[0:00]Hey, I'm Evan. I'm with Woo Ninjas. We're your WordPress, Learndash and WooCommerce experts. So if you've been thinking about switching from Shopify or starting your first e-commerce store, you might be wondering, how much does a WooCommerce site actually cost in 2025? Well, right now we're going to talk real numbers, no fluff, and we'll break down every key expense, so you don't overspend or get blindsided in the process.
[0:29]Okay, so right now we're going to break it down item by item to show you actually how much it will cost to build your own WooCommerce site. So, the first thing you need to create a site is a domain name. So, we'll just do a test name and see how much it costs. CloudFlare is a great option because it allows you full management of your domain, and they have some very good back-end features if you ever really were to get technical and dig into it. So, we've got about 10.44 for the domain registration. This is typically the cheapest out of all the other ones, Namecheap, GoDaddy, even if you want to compare. So after you have your domain, you're going to need a way to get your website on the internet, and that's when hosting comes into play. One of the partners that we work with for the last six plus years is Cloudways, and what it looks like to get hosting ranges from $14 to $280. Most likely, you're not going to be in these more expensive plans, but you may be starting these lower plans and then scale up as you need. Remember, there's standard, but premium is a little bit better, it's well worth it for the extra $3 per plan. So, if you wanted to just get started with the simple plan of $14, and then after everything's built out and people start coming to your site, then you scale up to a bigger and bigger plan. Regarding a theme, this isn't absolutely necessary, but it is great for having a fast website that actually looks great in the process and is easy for yourself or your development team to edit. So, this is Astra. They build lightweight, screaming fast themes built for WordPress and work well with WooCommerce and Learndash. To see the pricing, we go over here, it ranges to about 50 to 80. Just also know that if you have 10 sites, it just costs a little bit more than one site, and there's a lifetime option or an annual option. So, roughly it's between $50 to $80 for one site. And you also get themes built into the process, and you can dig through here and actually see if you want the full toolkit or if you just want Pro. Since we're actually building a commerce site, don't forget WooCommerce, the add-on or plugin that actually builds the store. This is one of the platforms that is a main competitor to Shopify, and what people like about it is it's much easier to build a website that you actually own and control, not Shopify. So you can have multiple payment processing methods, you can actually change and edit products, you can completely change the code of the website, and Shopify is a lot less flexible. So, this is actually free. However, they do have plugins and add-ons that do cost money. So once you have your domain, hosting, your theme, and WooCommerce, you're going to actually need a way to process and accept payments. Luckily, there's Stripe, and there's no upfront fee with Stripe. Stripe has a very standard pricing model that is simply just 2.9% of your transactions plus 30 cents per transaction. So, that's very streamlined. They have a lot of other services and offerings, but the thing you got to worry about now is just the cost to accept payments with Stripe, or PayPal, or any other platform that you actually want to. And a great thing about Stripe is you can also accept Apple Pay, Mastercard, Affirm, they have options like Buy Now, Pay Later, which does cost 6%. But Stripe offers you pretty much everything that you're going to need to start your business. So, once you have the bare structure of your business, if you're going to have a WooCommerce store and you sell products, that's very straightforward, that doesn't cost anything. However, if you want to start doing different things like adding subscription services, maybe they want to, for this, for example, this picture, get coffee delivered every single week on a subscription recurring basis. There are plugins for that, and Woo, WooCommerce actually offers that. So, they range from about 279 for a year, or more or less the double the price for two years. Also, if you did want to have something that wasn't unique like selling a product, if you actually wanted to do bookings for people's time, then you would need a plugin like WooCommerce Bookings. There's also third-party plugins as well for both of them, but this is one that works well. And now we're on the topic of plugins. Say, for example, you have a site that you also want to turn into Spanish, or Chinese, or Japanese, any other language, really helps to have WPML, which actually helps with making your site multilingual. And that price ranges from 39 to €100. This is in euros. And then, to get the biggest package, it is €200. So, I would think somewhere in the €40 to €100 price range. Remember, all these plugins are optional. If you just want a bare bones WooCommerce site, you don't need to add any of these plugins. Usually what people do is build the WooCommerce site, and then down the line, as they see features they need or are missing, they start getting more and more plugins, they add to their site to get exactly what they want out of WooCommerce. Since we're already talking about all the different plugins that can fix and customize your site, I thought I'd bring up our WooCommerce extensions. So, here at Woo Ninjas, we have over 85 custom plugins we've made. Here are the ones that are built just for WooCommerce. There'll be a link