WordPress pricing for a brochure site or WooCommerce store depends on scope, integrations and care, not on one package price.
This page covers the cost of commissioning and maintaining a self-hosted WordPress website, not WordPress.com subscription plans. To get an estimate, email me your website address, the result you need and any deadline. A few sentences are enough; the technical specification can follow once I have looked at the site. The ranges below are market context. A binding quote follows once we agree the scope in writing.
Who: Mariusz Szatkowski, a WordPress developer since 2006, working alone from Gdynia, Poland. No team, no subcontractors: the person who quotes is the person who writes the code.
What: a guide to how WordPress budgets are formed, with market ranges and my own rates. Builds, integrations, performance work, migrations and maintenance are scoped and quoted individually.
Where: remote, for businesses in the UK, Ireland and the rest of Europe. B2B contract under Polish law, invoices with EU VAT ID PL7393037445. Communication by email, written documents and the repository.
How budgeting works: market ranges for planning, then a binding quote once the scope is agreed.
- Marketing or brochure WordPress sites: individual quote after scoping (typical range 890-2 900 €)
- WooCommerce stores and complex catalogues: individual quote after scoping (typical range 1 800-6 900 €)
- Integration-heavy builds (ERP, SSO, multilingual checkout): individual quote after scoping (from 3 600 €)
- My maintenance: from 81 €/month; hours in the monthly allowance expire at month end and do not roll over
- My ad hoc rate: about 82 € per hour (senior market context 30-80 €/h)
- Deposit: work starts once the deposit has cleared
How much does a WordPress website cost in 2026? As market context for budgeting, a custom B2B WordPress company website ranges between 890 € and 2 900 € for standard builds, while a custom WooCommerce store ranges from 1 800 € to 6 900 €. Builds with ERP/CRM integrations start from 3 600 € to 12 000+ €. Ongoing maintenance ranges from 81 € to 590 €/month. These are indicative ranges; a binding quote follows agreement on the scope.
Serious WordPress and WooCommerce work is bought with a written scope, milestones and acceptance criteria. A public price grid cannot show integration risk or QA depth, so I publish ranges and then quote each project individually.
WordPress website cost 2026
I publish market ranges, not a fixed menu. Business site 890-2 900 €. WooCommerce store 1 800-6 900 €. Integrations from 3 600 €. Enterprise from 12 000 €. Maintenance 81-590 €/month. Senior market rate 30-80 €/h; my own ad hoc rate is about 82 €/h. Binding quote after written scope.
How WordPress projects actually get priced
WordPress core is free. Running a business site on it is not. You still pay for the domain, hosting, licences for premium plugins once the free versions fall short, and someone’s time for configuration, integrations, security, Core Web Vitals work, accessibility checks, updates and backups with tested restores. TLS certificates are usually bundled with hosting.
Three ways of contracting cover almost every job:
- Fixed price against frozen scope. We agree a written scope sheet and I quote once. It stays predictable as long as the scope holds; every change after that gets its own written quote.
- Retainer with an hour allowance. You prepay a monthly block of hours. Unused hours expire at the end of the month and do not carry over. This suits WooCommerce stores whose task list changes every week.
- Time and materials with a weekly cap. Without a cap, T&M feels like a blank cheque. With one, you see the work on staging every two weeks with a written summary and decide whether to continue.
Senior contractor rates vary with country, speciality, languages and how much commerce complexity is involved. Treat unattributed rate charts on forums as anecdotes.
WordPress website budget ranges
The figures below are market ranges, not a fixed menu. They help you sanity-check a budget before scoping. The binding number always arrives as an individual quote after written scope analysis.
| Engagement | Indicative range (EUR) | Maintenance (retainer per month) |
|---|---|---|
| Business or company website | 890-2 900 € | 81-200 €/month |
| WooCommerce store | 1 800-6 900 € | 130-590 €/month |
| Larger business with integrations | from 3 600 € | individual, scope-led |
| Enterprise and governance | from 12 000 € | individual, scope-led |
| Senior engineering rate (market context) | 30-80 €/hour | individual per proposal |
These ranges are for budgeting only. My own maintenance starts at 81 € a month, and ad hoc work is billed at about 82 € an hour.
