“It depends” is the honest answer to almost every website pricing question, and it’s also the answer nobody wants to hear when they’re trying to budget a project. So here are actual numbers: real ranges, based on real projects, broken down by what you’re actually buying at each price point.
These are the same figures I give clients directly, not marketing numbers designed to look attractive in a blog post.
Custom WordPress development: $10,000–$30,000
A full custom WordPress build, design and development together, typically lands between $10,000 and $30,000. Where you fall in that range depends on a few concrete factors, not vague “complexity”:
- Number of custom post types. A standard site with pages, posts, and maybe a testimonials or team section costs less than one with five or six distinct content types, each needing its own fields, templates, and admin experience.
- API integrations. Connecting to a CRM, marketing automation platform, or a third-party booking or payment system adds real development time, and the cost varies a lot depending on how well-documented (or not) the third-party API is.
- Specific requirements. Multisite architecture, SSO, custom user roles, or anything that isn’t “build pages, publish a blog” moves a project toward the top of the range.
A marketing site for a single-location business with a handful of page types sits at the lower end. An enterprise site with multiple content types, integrations, and governance requirements sits at the upper end. There isn’t a meaningful “custom WordPress site” under $10,000; below that, you’re generally looking at a page-builder build, which is a different product with different tradeoffs (I’ve written about why that tradeoff usually isn’t worth it for a business site).
Page-builder-to-custom migration: $15,000–$30,000
If you already have a site, on Elementor, Divi, or another builder, and want to move to a custom build without losing your content, rankings, or design equity, that’s a migration project rather than a build from scratch. Migrations run $15,000 to $30,000 and include design refinement (not usually a full redesign), development, testing, the migration itself, and 30 days of post-launch support to catch anything that needs adjusting once real traffic hits the new site.
Migrations cost more than you might expect for “moving” a site that already exists, because the actual work isn’t moving content, it’s rebuilding the site’s logic in code while preserving everything that currently makes it rank: metadata, schema markup, URL structure, and content relationships. Done properly, a migration should protect your SEO equity, not put it at risk.
Ongoing hosting, maintenance, and support
Once a site is live, there are two common ways to keep it running:
- Hosting and protection plan: starting at $1,500/year. Covers WordPress core updates, PHP version updates, security patches, plugin updates, performance monitoring, and backup management. This is the baseline for keeping a custom site secure and current without doing it yourself.
- General retainer: starting at $1,000/month for 10 hours. For clients who want ongoing development time, not just maintenance, whether that’s new features, content updates, or iterative improvements.
For smaller or one-off needs, hourly rates apply: $125/hour for consulting and project-based work, or $100/hour for clients on a standing monthly retainer.
AI optimization: $2,000–$30,000+
This is the newest line item, and the range is wide because “AI optimization” covers work at very different scales:
- Schema implementation: $2,000–$5,000. Structured data that makes your existing content legible to AI crawlers and answer engines.
- Content restructuring: $3,000–$8,000. Reorganizing existing pages and posts so their structure, headings, and semantic markup are actually parseable by AI systems, not just readable by humans.
- Full AI-ready rebuild: $20,000–$30,000+. A ground-up build with AI-ready architecture from day one, for sites where AI visibility is a primary goal rather than an add-on.
If your site is already well-built (clean code, good Core Web Vitals, no page builder), you can usually AI-optimize what exists rather than rebuilding. If it’s not, the rebuild and the AI-readiness work tend to happen together anyway, since the same clean-code foundation that helps AI systems parse your site is what also makes it fast and rankable in traditional search.
What actually drives you toward the top or bottom of a range
Across all of these categories, the same few variables move the number:
- How many distinct content types and templates the site needs
- How many third-party systems it has to talk to, and how good their APIs are
- Whether it’s a new build or a migration carrying existing SEO equity that has to be protected
- Governance requirements: multisite, SSO, role-based permissions, approval workflows
- How much of the design is being created versus refined from an existing brand system
None of these are padding. Each one is real engineering or design time, and a quote that ignores them isn’t more honest, it’s just missing information you’ll end up paying for anyway once the project is underway.
Timeline
Most custom WordPress projects take 12–16 weeks from discovery to launch: discovery, architecture planning, design, development, testing, optimization, and launch support. Migrations typically move faster on the development side since the content and information architecture already exist, but still need the same testing rigor before launch.
Getting an actual number for your project
Ranges are useful for budgeting, but the real number for your project depends on your specific content types, integrations, and goals. If you want a quote based on what you’re actually building rather than an average, tell me about your project, or start with the custom WordPress development page for more on how the process works.
