What Is the True Cost of Building and Managing a WordPress Website?

What Is the True Cost of Building and Managing a WordPress Website?

Reader Comments (11)

  1. Yesterday I was searching for an authoritative article on website costs that I could link to for an article that I’m writing on how to achieve positive ROI for small town municipal and nonprofit websites. I wake up this morning and, voila, here it is. Serendipity! Good overview. The only thing that gave me a hiccup was reading the company name “Hostgator.” Surely there was a much better hosting low-cost hosting company that you could reference. This particular company has had a shaky reputation for a long time in the internet space. I also found it helpful to make sure that folks know that Google Analytics is only available on the Business version of WordPress.com; an important factor for those non-techies who believe they’ll save dollars by choosing the “free WordPress.com” service. That said, thank you for the detailed, carefully written article. And for me, what amazing timing!

    • Thank you Sunni! Good point about Analytics. As for HostGator, the goal was to find the absolute lowest cost option for self-hosting, which I believe theirs is.

  2. Nice one Jerod. Been meaning to write something like this for a while, just keep getting sidetracked with LinkedIn • WordPress • MailChimp work.

    Thanks again.

  3. Hey Jerod,

    Great analysis. I’ve always said “free” is way too expensive! And I think you’ve under weighted the intangible (inevitable?) costs of what happens when something crashes, or the next hack comes.

    Plus, for those of us who aspire to “use WordPress the way Copyblogger uses WordPress” (even a little) you left off a ton of expensive features that are built into the package price of Rainmaker. ;-D

    I’d love to see that post. Coming next?

    Tom

  4. Many of these are just the cost of having any type of website, no?

    A decent premium theme + a logo from Fiverr are enough for most businesses in my opinion, especially with a little bit of web savvy to edit minor things.

  5. Jerod,

    Thank you for writing this piece. It really needed to be written, and you totally nailed it.

    One tip that’s worked well for us and our agency partners:

    When asked by a client to justify spending > $100 monthly on website hosting, ask them in turn how much they spend on their corporate cell phone bill. Their website is the primary communication tool they have for their entire business. If they are comfortable spending >$100 monthly on a cell phone, how could they argue investing in the quality of their website infrastructure is not more important?

  6. Totally spot-on. I used to self-host all my WordPress sites; for some reason I thought it would be faster/easier to use WordPress.com for my latest project, and boy am I running into problems. Suddenly all the things I took for granted to be able to do, I can’t without paying more money–sounds like a hidden cost to me!

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