Yes, it costs that much. Let me tell you why.

There’s a person out there in the WordPress world who teaches people to make their own websites in WordPress. (I also offer WordPress Courses, if you’re looking for that sort of thing.) But this person does this thing in her marketing that completely rubs me the wrong way.

A lot of her marketing for her course refers to how much it can cost to have someone build a website for you, but she phrases it like its completely ridiculous and unfounded.

(side note – the purpose of her posts is to sell you on her course, and not hiring a developer to do it for you.)

Yes, having someone build a WordPress site for you can cost $5,000 USD or more. Yes, you can learn how to build your own WordPress website.

But there’s a trade-off in all of this.

When you hire a professional to do a job for you, you are paying for their experience and knowledge in addition to the finished product or deliverable that you get from them. Without the benefit of that knowledge and experience, you need to learn it all yourself. That means that in addition to the technical knowledge needed to put together the site, you have to learn about the marketing and conversion strategies you’ll need to employ to turn your website visitors into leads and customers. You’ll need to learn the technical lingo so you can communicate effectively to your service providers for hosting, email, and domain management. You’ll need to learn about backups and managing your site and keeping it secure. And all of the time that you’ll be spending learning how to do all of that well is time you could be spending making connections, converting leads, and making sales.

Let me tell you a little story to help illustrate this point.

My house of over 100 years old, so of course, it has quirks. A few years ago, I noticed a crack on my dining room ceiling. I am blessed to have a family full of handy people, including a dad who can fix just about anything, a brother who is a carpenter, and another brother who’s really tall (he’s in HVAC, so while he’s handy, that skillset wasn’t needed here.) The three of them came out one Saturday, inspected the crack, and decided that the ceiling needed to come down and be replaced.

Within 4 hours, the very old plaster and lathe ceiling was pulled down and carried out, and the new drywall was up. The carpenter brother, while not tall, is scary good and fast at installing drywall, especially with the help of the tall and strong brother to hold it in place. And this is while working around a fireplace and a curved wall for bay windows.

Ready for the analogy part? Someone without carpentry and drywall experience could totally have done the same work, but it probably would have taken a much longer time, and possibly more in materials cost to accommodate mistakes and mis-cuts (that curved wall was a doozy.)

Here’s the second part to the analogy. The drywall got put up that day, but the finishing (taping, mudding, sanding, and painting) was left for another day. The part, I volunteered, I could do. Well, I gotta tell you, it looks a lot easier when I see it on the home remodeling shows. I can do it. But it’s going to take a lot longer than if I had hired a professional to do it.

And that’s the point I’m trying to make. Building a WordPress website on your own is totally do-able, but it will take longer than if you have someone do it for you. It will cost you less in actual money spent to do it yourself, but it will cost more in time and in lost sales and missed opportunities. You can save money or you can save time, but it’s not really possible to save both and end up with a quality website.

There’s an old adage my father-in-law told me when I first started my business. Good, Fast, Cheap – you can only pick two.

• Good and Fast won’t be Cheap
• Good and Cheap won’t be Fast
• Fast and Cheap won’t be Good

Which two are you going to pick?