Costs every WordPress site carries, whoever builds it:
- Domain registration, billed annually, depending on registrar and TLD.
- Hosting, which climbs with traffic, staging, PHP workers, object cache and data residency needs.
- Themes, from a lightweight custom block theme to heavy multipurpose themes that push the cost into later performance fixes.
- Plugins, sold as one-off licences, yearly subscriptions or usage-metered services.
- Security tooling: WAF and bot protection where the risk calls for it, two-factor login for administrators always.
- Development, billed hourly or per milestone after scoping.
WordPress pricing for brochure sites and WooCommerce stores
What moves the budget differs by type of site:
| Type | Typical budgeting notes (initial) | Typical budgeting notes (ongoing) |
|---|---|---|
| Small business marketing site | Number of distinct templates, languages, integrations, content migration and redirects, block patterns for your editors. | Usually lower than a store if changes are modest; grows with frequent campaigns and new landing pages. |
| WooCommerce store | Catalogue import, payment and shipping integrations, transactional email, VAT display, multilingual checkout, refunds. | Plugin updates, payment webhooks, ERP sync failures, load around seasonal peaks. |
| Membership or subscriptions | Recurring payments, trials, failed-payment handling, content gating, member login. | Card network rules, stored payment tokens, churn reporting. |
| Large multi-stakeholder programmes | Separate environments, documented releases, acceptance matrices, security questionnaires. | Patch windows, documentation for auditors, capacity reviews before peaks. |
In-house team, freelancer or agency for WordPress
- In-house staff cost salary and tooling, and keeping a senior WordPress developer engaged in-house is hard.
- A freelance senior avoids agency overhead but needs clear written tickets and careful access management.
- Agencies bundle designers, project managers and juniors. That can help, but ask who actually writes and deploys the code.
Compare maintenance scopes before comparing monthly prices with the same label.
WordPress marketing site
- Responsive build from your design and wireframes
- Performance and accessibility as acceptance criteria where agreed
- Staging, reproducible deployments, rollback
- Written handover notes for your editors
WooCommerce build or rescue
- Payments, VAT display, refunds, tested where it matters
- Shipping, ERP sync, feeds and multilingual checkout
- Performance tested with your real catalogue size
- Uptime monitoring every 1 to 5 minutes once live
Monthly WordPress costs for hosting, domain and licences
Infrastructure is billed by its vendors, separately from development. I do not resell hosting.
| Line item | How it is usually bought | Cadence and notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | From a registrar | Annual renewal; redemption fees hurt if the domain expires. |
| Hosting | Monthly or prepaid annual plans | Rises with CPU, staging, PHP workers and object cache. |
| CDN and edge | Vendor plan or pay-as-you-go traffic | Image optimisation and WAF features are sometimes paid extras. |
| Themes and plugins | Per-site or multi-site licences | Keep a list of renewal dates and licence counts. |
| Monitoring and backups | SaaS or built into hosting | Schedule test restores so backups are proven, not assumed. |
| Transactional email | Email delivery service | Order emails in spam folders cost sales even when checkout works. |
What makes a WordPress quote higher or lower
Two briefs that look the same on paper can come back with very different numbers.
Catalogue size on WooCommerce. Ten products imported once is an afternoon. Nightly stock sync with an ERP, multilingual attributes, bundles, preorders and feeds to marketplaces is a project of its own, and faceted search starts to stress MySQL.
Integration depth. One payment provider is simple. Several, plus refunds, chargebacks, accounting exports and invoice numbering, means weeks of work, mostly on the failure paths.
Number of languages. Two languages are mostly translation logistics. Five, with hreflang, translated transactional emails and consent texts per country, is a separate stream of work. You or your translator supply the translations.
Hosting and compliance. Data residency, log retention and a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR are budget items, not afterthoughts.
Deadline. I work alone, so a shorter deadline cannot be bought with extra people. It can be met by launching a smaller first version and adding the rest in a second phase.
Less common WordPress jobs priced separately
- Incident response. Site down, defacement or a failed update. Billed hourly with a weekly cap, then handed into regular maintenance. I start as soon as I can, but I do not guarantee a response time.
- Technical due diligence before an acquisition. Half a day or a day reviewing code quality, plugin licences, hosting contracts, security and migration risk, delivered as a written report.
