2,500 contacts. Editorial calendars from PublishPress start at about $70 per year for 1 site, while external integrations like Asana can be over $10 per month per user. An image-heavy site might require WordPress image compression from Imagify, which costs close to $10 per month.

And that’s just the beginning. Those are some of the more common plugins and services that get integrated into WordPress through plugins that should be accounted for as well. And all of these features can be obtained by free plugins, too, but with far more limited feature sets. Thus, overall estimate cost is from $0 to $1400 per year per 5 per one site.

Lastly, consider the human cost of running a WordPress website. Your time, if you are doing it yourself, has value. The more inexperienced you are the more time it will take to finish designing a website as well as maintain it in a future. If your company hires a full-time team working on the website, their time has a value as well. This human cost could easily become the biggest part of your budget and it needs to be considered.

In conclusion, depending on how conservative your needs are a cost of a WordPress site design, development and running can be as low as $800 or, as high as $24,000. While some costs might be one-offs, others are recurring and can be adjusted, based on your needs. In today’s world a website is a business card online. It may be a first contact with a potential client. How well it is designed and how fast it works will determine its effectiveness. It makes sense to design a budget, that will allow for all the necessary features on your site to make it fast and functional. While budgeting, don’t forget to include the cost of time required to learn to use all the necessary tools, as well as the time needed to design a website. Hiring a professional team to take care of it for you, might, in the long run, save you some money and a lot of aggravation.

*Based on “WordPress Pricing: How Much Does a WordPress Website Really Cost?”- an article from www.elegantthemes.com by B.J. Keeton
** Prices quoted are in US Dollars and have been rounded in some cases

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