How much should I budget for a Website?

Thinking of creating a website for your business, hobby, or blog?

This article gives a complete break down of all the costs for a website. As a web designer, I’ve created many websites and tried and use many plugins. I’m providing my list of go-to plugins as part of the budget.

Whether you have a bare-bones budget or more wiggle room in the budget, this article will give you an idea of the overall cost to build and maintain a WordPress website.

Hosting Provider

The Hosting Provider is the server that will host your website.   The cheapest hosting plans are shared server plans (meaning not just your website is on the server) v. a dedicated IP address.  Most small websites and blogs choose this option.

You only have access to your website, but other websites are on the same server.

The hosting provider also provides support and maintenance of the servers. If your site is down due to a server issue, you place a call or email to the support for them to handle the issue.

Hosting providers offer a FREE installation of WordPress, which is the foundation of your website.

 If you do not have a hosting provider, I recommend BlueHost. Bluehost has top-notch service and features, including a free shared SSL certificate. Bluehost is an affiliate and you receive a discount if you click our link to BlueHost.

Note: At Create IT Web Designs, we believe in transparency. If you purchase hosting using our referral link, then we will get a small commission at no additional cost to you. You will receive a discount on hosting plus a free domain name. We would get this commission for recommending any WordPress hosting company, but we only recommend products that we personally use or have our clients use.

Bluehost costs $3.95** for 36 months billed upfront ($142.20).  Keep in mind Bluehost offers specials from time to time as the price might be higher or lower depending upon the sale being offered.

Additional Bluehost Options

Setup fee – FREE

Primary Domain Registration – FREE         ($15.99 Annual Renewal)

*Receiving the Domain name free is a great discount and benefit. The annual renewal fee of $15.99 per year per domain name is industry average.

Domain Privacy Protection = $.99 per month ($11.88 a year)

Domain Privacy

The whois information for any domain name is available to anyone on the internet.

Your whois information can be harvested by marketing and financial loan companies, which may give you unwanted solicitations.

When you add Bluehost Domain Privacy to your registration, the only information listed in the whois will be Bluehost. Here is an example of what the whois might look like for your domain.

createitwebdesigns.com participates in select affiliate programs. This means that if you click and/or make a purchase through certain affiliate links on this site, createitwebdesigns.com may make a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Please read our disclaimer for more information.

With Bluehost Privacy you will still be the owner of the domain name, but your contact details will not be accessible through the whois information.

Choosing the privacy policy option is a personal preference. If you are a travel blogger, using your website as a hobby, or your business is out of your home, I’d highly recommend purchasing domain privacy as you do not want people to know where you live and your phone number.

On the contrary, if you are building a legitimate website or business, why would you want or need to hide your contact information?

A third option is to have your phone number as a Google Voice number (Free), which helps block spam calls and to buy a PO Box (which is recommended to also use when you have Mailing list further down in this article).

Be prepared for a large volume of spam calls the first month if you do not choose the privacy option or Google Voice Number (which helps filter robocalls).

The calls will eventually slow down, but it is also a nuance to not selecting this option.

SiteLock Security Find – $1.99 per month ($23.88 a year)

With SiteLock Find You Receive

• Basic Spam Monitoring: Checks your site daily to make sure it is free of spam lists.
• Basic Business Verification: Validates that your business exists and can be trusted.
• Site Verification Certificate: Increase conversions and develop customer trust.
• Blacklist Monitoring: Avoid your site being quarantined by search engines.
• Basic Malware Monitoring: Scans your site daily for malware that would block potential visitors.

*There are better FREE Security plugins available than this one that offers more features than the paid SiteLock.

The customer reviews on SiteLock are average and the Malware monitoring does not include a firewall.

If you do purchase SiteLock, I recommend adding an additional FREE security plugin for scanning for malware.

Codeguard Basic – $2.99 per month (billed to the end of hosting term) (35.88 per year)

CodeGuard works behind the scenes, taking daily backups and saving each as a separate version – making it easy to turn back the clock should disaster strike.

• Daily Backups: Secure all your hard work with an automatic, daily backup of your site.
• Monitoring: Rest easy knowing CodeGuard is diligently checking your site for changes every day.
• One-Click Restore: Revert back to a previous version of your website with just one click.
• Redundancy: Redundant copies of your backups are stored across multiple secure locations.

*Backups are VERY important to the health of your website.

Which backup software you use is a personal preference.

I list FREE backup programs below (although the FREE version is a manual backup). Please read until the end of the article to see the premium options.

Bluehost SEO Tools Start – $2.99 per month (Billed annually at $35.88 per year)

The Bluehost start package is the perfect choice if you are beginning with a new website that needs to be submitted to search engines. You receive weekly reports about how your site is progressing and recommendations on how to optimize your site further. Features include:

• Search engine submission
• 50-page analysis
• Weekly scan
• 10 keyword ranking reports
• 2 competitor reports
• Monthly email report
• Marketing report with 5 recommendations

**First, submitting to search engines is super easy and less than 5 minutes of your time.

There are free SEO plugins, such as Yoast which help with search engine optimization. Unless you are well versed in SEO and need competitor reports, I recommend skipping this option.

