Ask three agencies to quote the same website and you will get three numbers that differ by a factor of ten. None of them are necessarily lying. They are answering different questions. This post shows you how to ask the right one.
Why quotes vary so wildly
“A website” is not a product. It is a bundle of decisions that haven’t been made yet: how many templates, who writes the content, what happens at 10,000 visitors a day, who maintains it after launch. When a brief leaves those questions open, every agency answers them differently, and prices them differently.
A low quote usually means the agency answered every open question with the cheapest option. A high quote often means they priced in the risk of not knowing. Neither number tells you what your site should cost.
A quote is an answer. If you didn’t define the question, it’s answering someone else’s.
The four cost buckets
Every WordPress project, from a five-page brochure site to a full platform, breaks down into the same four buckets. Make each one explicit and the quotes suddenly become comparable.
- Design. Custom design, a customized theme, or an off-the-shelf theme. This choice alone can swing the budget 5x.
- Development. Templates, custom functionality, integrations. Count the things that don’t exist in any plugin yet. Those are the expensive ones.
- Content. Copy, photography, migration of old material. The bucket everyone forgets and the most common reason launches slip.
- Running costs. Hosting, licences, maintenance, updates. A site is a subscription, not a purchase. Ask for the yearly number up front.
Questions that expose a bad quote
You don’t need to be technical to pressure-test a proposal. Ask what happens if you need one more template than scoped. Ask which parts are custom code and which are existing plugins. Ask who owns the code and the hosting account when you part ways. Ask what a change request costs after sign-off.
Vague answers to any of these are where “hidden costs” live. A transparent agency will answer all four in writing without flinching. That, more than the number at the bottom, is what you’re choosing between.
The bottom line
The real cost of a WordPress website is set before any code is written, in the questions you answer or fail to answer in the brief. Spend the effort there. And if you’d like a second pair of eyes on a quote you’ve received, that’s precisely the kind of session I run.