What does a WordPress site really cost?

The short answer is that there is no single number, and that is not a dodge. The cost of a WordPress site is three separate things: the build, costs that return every month and every year, and a third cost most quotes never mention at all. The build is usually the small part.

We build both WordPress sites and coded sites, and we maintain WordPress sites other people built. We have no reason to push you either way, which is what makes it possible to lay the numbers out honestly here.

What the build price is made of

Building a WordPress site is several separate things: the theme, the plugins, fitting it to your design and loading your content. Each can be cheap or expensive, which is why the market range is so wide.

What really decides it is how much of the work is custom. A ready theme with changed colours and text is the cheap option. A theme you have to break open to get a page it cannot produce is the expensive one, and sometimes dearer than building that page from scratch.

What comes back every month and every year

An Israeli domain costs around 90 ILS a year. Hosting for a business site runs from free to about 100 ILS a month, depending on the technology and the traffic. Those are the easy numbers to work out.

What quietly accumulates is plugins. A forms plugin, a backup plugin, a security plugin, a speed plugin, each with a paid yearly tier. A typical WordPress site runs on dozens of plugins and several of them are subscriptions. It is worth asking for the full list and its yearly cost before you sign anything.

The cost that never appears in the quote

WordPress is a living system: the core updates, the plugins update, and now and then one update breaks something else. That is not a rare fault, it is simply how the platform works, and it is the price of the flexibility it gives you.

So the third cost is who deals with it. You can do it yourself if you have somebody who will, or you can buy quiet. Ongoing maintenance starts at 500 ILS a month and covers core and plugin updates, backups, monitoring and fixing faults.

When WordPress is the right choice

When you want to edit content yourself every day without asking anyone, when you run an active blog, or when you need a shop with WooCommerce and ready plugins for almost anything you might want. In those cases the platform works for you and the maintenance is a fair price.

WordPress also makes changing supplier easier. It is common enough that somebody will always know how to work on it, and that is worth something real if you are worried about being stuck with one developer.

When a coded site works out cheaper

If your site is a few pages explaining what you do, with a form on it, WordPress brings an entire infrastructure you will not use, and with it the updates, the plugins and the breakages that come in the same package.

A business website starts at 1,500 ILS, goes live in 4 working days once your content and images are with us, and has no plugins to update. The price is flexible and fits your budget. This is not a claim that WordPress is worse, only that not every business needs what it offers.

And there is the case where you already have a site

We do not need to have built it to look after it. A WordPress site that works but is slow, breaks now and then, or needs something added is exactly this kind of work, WooCommerce included: payments, shipping, stock and connecting to your bookkeeping.

Before we start we look at the site and say honestly whether it is worth continuing to maintain or worth rebuilding. Often the answer is to continue, and that is perfectly fine. One-off work is priced by scope once we have seen it.

Frequently asked questions about WordPress pricing