The Real Cost to Setup a WordPress Blog / Store
So you want to start your own WordPress blog or online store?
You have some ideas that might change the course of time and you want to put them on the big wide web for everyone to see, or you have just created a new product that you wish to sell, but for how much?
Well realistically you’re looking at around £150, and no, I didn’t miss a few extra zeros at the end, take away years worth hosting for £10 or less per month.
Hosting
You can purchase cheap hosting from godaddy, bluehost, 1&1 etc which will do the job but if you want something with a bit more power then that’s gonna cost an extra.
Bare in mind that when you’re on a shared hosting platform with other users your site speed is gonna differ. An example would be when another site on the same server you’re on starts getting a peak in traffic most resources are gonna be used to keep that site up and running which is good for them but bad for you as your site starts becoming sluggish and refuses to load.
Domain Name
A domain name is needed of course how could I forget as you’ll need a domain name to access your site/store, they start from as little as 99p depending on what suffix you’re using.
So what money do you have left…..do you need to spend that money?
WordPress is a free open source content management system and has thousands of free plugins and themes to choose from.
Themes
If that money is still burning a whole in your pocket then you can head over to Themeforest or a similar website and buy a premium WordPress theme, something’s responsive, mobile ready, e-commerce ready and of course fast.
Plus most premium / free themes come with a selection of demos that you can import into your WordPress site and then all you have to do really is change the text and a few images and you have yourself a brand new, flashy, fast website.
E-commerce
For the e-commerce side of the site if you’re wanting to go down that route then woo commerce is my answer to you, it is the best e-commerce plugin for WordPress, it has a bunch of features, it’s easy to use and you can start selling in no time.
The real cost here is your time, building a WordPress blog from scratch is a long and difficult task if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can pay professionals to do this for you but again that’s more money that you wish you had.
Overall from start to finish, it should take you a day* or so to actually get it setup and everything installed then it’s just a matter of doing some adjustments to make it unique.
Take time with your blog, read up on WordPress watch a few tutorials get to grips with it so you can take full advantage of what’s available to you.