Hidden costs of cheap WordPress websites
- Performance debt. Heavy multipurpose themes look fast on launch day and then fail field Core Web Vitals once real traffic and media arrive.
- Security shortcuts. Predictable admin logins, no two-factor authentication and over-privileged accounts turn a small incident into a public outage.
- Licence integrity. Nulled premium plugins bring compliance and malware risk at the same time.
- Privacy gaps. Consent that does not block scripts, no data processing agreement with the host and undocumented subprocessors need budget like any infrastructure line.
How I structure a WordPress project
The scope is agreed in writing before work starts, and a deposit is paid. Invoices after that follow milestones you accept on staging. Changes go through a written change quote, not silent assumptions. You supply the graphic design and wireframes; I build them into a responsive WordPress theme.
My maintenance covers:
- Updates tested on staging first, with backups kept for at least 30 days in EU countries.
- Uptime monitoring every 1 to 5 minutes. There is no 24/7 on-call service and no guaranteed response time.
- Development hours from a monthly allowance that expires at month end.
- Security reviews of users, roles, headers and plugins, retiring risky plugins when they fall behind.
Before I get access to a site with personal data, we sign a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR. What the monthly fee from 81 € covers and what is billed separately is on the WordPress maintenance cost page.
What drives the cost of a WordPress project
Five levers explain almost every gap between two quotes for the same brief.
- Scope and page count. The number of distinct layouts, not the number of pages, predicts the hours. Ten pages sharing one template cost far less than ten pages that each need their own layout.
- Custom versus off-the-shelf. A commercial theme with a page builder launches faster and cheaper on paper, but brings licence fees, fragile upgrades and a performance ceiling. A custom block theme costs more up front and is lighter to run.
- Integration depth. Each connected system needs error handling, retries and reconciliation, and that is where hours pile up.
- Compliance and regulation. Consent that really blocks scripts, a signed data processing agreement with your host, accessibility checks and data residency are cheap to plan in and expensive to retrofit.
- Ongoing maintenance. Over a few years the build is the smaller part of the cost. A quote that ignores maintenance only moves the invoice later.
What should a WordPress website quote include?
- Written scope. What is included and what is explicitly excluded.
- Named deliverables. The specific page templates, block patterns, integrations, migration volume and languages.
- Acceptance criteria. Measurable conditions such as a performance budget, WCAG checkpoints or a smoke test of the purchase path.
- Milestones and a payment plan. A deposit before work starts, then invoices tied to work you accept on staging.
- Assumptions and exclusions. What you supply (copy, images, design, access, a decision-maker for sign-off) and what the quote does not cover.
- Handover and warranty. Who fixes defects after go-live and how the site moves into maintenance.
- Licence and infrastructure list. Which paid plugins, themes and services recur and who pays for them.
Without these, you are buying a risk that shows up only after signing.
How to compare WordPress quotes
- Compare scope, not price. Level both proposals to the same deliverables before comparing numbers. The cheaper one often does less.
- Normalise maintenance. Check whether each includes tested backups, monitoring, what happens during an outage and development hours. The WooCommerce reliability plan separates monitoring, update checks and incident handling so you can compare scopes.
- Ask who does the work. With agencies, ask who writes and deploys the code. With me, it is always the same person.
- Ask for references who went through a real incident. They tell you more than a happy launch story.
- Count total cost of ownership. Hosting, licences, CDN and email delivery run regardless of the developer.
What to prepare before requesting a WordPress quote
- Content inventory. How many pages and templates, what is migrated and what is new.
- Design and wireframes. Your designer’s files, or a filled-in template showing which element goes where on each view.
- Integration list. Payments, ERP or inventory, CRM, newsletter, shipping and anything else that exchanges data with the site. For stock, order or customer data, read the WooCommerce ERP integration scope first.
- Operational numbers. Catalogue size, expected traffic and seasonal peaks.
- Must-have versus nice-to-have. What has to work at launch and what can wait.
- A real deadline. A date and the reason behind it, such as a trade show or an expiring hosting contract.
- A budget envelope. An order of magnitude, so I can propose something that fits.
- Access and decision-makers. Who signs off and who can grant access to existing systems.
With these, a rough range becomes a firm quote you can compare.
Related work sits under WordPress developer.
