The honest pricing bands
- $1,500–$3,500 — Template-based small business sites assembled from a pre-built theme with minor customisation. Fine for a one-person service business. Rarely great for SEO or conversion out of the box.
- $4,000–$10,000 — Properly configured SME WordPress sites with a solid theme, a dozen or so custom pages, baseline SEO setup, speed tuning and training. The realistic floor for a commercial site.
- $10,000–$25,000 — Custom-designed WordPress builds with bespoke page templates, a proper design system, structured content types, integrations (CRM, booking, email) and measurable SEO work.
- $25,000–$60,000+ — Larger commercial builds: multi-language, multi-location, product catalogue, custom WooCommerce, API integrations and ongoing optimisation.
These are realistic Australian studio rates in 2026. Anything well below this band is either a template site in disguise or someone shifting work offshore.
What actually drives cost
- Design depth. A themed build reuses layouts. A custom WordPress website design creates them.
- Page count & content types. Ten pages is not "the same as" sixty.
- SEO foundations. Proper technical SEO takes real hours — meta, schema, sitemaps, internal linking, performance.
- Integrations. CRM, booking, ERP, API integrations each add scope.
- Speed & Core Web Vitals. Getting to mobile green is engineering, not luck — see WordPress speed optimisation.
- Copy & imagery. Someone has to write the words and light the photos.
What "cheap" actually costs you
A $1,500 WordPress site is almost always rebuilt within 18 months — we see this pattern constantly. The real cost is the traffic and leads you never had in the intervening period, plus rebuilding from scratch.
Where to focus a real budget
- A clean, fast, custom-coded WordPress foundation.
- Content structured around commercial intent, not decoration.
- Technical SEO baked in from day one.
- An asset pipeline that keeps the site fast as it grows.
For what a disciplined SEO foundation can do on a WordPress site, see the technical SEO case study.
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