WordPress pricing
Real ranges, not “it depends.” Below is what WordPress work costs around Tampa Bay — and the number most quotes leave out: the annual plugin subscriptions you'll pay forever, which often exceed the cost of just building the thing properly once.
These are typical market ranges, not menu prices — where a project lands depends entirely on scope, which is why we quote every job individually and in writing. E-commerce is the wild card: a simple store can land near the WordPress range, while a complex one with inventory, shipping rules, and account areas sails well past it.
Three to eight pages, custom-designed, mobile-first, with a contact form and SEO basics done properly. Often built as a static site — no database, nothing to hack, almost nothing to maintain. The right ship for most service businesses that need to look credible and get found.
A content-managed site your own crew can update — blog, galleries, staff pages — with a custom WordPress theme built for your business rather than one bought off a shelf. The range widens with page count, custom features, and how much content already exists versus needs writing.
Booking systems, customer portals, dashboards, tools that run part of your business — usually built on Laravel. There's no ceiling to quote honestly here because the price is the feature list — which is exactly why these projects get scoped in detail before anyone names a number.
Harbor Watch ($149/mo) keeps your site updated, backed up, and fast. Full Watch ($349/mo) adds instant lead response and monthly conversion improvements. Month to month, no contract — the full plans are below.
One monthly plan for Tampa Bay contractors and trades. Harbor Watch keeps your site fast, safe, and current. Full Watch adds instant lead response and ongoing conversion work. Both month to month — no contract, cancel anytime.
Site care, fully handled: updates tested on staging before they touch production, daily backups, security, uptime and speed monitoring, small content changes, and a real human to call when something breaks.
Everything in Harbor Watch, plus every web inquiry answered in under a minute — nights, weekends, holidays. Qualifying questions handled, estimates booked into your calendar, a monthly lead report, and one conversion improvement every month.
Setup covers onboarding: a speed pass, security hardening, and wiring your forms and lead flow. Start with the free lead-response audit — it's how every Full Watch retainer begins, and the report is yours either way.
Two "five-page websites" can differ in price by thousands of dollars and both quotes can be honest. Here's what's actually varying under the waterline.
Ten pages that share three layouts cost far less than ten pages that each need their own design. It's the unique layouts, not the page count, that take the hours.
A contact form is an afternoon. Online payments, member logins, booking calendars, and search are each their own piece of engineering — and each one moves the quote.
Connecting your site to a CRM, scheduling tool, payment processor, or inventory system means working with someone else's API — sometimes smooth sailing, sometimes a reef we have to chart carefully first.
If your text, photos, and logo are ready, we build. If they need writing, shooting, or untangling from an old site, that's real work someone has to do — and it shows up in the price.
What pushes a quote up Custom functionality, e-commerce, integrations with other systems, content that doesn't exist yet, migrations from an old platform, tight deadlines, and "we'll figure it out as we go" scoping — which is the most expensive sentence in web development.
What keeps a quote down Content ready before the build starts, a clear list of must-haves separated from nice-to-haves, standard features over invented ones, launching in phases instead of all at once, and honest answers about what the site actually needs to do on day one.
Red flags in a $500 website At that price the math only works one way: a recycled template with your logo swapped in, a platform you don't own, and the real revenue hiding in monthly fees or hostage hosting. Ask three questions — do I own the code, do I own the domain, and what does month thirteen cost? A cheap quote that survives all three is rare water.
The Tampa Forge rule You get a written scope and a fixed price before a line of code is written, and the price doesn't drift. Estimates are honest or they are nothing — we'd rather lose a job than sink one.
Fixed price, in writing, before any work starts. The number you agree to is the number you pay. Hourly billing only shows up for genuinely open-ended ongoing work — and only if we both agree to it upfront.
Hosting is separate from the build, and the account is in your name — not held by us. A static site hosts for roughly $0–15 a month. WordPress on decent managed hosting usually runs $15–50 a month. Custom applications depend on what they do. Whatever you're building, the expected monthly cost is spelled out in the quote so nothing surprises you after launch.
A deposit books your spot in the build schedule; the rest is split across milestones you can see and click through, with the final payment due at launch. You never pay 100% upfront, and the exact schedule is written into the quote before you sign anything.
New ideas mid-voyage are normal — the site you imagine in week one is rarely the site you want in week four. Each new request gets its own written mini-quote: a price and a schedule impact, in plain English, before we build it. You decide whether it goes in now, waits for phase two, or walks the plank. The original fixed price never silently creeps.
Month to month, no contract: Harbor Watch is $149/mo ($495 one-time setup), Full Watch is $349/mo ($795 one-time setup). Setup covers onboarding — a speed pass, security hardening, and wiring your forms and lead flow. Cancel with 30 days' notice. Everything we build for you stays yours, including the lead-response setup.
This is the part that changes the decision, and almost nobody puts it in a quote.
Five premium plugins at $80-200/year each is $400-1,000 annually, before hosting, forever, for features you don't own.
A $2,500 custom plugin replacing $700/year of subscriptions has paid for itself by year four and keeps paying.
When a plugin author raises prices, gets acquired, or quits, that's your site's problem. Owned code isn't.
One $99/year plugin doing one job well is cheaper than any custom build. We'll tell you when that's the case.
Describe the site and what it needs to do. You'll get a written scope with one fixed price — plus the honest annual cost of running it.
Get a fixed quoteNo ransom required. The quote costs nothing and obligates nothing.
Tampa Forge