How Much Does a WordPress Website Cost in 2019?

Are you looking to build a website that you’re in full control of? Do you want a site you truly own, where the data is yours? Are you done with “pages” on social media platforms that may sell your valuable data to the highest bidder?

A WordPress site is the perfect solution for most of you. Why? This way you can decide for yourself about each feature of your site, each piece of content and each bit of data you share! Hosting providers just provide Web space for your website. WordPress gives you much more.

For many years, most people were afraid to publish on their own site. Beginners either assumed that they are not tech-savvy enough or they were convinced that they needed a third party service to provide an actual audience. Who in their right mind would visit my website? Nobody knows me!

WordPress.com stepped in to create a compromise between social networking sites like Facebook and actual hosting providers. The latter started by selling so-called shared hosting and later went on to a more advanced managed service that is usually based “in the cloud”.

While WordPress.com was always great for starters, many people weren’t fond of the limitations down the road. Upgrading to business accounts was relatively expensive and did not solve all the issues.

Shared hosting is sharing one server with many other websites. It’s cheap and today still is a good option for the tech-savvy, value-conscious user that wants to use WordPress.

Once your blog or site become very popular or they experiences momentary traffic spikes could interrupt the actual service and result in downtime right when you need your website most!

To deal with the sudden growth of traffic so-called cloud hosting has been developed that divided up content between multiple servers without adding significant cost.

On cloud hosting your site literally lies in many places at once. When your content goes viral many actual machines can get accesses by visitors viewing or reading it.

Some Free Services Are More Costly in the Long Run!

Some social networking sites sell access to your friends. You need also to pay to reach them. Yes, you heard it right. You pay for being able to show content to your own audience of subscribers!

Other services are capitalizing on you in a similar way. They host you for free but once you stop adding more content they sometimes even delete your whole site.

In general, content from social media sites simply disappears for one reason or another like these examples below show:

• Google+
• Flickr
• Tumblr

Most services delete whole sites, and years of work, for violations of their Terms of Service. Yes, “free” can cost you much more down the road than you expect. Saving years of content is priceless.

Thus more and more people ask themselves: how much does it cost to build a WordPress website in 2019? It actually just got even cheaper this year!

Here’s the good news: with EasyWP you can set up a professional website based on WordPress with ease and without spending a lot of money.

Creating social networking profiles and pages is not the only entry-level option for online publishing with ease. An independent website is by now as easy to set up as a mail account. Everybody can do it!

What Are the Actual Costs of a WordPress Website?

The good news upfront: a proper WordPress website is cheaper than ever! In 2019 you can have a domain and professional WordPress hosting for a lot less than in prior years. One reason is the aggressive pricing strategy of EasyWP you will see below.

It’s not just the domain name and hosting cost, it’s also about the content, design or optimization: there are so many excellent free or affordable options for WordPress that it’s much cheaper to create a WordPress site than using a different content management system.

As mentioned above, there are also still free online publishing options where you pay with your data or content. Sometimes you have to buy back your friends from the gatekeeper.

With WordPress the cost is clear upfront. The software itself is free as ever and developers make money by offering premium tools and services.

Using these paid options sometimes can be the better option but starting out for free can be often sufficient as well. There are some aspects of a WordPress website you shouldn’t try to get for free though. Read on to learn which ones.

Domain

On Namecheap—that’s our umbrella company—EasyWP is a subsidiary of it – you can get a top level domain (TLD) like

• .com
• .net
• .info
• .site

Many of them are extremely affordable. Others like .io are more hip and expensive but still not a problem for most users who want to make money off their site.

You can even sometimes get an actual domain name for mere Cents per month when you’re lucky. Namecheap offers all kinds of occasional discounts. Just stay tuned!

On EasyWP you can also have a free subdomain like example-1a2b3c.easywp.com for as long as you wish. This is OK for private users or when you are testing our service. For business users, it’s highly advised to buy an actual domain like example.com

For all those who can’t reserve their .com domain anymore, there are many new TLDs that offer a wide variety of choice. For example .site is a great generic domain name with many options.