Cost of Hosting

Minimum Cost: cost is $3.95* for 36 months built upfront ($142.20) (recurring annual fee of $15.99 for domain)

Base + Privacy = $154.08 (+recurring annual fee of $11.88 for privacy)

Base + Privacy + CodeGuard = $189.96 (+recurring annual fee of $35.88 for code guard)

Base+Privacy + CodeGuard + SiteLock + SEO = $249.72 (+recurring annual fee of $59.76 for SiteLock and SEO)

Email

An email address is included with purchasing web hosting through Bluehost and most other hosting providers.  They offer FREE cloud-based email clients, such as Horde, SquirrelMail, and Roundcube.  All 3 email clients are a bit out-dated but still functional.  If you would like for your email address such as yourname@yourdomain.com to go through Gmail then you will need to purchase Gmail G-suites.  The cost is $5 per month ($60 a year).

Themes

One of the biggest mistakes people make is not putting in money to budget for a theme!

The best themes are NOT FREE!

There are some good themes for FREE, but not the BEST themes. I’ve tried plenty of themes as a web designer. It doesn’t mean all paid themes are great either.

Choose wisely.  Out of all your purchases, this one is the most important.

Purchasing a theme allows you to have documentation of the theme and support on the theme (which I’ve always had to contact to ask a question).

There are many great places to get themes such as Themefuse, StudioPress, Themeforest, Elegant Themes, Themify, and the Creative Market.

If you want to know what you should look for in a theme, please check out my Ultimate Guide For Themes.

How much does a theme cost? It ranges from $40-$80. Some themes have annual support of about $50-$80, but not all.

Want to know what theme my website is built with? My website is built on the ThemeFuse Core theme. I love it because of the plug-and-play features and great support. It costs about $79, depending upon the promotion being run, and no annual fee.

Estimated Cost of Theme $79 (hopefully with NO annual fee)

Plugins

There are a huge array of plugins that you can use for your website.

This is one of the many benefits of using WordPress.

Below is the list of basic plugins that I’m using personally, have used on my customer’s website, or I recommend.

You don’t need to install them all. Choose what is best for your website.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND choosing a security plugin and a backup plugin.

I also recommend choosing a mailing list plugin and service as collection your customer’s email is a must to keep your customers coming back and engaging with you.

Many experienced bloggers and businesses regret not starting out with collecting emails for a mailing list. This mailing lists ARE your customers and potential future customers.

Plugin List

(in alphabetical order)

• Antispam Bee FREE or Akismet Anti-Spam – $5 per month – helps stop comments that are spam.
• Broken Link Checker– FREE – checks to make sure all of your links are valid.
• Duplicate Post – FREE – allows you to copy a page or post and then modify the copy to a new page or post
• Eww Image Optimizer –FREE to $9 a month – helps make the images on your website smaller for faster processing and page speed.
• Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights – FREE to $99 a year – allows you to see how many page views, who is viewing your site, and who is linking to your site.
• Instagram Feed – FREE – allows you to put a link of the pictures you post on Instagram
• Mailerlite (FREE up to 1000 subscribers)/Convertkit ($15+ per month)– an opt-in form to allow you to collect emails from your audience and customers.   (Note: You must have a valid address when using Mailerlite according to the US Government CAN-SPAM Act. Most home businesses choose to rent a PO Box from the USPS for an average of $100 a year depending upon your city to avoid their address on the Online Mailer form. After much research USPS has the cheapest rates of any mailer service including virtual mailing. ConvertKit offers a free virtual mailbox where they will scan and email you any letters that are sent as part of their fee.)

• Social Warfare – FREE (Pro version is $29 a year) – puts social media icons on your webpage for viewers to easily post to their social media feeds.
• TinyMCE Advanced – FREE – $34 a year for the Pro version – HTML shortcodes so you may write your page and posts quicker.
• Updraft Plus – Backup/Restore – FREE/Paid Version – $95 a year
• Woocommerce – the gold standard for having an online shop. FREE – $149 depending upon what additional features you want added on.
• Wordfence – FREE – $99 a year OR Ithemes Security—FREE – $80 a year OR *Succuri – $299.99 a year – Website security, malware scanner and firewall
• Yoast SEO – FREE – $89 a year – search engine optimization to help your website appear in search results.

Plugins Total Cost

Plugins will run you a grand total of $0 to $1000+ a year depending upon what advanced features you are wanting and needing.

The FREE versions offer plenty of great features and for the most part, is all that you need when starting out. I personally started out with all the FREE plugins until I had needed a specific feature to make better use of my time.

Estimated Cost for Plugins for a beginning website = FREE – $100 a year.

Intermediate Website Costs – $200-$300 a year.

Advanced Website Costs – $500+ a year

Estimated Grand Total Cost For The First Year

Basic Hosting Plan + Privacy – $154.08

Theme = $79

Gmail G-Suites (with 20% discount code for the first year) – $48

Plugins =$0

PO Box = $100

Grand Total = $381.08 for first year

Second Year

Domain = $15.99

Privacy = $11.88

Theme = $0 (if you choose a theme with no annual fee)

Gmail G-Suites = $60

Plugins = $0 (unless choosing upgraded features in paid themes)

Mailerlite email marketing – $0 (unless have over 1000 subscribers)

PO Box = $100

Total = $187.87

Conclusion

Knowing how much you are going to spend on your website helps you plan and budget your expenses.

This is meant to be a way to identify your costs and may fluctuate depending upon how fast your website grows and what you want to add on and spend for additional plugins.

This does not include any website design and development costs, if you hire a web designer, like myself, OR if your web designer charges ongoing maintenance.

Did we forget your favorite plugin or do you have any comments?  Please, sound off below.