What £500 Gets You for a WordPress Site (And What It Doesn't)

Introduction

Our WordPress projects start at £500. That number raises eyebrows on both sides — clients ask what's the catch, freelancers ask how anyone makes money at that rate. So let's pull it apart properly. What you get for that money, what you don't, and where the price has to go up.

This isn't a pricing page. It's the conversation we have on every first call, written out so you can have it with yourself before you ring anyone.

What £500 Actually Pays For

A £500 WordPress site from us is a real, working website. Not a Fiverr-grade template-and-pray job. Specifically:

Turnaround is typically 7-10 working days. That's because we're not designing your brand from scratch, not writing your copy from scratch, and not building anything bespoke beyond styling decisions.

If you have your logo, your text, a rough idea of what you want it to look like, and your hosting sorted — £500 gets you live in under two weeks.

What £500 Doesn't Pay For

This is the bit that matters more.

Bespoke Design

£500 doesn't buy a custom Figma file, three rounds of design iteration, and a brand identity. It buys "make this template look like our brand." If you want a designer crafting your site from scratch, that's a £2,000-£4,000 conversation, depending on scope.

Copywriting

We're not writing your "About Us" page for £500. We can place your existing copy beautifully and tweak headings, but the words come from you. If you need copy written, add £300-£600 depending on how many pages.

E-commerce

WooCommerce changes the project. Product catalogues, payment gateways, shipping logic, tax setup, GDPR-compliant checkouts — none of this fits in 5 pages and 10 days. WooCommerce starts at around £1,200 for a basic shop.

Custom Functionality

Booking systems, member portals, multi-step forms with logic, integrations with your CRM, custom dashboards — all of these are real work. They don't fit in £500 because they take real time. We'll quote them separately and tell you upfront what they cost.

SEO Beyond the Basics

Basic on-page SEO is part of the £500. A keyword strategy, content plan, backlink work, technical audit, schema markup beyond the defaults — that's a separate engagement.

Content Migration

If you've got an old site with 50 blog posts and you want them moved over, that's labour. Usually a few hundred quid depending on volume.

Speed Optimisation

A £500 site loads fine on a decent host. If you want sub-2-second loads under load, that needs caching configuration, image work, asset optimisation, and database tuning. Another £300-£500 typically.

Ongoing Maintenance

Updates, backups, security monitoring, plugin compatibility checks — none of this is included. We offer maintenance retainers starting at £40 a month, but you can self-manage if you're technical enough.

Why the Line Sits at £500

I've been doing this 15 years. I've seen the £150 jobs and I've seen the £15,000 jobs. £500 isn't an arbitrary number — it's the floor at which we can still do the job properly without rushing.

Below that, you're either getting a one-page Wix-style template-fill (which is fine, just not what we do) or you're getting work from someone cutting corners somewhere. Usually the corner is: no testing on mobile, no security hardening, hosting set up wrong, contact form silently broken, no analytics, no SSL, no backups configured. The site looks fine on day one and is a disaster on day ninety.

The reason a "cheap WordPress site" so often ends up costing more is that you pay £200 for the original, then £400 to a second person to fix it, then £600 when the security issue takes the site down and a third person rebuilds.

£500 covers the time to set things up properly the first time. No miracles, no luxury — just done right.

When £500 Is Genuinely Enough

Honestly, more often than people think. If you're:

Then £500 does the job. You don't need £5,000 of custom design. You need a site that loads, looks decent, ranks for your name, and converts the people who already know about you.

We've built dozens of these. Most of them are still running, untouched, three or four years later. That's the point — keep it simple, keep it solid, keep it cheap, and revisit when the business actually needs more.

When You Genuinely Need to Spend More

When the website is the business. A SaaS landing page funneling paid ads doesn't get to be £500 — every hour of conversion optimisation pays for itself a hundred times. A high-ticket consultancy where the site is the entire sales pitch needs proper design. An e-commerce store with 200 SKUs and three warehouses needs proper architecture.

In those cases, asking "what's the cheapest" is the wrong question. The right question is "what's the ROI" — and you'll find investing £4,000 in something that converts at 3% beats investing £500 in something that converts at 0.3%.

How to Tell if a Quote Is Suspicious

Anyone quoting £500 for a WooCommerce store with 100 products is lying or about to disappear. Same for anyone quoting £500 for a "full SEO package" or a "complete branding and website."

What's reasonable at £500:

What's not reasonable:

If anyone promises you those things at £500, ask how. Their answer will tell you what corner they're cutting.

So, What Now

If you're a small business or solo founder and a £500 site sounds about right — drop us a line. We'll have a 15-minute call, work out if your project actually fits the brief, and quote you honestly if it doesn't.

If you're not sure whether £500 is enough for what you need, that's also the call to have. Better to spend 15 minutes on the phone than three months on the wrong website.