Why do actual top level domains cost money? You have to register them with an organization called ICANN. They have fees. Also, there is a whole infrastructure and customer support that needs to work behind the scenes to keep domain available at all times.

Namecheap is the second largest domain registrar in the world and more private, progressive and reliable than the largest one.

Hosting

Your website content and structure needs a place on the Web from which it is “served.” That’s called hosting. For business WordPress users, managed hosting is the best option. Experts manage your servers for you “in the cloud”!

You can be happy with shared hosting (many sites on one server) unless you have a very popular site for other reasons than business or do not have the time or skills to take care of WordPress yourself.

A few years ago when managed WordPress hosting got introduced for the first time it was mainly an option for enterprise level customers. Small boutique services like WP Engine, Flywheel or Kinsta offered a whole new level of full service website hosting and maintenance at once. Instead of having to care about

• updates
• security
• backups

managed WordPress hosting allows website owners and bloggers to do what they do best—create content and publish it or simply sell products and services without having to care for the infrastructure.

Sadly these types of managed services require a lot of actual technical infrastructure and also wo/manpower. This way the cost is often much higher than for average websites that run on shared hosting for example. Managed WordPress is also usually located on a so-called ‘cloud.’ Many servers are interconnected so that when one is overloaded others can quickly take over.

Until lately people like you and me couldn’t afford managed WordPress and mostly sites that already had large traffic in the thousands per day or hour made financial sense that way. This has changed just recently.

Now that EasyWP offers managed WordPress hosting based on the existing Namecheap infrastructure instead of buying server space elsewhere (like on Amazon or Google) entry level plans are possible!

EasyWP is also having an existing customer service on Namecheap so the additional infrastructure and human cost is significantly lower. Due to the large scale of the whole system EasyWP and large reserves of Namecheap the actual pricing is dramatically lower.

The EasyWP first-month offer is ridiculous. For just one dollar you can test run the WordPress environment. The risk is minimal that way, don’t you think?

By requiring $1 upfront you merely ensure that actual humans sign up, not bots.

For $22 you can get a whole year of our “Starter” plan managed WordPress hosting! That what you per for a month with competing services.

It sounds dirt cheap to you? Yes, it is! Early adopters get better pricing than those who are late to the table. EasyWP managed WordPress hosting is cheaper than many shared hosting services.

On shared hosting you literally share one server with many other sites. That’s like living in a high rise building.

EasyWP runs “in the cloud”. That’s the exact opposite of shared hosting. Multiple connected computers divide the workload of keeping your site on the Web!

Your site is distributed on many servers in different places. This way even when one computer is overwhelmed others quickly take over with no noticeable downtime.

Design

Essentially it’s now possible to get high-quality WordPress themes for free. Many of those also offer premium features for advanced users that cost additional fees.

In general, free WordPress themes are as professional as paid ones in 2019. You just get a stripped down version—which is ideal for starters anyway.

The hardcore features you may need down the road can be added later. You can grow with WordPress over time.

1. image galleries
2. contact forms
3. online stores

etc. can wait. You do not need to have it all from day one.

In case you want someone to create a whole new design from scratch, including a complete WordPress theme, prepare for an investment in the hundreds of dollars at least. Custom designs make sense for businesses that rely heavily on branding and corporate identity.

For small business, it’s more than enough to adapt and customize an existing WordPress theme and to add or subtract items or features as you wish along the way. There are plenty who help with that for much less than a design costs.

Customization

You will most likely want to customize your web design, template or more specifically WordPress theme. Envato is a great place to find someone who can help you with WordPress customization.

Intermediate and advanced users can do it themselves. Beginners probably need someone who is more used to WordPress, it’s interface and intricacies.

WordPress developers are in high demand so that can cost you a few hundred Dollars or more, depending on how much you want to change the ready-made design.

There are lots of freelancers overseas who offer similar services cheaper though due to the lower living costs around Asia, for example.

Optimization

Customizing your ready-made theme is one thing. Optimizing it and your whole WordPress site is another. While beginners will be happy with WordPress out of the box intermediate and advanced will usually want to optimize their WordPress site as much as possible.