in the description for that. Moving on to the more optional things that if you think it's important to have SEO, meaning people can search on Google and actually find your business, Yoast is one of the top plugins for WordPress to help optimize your website to be found on Google, Bing, any other search engine. So, there is a free version, but after using a bit of the free version, it's always good to think about upgrading to the $99 per year plan. So, that would be the price of SEO. Remember, it does take a good amount of work as well, it's not just you buy the plugin, your website's indexed, and people can find you, there's still a good amount of work. One more optional thing that might be good is that once you get people to buy, you're going to want to keep them in the loop. So, there are many different email services out there. MailPoet is one, Klaviyo is another. Basically, it ranges on the number of subscribers you have, so if you have 500, it'll be 30 per month. The difference with Klaviyo is it also allows email and SMS. That's one of the best ways for actually getting people to read and take action. So, if you get people to get on SMS, that's a great idea as well. So, Klaviyo is about 60 for email and SMS, or it's about 45. So, if you just wanted to use this 1,000 to 1,500 profiles number, for Klaviyo it's 45. And then for MailPoet, it is just about between 20 and 60. So, choose whatever you want, there's many other platforms out there like MailGrid and others. Also, I did want to jump in and say that you can build out everything with WooCommerce and WordPress on your own. However, there is a learning curve and it will take a good amount of time, but if you did want to delegate that to a company who's built over 500 websites, we have 85 active plugins, we've been doing this for 10 years, we're happy to help. We have an e-commerce website development service that allows you to tell us what you want and we will build out exactly what you desire. So, whether that's custom code, adding plugins, or even just fixing a site that you already have, that you want some modifications or upgrades that you can't really figure out how to do. Yeah, we've been doing that for 10 years, so feel free to go to the bottom of this page and fill out the contact form. Link is in the description. So, one of the things you can also do by yourself is WooCommerce maintenance. It does take a good amount of time, and you have to manage security, updates, backups, documentation, making sure that custom code is up to date. So, there is a good amount of work, but if you're comfortable and technical, this is a great thing you can do on your own. So, some of the things that we make sure we offer that a lot of other providers don't is website documentation right here. So, if anything does happen to your site, we make sure to document it, so if you're going to hand off your site to another development team, they know exactly what to do and what's been done. Website audit, so we make sure how the speed and the different plugins are working and make sure we optimize that. We do maintenance reports to make sure everything's going well. You also get priority support, and we reach out and we actually can fix your website when you ask any questions. That's something that WooCommerce could never do. Speed and performance optimization, along with custom code monitoring and constant website backups. So, how much does this cost? This costs between 169 with no custom development hours to 419 per month with 24 custom development hours, which is important. So, if you ever do have a question or need something, you just tell us and we just do it. No. So, yeah, if you have any questions, feel free to go to the bottom and fill out the form, or you can just choose a plan and move from there. Alright, time to get to the grand finale where we add everything up. So, as we did break it down in the beginning, we started with the essentials, so that's domain, hosting, and the Astra theme. So, that would range on the low side with cheap hosting and the basic Astra theme about 228. And if you were to get the most expensive hosting, which you wouldn't need in the beginning, it'd be $1,290. We did bring up the optional add-ons, such as the maintenance plan, which ranges from about two to 5,000. There's a number of different plugins and extensions that you can add on to your site to make it exactly how you want, whether that's adding bookings or adding subscriptions and so many more options out there. You can check our site, so that would be roughly 3 to 800. And remember, when you have people on your list, you also need to email or text them, so email marketing would be between 120 and 720, depending on the number of people on your list. So, always think if you start off, it starts on the lower side. And then the SEO plugin would be 100. So, this total right here would range in just the optional section will be 2,500 to say 6,600. So, if you were to combine the extras, the optional plus the essentials, $2,800 to $8,000. And remember, that is just the website and everything you need paid every year. This is what it costs. However, if you don't want to set it all up yourself, I would assume somewhere in the range of $1,000 to $5,000 to get your site set up and running. We do offer that service or you can find another company that does the same. So, in summary, that's what it takes to start up a WooCommerce site. We're talking from 228 to $13,000 is the range to start up a site, depending on the size and depending on how fast of a server that you do want and if you want maintenance. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, our link's in the description. Happy to help you with building your WooCommerce site. See you in the next video.
