What’s the real cost of running a WordPress site?

What Are The Real Costs You Need To Consider To Maintain A Successful WordPress Site?

We’ve discussed WordPress often, and we’ve reminded our readers that WordPress is free but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any costs involved. Particularly when WordPress.com is far less forgiving than WordPress.org. You see there is a huge difference between the two, but for now, we’ll talk about the little things that you need to do in order to maintain a successful website. There will always be costs. Whether it be spending time or spending money, one thing is for certain, a website needs a domain, hosting and there will inevitably be those little hidden costs that eventually add up. You’ve got two choices here. You either spend a lot of valuable time setting up your website and when you’re done, spending more time to write the content, or you can spend some money on attaining services and plugins and themes which equates to not spending too much time at all. It’s your choice entirely.

Domain Registration

If you want to be serious about your website, or your blog for that matter, you’ve got to spend a little money on registering a domain and getting it hosted. Now the price is going to vary depending on what sort of domain you want. Make it short, sweet and attention-getting with three words and you’ll pay around $12 per year. Your cost will also depend on whether you opt for a dot com, org, net, info or au.

A lot of people recommend that you buy a dot com, a net and an au just so that traffic isn’t redirected to another site by using your name with another extension. These packages sell for about $17 per year. If you wish, you can also buy an add-on such as privacy which prevents your information from being on the ‘Who is” list. That one usually goes for about $8 per domain. So your annual cost for registration and all the trimmings is between $12 – $61

Hosting

Once again, depending on what kind of features you require, good quality hosting which is what you want, can average at about $5 for a basic hosting plan or for a business plan, expect to pay around $25 per month.
If you prefer,

• Shared Server – this will cost about $3 to $10 per month depending on whether you pay a lump sum for the entire year which of course brings the costs down. However, shared hosting tends to compromise the performance of your site but is a great choice for those just getting started or who want to write a personal blog.
• Managed Hosting – This is a great choice for small to medium business sizes because this is optimised for loads of traffic. These packages run at about $50 per month.
• Virtual Private Server – A VPS is a dedicated server wherein you have total control. You treat this kind of server as a private one which has higher bandwidth than shared and it won’t become stagnant due to other websites on the same server.
• Dedicated Server – The average cost is about $150 per month. This is a stable server reserved for the exclusive and dedicated use of a single client. You have everything you need and nothing to share with other sites. It’s a great choice for very high traffic websites.

The yearly cost for these kinds of packages ranges from $60 through to approximately $1800.

Premium Themes

As you can imagine, themes can range from the absolute free to many hundreds of dollars. Customised themes are way more when they’re built from the ground up. But you can utilise a free theme, however, if you want a unique site, one that really stands out, consider a premium theme. Premium themes are about $70 which is usually a once only fee. If it isn’t, find one that is, there are plenty out there. If you want to go further you can obtain a yearly subscription to Elegant Themes for $70 per year and this will get you personal usage. For a developer plan you’re looking at $90 and for a lifetime subscription $249.

Maintenance

This is where spending time comes in and it can be extensive. You’ll be backing up, making upgrades, updating, security, tuning up, checking for bad or broken links and deleting spam and that’s just the surface. You can do all this yourself if you prefer or you can spend a little money and subscribe to a service who will do it all for you.

• Backups can be either automated or you can use third-party off-site services like Dropbox for about $15 per month if your storage exceeds their free quota.
• Or Amazon S3 which depend on your usage.
• Updates keep your site upgrade and that includes performing theme and plugin updates. Although they’re easy to do they still take up time. So you’ll be performing backups before you update and then you’ll need to perform a restoration back up for when and if something goes pear shaped.
• WordPress Security Lock $247
  WordPress Maintainer $99 per month
• Security with Sucuri Security Management $99 per annum
  Akismet – Personal Use is free
  Akismet Business use begins at $7 per month

Marketing

To get noticed in the world you’re going to need SEO, social media platforms, a weekly or bi-monthly newsletter and some well thought out surveys. And all of this can be done either for free or very cheaply, but it all still takes time. There are free plugins you can use for search engine optimisation or you can pay for plugins and their services. You’re still going to spend time to learn how the free plugins work and then you’ve got to set up every post, so considering it may only take a second or two for each,

• Free Yoast SEO
• Commercial Yoast SEO – $99 per year

Forms

Consider forms. They’re a way to easily gather information from your visitors to your site. You can use forms to get them to subscribe to your newsletter or fill out a quick survey.

• Gravity Forms – $39 per annum

Paid Contributions

If you’re finding writing content yourself too consuming, consider paying for articles contributed from outside sources. Depending on the topic, who the writer is and the quality of the post, you’ll be spending between $10 and $200 per post.

Newsletters

Probably one of the simplest ways to keep communication lines open, you’re reminding your visitors about your site. There are many quality newsletter services available but we’ve narrowed them down to three most popular choices.

• Aweber – $19 per month
• GetResponse – $15 per month
• MailChimp – free for 2000 subscribers. Upgrades begin at $10 per month. For 7500 subscribers, you’ll be paying $150 per month.

Email

Depending on your site type, usually, an email account is included with your host account.

Learning to Use WordPress

It’s about time and learning to use WordPress is going to take some of it. You can begin by experimenting, clicking on stuff and watching what it does and you can read ‘How to’ books or spend time in classes learning that way. All of which costs.

Or you can opt to learn via:

• WordPress for Beginners: A Visual Step-by-Step Guide to Creating your Own WordPress Site in Record Time, Starting from Zero! (Webmaster Series Book 3) Kindle Edition
• WordPress All-in-One For Dummies 2nd Edition by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
• WordPress: The Missing Manual 2nd Edition by Matthew MacDonald

WordPress Developer

Using a WordPress developer can set everything up and have everything you need in its place and that’s everything from the host account, your theme, plugins and widgets, your logo and all those little things in between. With all that done, you’re able to get started on your posts. However, although you will save yourself a lot of time, generally this sort of service will cost. Prices vary depending on the services you require so be prepared; costs could begin well into the hundreds and go from there. Be prepared to climb to approximately $15K.

Do it Yourself

Courses cost so if you’re not interested in spending a lot of time learning about WordPress either online or via books, it is highly recommended that you remain with the latest information provided by WordPress. It changes often and you don’t want to be wasting money on stuff that is going to be out of date next week.

Reducing Costs

Automattic who are the creators of WordPress has created ways to reduce the costs of owning and operating a WordPress site. Below is a list of plugins and services they provide which will bring down the costs of development.

• WordPress.com VIP
• CodePoet
• Simperium
• Jetpack
• VaultPress
• Akismet
• Cloudup
• Polldaddy
• Gravatar

So with the above at your disposal, running a WordPress site is more cost effective than it has ever been. WordPress is probably the most favoured of all websites and whilst Automattic continues to build a whole lot of new stuff, it’s helping to reduce the costs for the end user.

Final Thoughts

I guess you’ve figured out how WordPress is the call to for all website requirements. It’s got everything you could possibly need and while it’s free, other costs don’t make too much of an impact. But this exercise has given you an insight into what the costs could be and when it’s all said and done, it’s your investment and it needs to be spent wisely.