One main reason you should optimize your site is site speed. Many WordPress themes look good but achieve this effect with many images or visual effects. These can cost visitors valuable time. People bounce off slow sites after mere seconds. Nobody wants to wait.

One of the most popular free tools to optimize websites for websites speed is provided by Pingdom. It’s aptly called the Pingdom Website Speed Test.

What it does is measure the actual load time of your website from different places in the world (US, UK, mainland Europe) and provide stats on each resource you have—pointing out the bottlenecks of your site.

Additionally to improving website speed or reducing load times most people attempt to please the Google spiders by making their sites even more Google-friendly than the default WordPress site already is. Some themes also require additional tweaks for Search Engine Optimization.

One of the most popular all-in-one plugins is made by Yoast. It basically takes care of all the major Google optimization features WordPress does not excel at by design. It’s the most popular WordPress plugin overall!

There is both a free and a premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin. The basic one will be already sufficient for starters while the premium one offers advanced features for those who want to gain a competitive advantage without hiring an SEO company.

Security

Managed WordPress hosting services like EasyWP take care of the security for you. Sure, sometimes you will have click backup or restore and you still have the obligation to use secure passwords but we do the hard work for you behind the scenes.

What does that mean? WordPress security does not cost anything extra in case you use managed hosting. Otherwise you may need to use additionals tools and services.

We manage it for you as the name suggests. For shared hosting users, some professional third-party tools like BlogVault may be advisable.

There are also free tools for backup and other security features but you need to be more into tech to use those. The more you pay the less you need to care!

Content

Content creation—be it articles, page copy or images like illustrations and photos is the costly part of running a website – on any service.

WordPress allows you to manage your content effectively. You still need to create at least a little part of it yourself.

Sure, there are sites like Unsplash where you can download free to use high-quality photos but your writing remains costly as long as you want it done properly.

So-called content writing services of course exist but I haven’t seen many that were really making sense. Hiring freelancers writers is a better idea but it often can be hard to find a good one.

Prepare yourself to pay at least $100 for a proper article by a freelance writer.

You will always find people on the Web asking writers to work for peanuts but you get what you pay for. You can’t get quality copy for the proverbial fiver.

The Difference Between Costs vs Investments Explained

Take note that all these costs (or rather investments—as a website is always an investment in your future) are optional. You can get everything for free but often with some limitations.

Services like WordPress.com offer a stripped down WordPress version for all those hobbyists who rarely venture beyond occasional publishing for the sake of sharing their worldview. They often have nothing tangible to offer beyond opinions and thus have no business model.

For all those who offer real value, be it:

• inspirational
• educational
• useful

In any case, a real WordPress website is not really a cost. It’s an investment that helps promote their ideas, products or services.

Opinions and free expressions are fine by themselves, but when you take online publishing seriously you need a full-fledged website—not just a “pay with your content” type of set up on Tumblr, Wix or WordPress.com.

Some Investments Are Optional

While it’s a great idea to invest a lot of money and effort up front in your website and business in order to fare well down the road, some investments are really optional.

Do you really need a custom design or does a ready-made WordPress theme suffice?

Do you really need to make professional photos from day one, or can you simply use free images from Unsplash to illustrate your point?

More money does not equal more success automatically. The same applies to more time or effort invested. You have to find the sweet spot where what you invest still makes financial sense to your particular situation and nonetheless yields impressive results.

Sometimes it’s about simple tweaks that make your site unique. The same applies to the unique selling proposition of your business. Everybody is selling blue or red widgets? Why not try pink ones then? Why not go beyond widgets altogether?

What you need for sure is a proper domain and hosting in case you are serious about online publishing.

A high-quality WordPress theme is also a prerequisite for a successful site. People judge by the design in seconds. Yet you get excellent ones for free! Customization is also obligatory but you may be able to do it yourself with some online tutorials. Stay tuned for more of those tutorials and test the easiest way to install fully functional WordPress with EasyWP until then!