A WordPress website costs $500 to $2,000 from a freelancer for a basic five-page site. A ten-page business site with a blog runs $2,000 to $5,000. E-commerce starts around $3,000.
Agencies charge three to ten times those numbers for comparable scope. Same software, different overhead.
That is the short version. The rest of this post explains why two quotes for "a WordPress website" can differ by a factor of twenty and both be honest.
(For the record, the most confusing quote I have ever seen was $5,000 for a site described in one sentence. The client asked me if it was a good deal. I asked what was included. Nobody knew. That is the actual problem with website pricing, and it is not the number.)
The short version
A freelancer-built small business site costs $500 to $5,000. E-commerce costs $3,000 and up. The price is driven by scope, not by WordPress. Anyone quoting you a number before asking what the site needs to do is guessing.
First, WordPress is free
This trips up almost everyone, so let us clear it up.
WordPress.org is free, open-source software. You download it, put it on your own hosting, and own it. It is what most of the world means when it says WordPress.
WordPress.com is a separate hosted service run by a company. It has its own pricing, starting around $4 a month. It is not the same product, and advice about one often does not apply to the other.
When someone says "a WordPress site costs $X," they mean the total to get a finished website running. The software itself is zero. The cost is hosting, a domain, a theme or page builder, and a human to assemble it.
What WordPress websites cost by project type
Freelancer rates. Agency rates for the same scope generally sit three to ten times higher.
| Project type | Cost | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Template site, stock theme | $500–$1,500 | A few days |
| Basic business site, 5 pages | $800–$2,500 | 1–2 weeks |
| Business site with blog, 10 pages | $2,000–$5,000 | 2–3 weeks |
| Custom design and integrations | $5,000–$15,000 | 4–8 weeks |
| WooCommerce store | $3,000–$15,000+ | 3–6 weeks |
| Membership or custom functionality | $10,000–$35,000+ | 2–4 months |
My own packages sit inside these ranges: $799 for a five-page site, $1,799 for ten pages with advanced SEO, and $2,999 for a WooCommerce store. If you want the detail, it is all on the pricing page.
What actually drives the price
Six factors. Only two of them are about the website.
Page count. More pages, more design, more content, more review. Straightforward.
Custom design versus a template. A template is adapted to fit you. Custom design is built around you. The second one costs more and looks less like everyone else.
Functionality. Contact forms are cheap. Booking systems, member areas, custom calculators and third-party integrations are not. Integrations are where estimates go to die.
Who writes the content. If you supply finished copy and images, the build is faster and cheaper. If the developer writes it, budget for it. A well-written page takes hours.
Who you hire. A freelancer has low overhead and answers their own email. An agency has project managers, account managers and an office. You are paying for all of them, and sometimes that is worth it.
How much back-and-forth. This is the one nobody budgets for. Three rounds of "my cousin thinks the header should be blue" costs real money. Clear feedback early is the cheapest thing you can give a developer.
The overseas question, answered honestly
I am a freelancer in Lahore. Most of my clients are in the US, UK and Australia. So I have an obvious interest here, and you should read this section knowing that.
The honest version: rate differences between countries are real, and quality differences are real, and the two are not correlated the way people assume.
What you get at a lower rate is real work at a real price, usually from someone who has built more sites than their rate suggests. What you risk is timezone friction, communication that is fine on email and painful on calls, and occasional cultural mismatches on what "finished" means.
What you do not automatically get at a higher rate is a better website. I have rebuilt plenty of $12,000 agency sites that were slow, hard to edit and shipped with broken forms.
Practical advice: judge on the process, not the postcode. Does the developer ask what the site needs to achieve? Do they show you a staging link early? Do they give a fixed price in writing? Those three questions predict the outcome better than where they live.
Hidden costs nobody quotes
Things that appear after the build:
- Domain — $10 to $20 a year
- Hosting — $5 to $50 a month for a small site, more for e-commerce
- Premium theme or page builder — Divi is $249 lifetime; Elementor is $59 to $99 a year
- Plugin licences — $0 to $300 a year depending on what you need
- Ongoing maintenance — $50 to $500 a month if you want someone watching it
- Content — extra pages are commonly $50 to $150 each
None of these are scams. They are just rarely in the first quote. Ask.
Cheap websites and what they actually cost
A $400 template site is not a scam either. It is a real product for a real use case.
The problem is that templates have edges. The moment you need something outside the template's design, you either pay a developer to fight it or you rebuild. I have done both, and the rebuild is always cleaner.
Here is the arithmetic that convinces people. A $400 template plus $2,000 of customisation work over 18 months equals $2,400 and a site held together with adjustments. Building it properly for $1,799 gets you there first. Cheaper is only cheaper if nothing changes.
How to read a quote
Four checks before you sign anything.
Is the price fixed or an estimate? "Around $2,000" means $3,000. Ask for a fixed number against a written scope.
What is explicitly not included? Content, images, hosting setup, maintenance — get the exclusions in writing.
How many revision rounds? Two or three is normal. Unlimited is either generous or meaningless.
Who owns it afterwards? You should own everything — design, code, content — once it is paid for. No licensing, no lock-in. If the answer involves keeping the developer on retainer to keep the site running, that is not ownership.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a WordPress website cost? $500 to $2,000 from a freelancer for five pages. $2,000 to $5,000 for a ten-page business site. E-commerce starts around $3,000. Agencies charge three to ten times more.
Is WordPress free? The software is. Hosting, domain, themes, plugins and the developer are not. WordPress.com is a separate paid service from WordPress.org.
Why does one quote say $500 and another $15,000? They are not quoting the same job. One is a stock theme with your logo. The other includes custom design, copywriting and integrations.
Should I hire a freelancer or an agency? Freelancer below about $10,000, especially if you want to speak to the person building it. Agency when you need several skills at once or ongoing capacity.
What ongoing costs should I expect? Domain $10–$20 a year, hosting $5–$50 a month, plugin licences $0–$300 a year, maintenance $50–$500 a month if you want it.
Are cheap WordPress websites a false economy? Often. The template becomes expensive the moment you need something it cannot do.
How long does a WordPress website take? Five pages takes about a week. Ten pages with a blog takes two. E-commerce runs three to four weeks.
Where this fits
If you are weighing a rebuild against repairing what you have, what website maintenance actually costs covers the ongoing side of the numbers.
If you already have a design from Figma, Lovable, v0 or similar and just need it built, that is cheaper than starting from scratch — AI prototype to a real site starts at $399.
Under pricing pressure and want the full breakdown by tier, the pricing page has every package with inclusions and timelines.
Ten years on WordPress, just over 100 sites built, based in Lahore and working worldwide. I quote fixed prices because hourly billing punishes you for asking questions, and I would rather you asked.
Further reading: WordPress.org on what the software actually is, and web.dev on Core Web Vitals if you want to know why speed affects what you earn.
One last thing. If a quote has no exclusions section, it is not a quote. It is an opening bid.
Ask what is not included. Watch how they answer. That single question tells you how the whole project will go.