What a WordPress Website Actually Costs in India

A website quote bundles several separate jobs, and the ratio between them varies enormously by project:

• Design — whether it's bespoke, adapted from a template, or supplied by you as a Figma file.
• Development — turning that design into a working site, which is where the theme decision lands.
• Content — writing, editing, sourcing images. Frequently underestimated and frequently the thing that delays launch.
• Functionality — forms, bookings, payments, integrations, anything beyond pages and posts.
• Setup — hosting, domain, SSL, email, analytics, search console.
• Project management, revisions, testing and handover.

• Template versus custom theme. A well-chosen commercial theme configured properly is a fraction of the cost of a bespoke build, and for many businesses it's the right answer.
• Number of unique page templates. Twelve pages using three layouts is much less work than twelve pages with twelve layouts.
• Ecommerce. A store is a different category of project: products, payments, shipping, tax, invoicing, and testing all of it.
• Integrations. Anything that has to talk to a CRM, an ERP, a booking system or a payment gateway carries its own discovery, build and testing.
• Content readiness. If you supply final copy and images, the project moves. If the developer is waiting on content or writing it, cost and timeline both grow.
• Multilingual. Two languages is meaningfully more than twice one, because every template and every content workflow doubles.

This is where budgets go wrong. The build is the visible number; the running costs are the ones people discover later.

• Hosting, annually — and a store needs better hosting than a brochure site.
• Domain renewal, annually.
• Premium plugin and theme licences, annually. A store can easily carry several.
• Maintenance: updates, backups, monitoring, small fixes.
• Payment gateway transaction fees, if you're selling.
• Email service, if you're sending transactional or marketing email properly rather than through the server.
• Content: someone has to keep writing it.

Almost always because they're quoting different work. One includes content migration and the other doesn't. One includes a custom theme and the other a configured template. One includes three months of post-launch support and the other includes none. One has read the brief carefully and priced the integration; the other has assumed it's simple.

There's also a real difference in what you get for the money — code quality, performance, security practice, and whether the site is maintainable by someone else afterwards. Those don't show up in a proposal unless you ask about them.

When a quote is dramatically lower than the others, the useful question isn't "why is this cheap?" but "what does this one not include?"

• Send every developer the same written brief. Different briefs produce incomparable quotes.
• Ask for an itemised scope: pages, templates, features, integrations, revision rounds, and what happens after launch.
• Ask explicitly what's excluded. The exclusions list is more informative than the inclusions list.
• Ask who owns the code, the hosting account, the domain and the plugin licences at the end.
• Ask what maintenance costs after launch, and what the hourly rate is for work outside scope.
• Ask to see two or three live sites they've built with similar requirements, and open them on your phone.

A staged structure protects both sides: a deposit to start, one or two milestone payments tied to deliverables, and a final payment on completion. Avoid paying everything up front, and be wary of a developer who asks for it.

Be equally wary of paying nothing until the end. That structure encourages corner-cutting and gives the developer no protection against a project that stalls on your side, which is more common than people expect.

Define what "complete" means in writing before you start, so the final payment isn't a negotiation.

• Performance work, if your customers are on mobile data. It affects every visit.
• A proper content model, if the site has structured content. Retrofitting one is far more expensive than building it right.
• Accessibility, which is both the right thing and a legal consideration in some sectors.
• Checkout work on a store, where small improvements compound over every order.
• Handover and documentation, which is what makes the site maintainable by anyone other than the person who built it.

• Custom design for pages nobody visits. Check your analytics before commissioning bespoke layouts for them.
• Animation and scroll effects that cost performance and rarely change behaviour.
• Features for a stage you haven't reached yet. A membership area you'll launch next year is next year's project.
• A custom theme for a site that is genuinely a standard brochure site with a standard structure.

Write down what the site must do on day one, separately from what it should do eventually. Get the first list quoted properly and build that well. Phase the second list.

Then set aside a realistic annual figure for hosting, licences and maintenance before you commit to the build, because a site you can't afford to maintain will cost more to rescue in two years than the maintenance would have cost.

If you have a brief and want a straight answer about what's realistic for it, send it over and I'll tell you what I'd include and what I'd phase.