Custom WordPress builds at three brackets: $3,500-7,000 brochure, $9,000-20,000 custom, $25,000+ enterprise. Sage 10, real timelines, full handoff.
Base scope of work — applies to all tiers. See the tier comparison below for hours and SLA specifics.
Sage 10 with Bedrock on most projects, hand-rolled _s fork for smaller brochure work. No premium ThemeForest themes.
6-16 custom Gutenberg blocks or ACF Flexible Content layouts tuned for your editor team's actual workflow.
RankMath, Wordfence, WP Rocket, Query Monitor in dev. Plugin licences bought under your account.
GitHub repo with deployment scripts. Cloudways, Kinsta, or your existing host — never shared hosting.
30-page guide covering site structure, editor workflows, plugin choices, and the trade-offs we made.
60-minute video walkthrough plus a 1-page cheatsheet for non-technical editors.
Original design file with edit access. Your team can iterate on the design system without paying us a redesign fee.
Any bug we shipped is on us. We fix it without a separate ticket within the warranty window.
Transparent process — you always know what stage we're at and what comes next.
Stakeholder interviews, content inventory, sitemap, IA workshop, wireframes for key page types. Deliverable: signed brief.
Figma file: 8 colours, 4 type styles, a button grammar, 12-16 components. We design every component, not every page.
Theme work in a feature branch, plugin install and configuration, custom blocks. Deliverable: working staging site.
Content migration, cross-browser QA, Lighthouse pass (90+ mobile, 95+ accessibility), schema validation.
DNS cutover via Cloudflare, 301 redirects, 48-hour post-launch monitoring. GitHub handoff, docs PDF, training video.
Pick the level that fits your size and required response time. You can switch tiers between months.
5-12 pages, custom theme, standard plugin set. For B2B service sites replacing a marketing template.
15-40 pages, custom post types, ACF or React blocks, one major integration. Where most of our work lands.
Multilingual from day one, custom REST, editorial workflows, full DevOps pipeline. For publishers and SaaS marketing sites.
Scope transparency — no surprises in the monthly report.
Access we require — passed via secure channel (1Password / Bitwarden).
"We spent six months on Avada with a previous agency before scrapping it. Three weeks with the topcms team and we shipped a Sage build that the editorial team actually enjoys using. They told us up front which decisions they'd revisit in a year — we kept that list and they were right."
"Honest about what they wouldn't do. We asked for a marketplace feature in week three and they said no — not their wheelhouse, here's who is. The build came in on the lower end of the Custom bracket and we've shipped six new page types ourselves since launch."
"First agency that handed over a working GitHub repo and a README we could actually run locally in under 30 minutes. The Figma file came with edit access, the plugins were licenced to us, and the 30-day warranty caught two issues we'd have missed."
Our three brackets are $3,500-7,000 for brochure builds (5-12 pages, 3-5 weeks), $9,000-20,000 for custom builds with editor experience and one integration (15-40 pages, 6-10 weeks), and $25,000 and up for enterprise multilingual builds with custom workflows (12-20 weeks). Anything under $3,000 is better served by a premium theme and a freelancer.
Both. New builds run through the pricing brackets on this page. Existing sites usually start with a one-time site audit and then either move to our Support and maintenance plans for ongoing care or get scoped as a redesign or feature project. We also handle migrations from Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and other CMS platforms — see WordPress migration service for details.
Sage 10 with Bedrock on most custom builds where there’s enough JS or templating complexity to justify it. A stripped _s fork for smaller brochure work. We do not build on Avada, Divi, BeTheme, or any premium ThemeForest theme — the markup, performance, and handoff stories are too painful for the kind of work we invoice for.
Yes. We build custom Gutenberg blocks for layouts that change weekly and ACF Flexible Content for layouts that change monthly. Editor training is part of every project: a 60-minute video plus a written guide. Most clients can publish a new page within the first week of launch without our involvement.
Cloudways with Vultr High-Frequency for sites under 100k monthly visitors. Kinsta for sites that need more uptime or larger MySQL. WP Engine or WordPress VIP for enterprise. The hosting account is in your name with your billing — we don’t resell hosting or take a margin on it. If you already have hosting, we’ll work with it as long as it isn’t shared GoDaddy or Bluehost.
Yes for technical SEO: clean URL structure, schema markup for the right content types, redirect maps from old URLs, sitemap and robots, Core Web Vitals targets (90+ Lighthouse mobile performance). RankMath is our default SEO plugin. Content SEO (keyword strategy, copywriting) is a separate engagement under our SEO service tier.
Nothing breaks. The site code is on a GitHub repo we hand over at launch. Hosting is in your account. The Figma file is yours. The plugin licences are bought under your account, not ours. A new team can run the project from week one without paying us a discovery retainer to learn what’s going on.
Three weeks for the smallest brochure builds, eight weeks for a typical custom build, twelve to twenty weeks for enterprise multilingual work. The bottleneck is almost never code — it’s content readiness and stakeholder availability. Projects that miss timelines tend to miss them because the client team can’t get sign-off on copy fast enough, not because the build slipped.
This page is about WordPress development services — full builds, not maintenance and not migration. If your site already runs on WordPress and you need someone to keep it healthy, see WordPress support and maintenance. If you’re moving from Wix, Squarespace, or another CMS, see WordPress migration. Everything below is for projects that start with a blank repo and end with a live site.
“WordPress development” gets stretched to cover everything from a $300 ThemeForest install to a six-figure custom build for a publisher. We do the middle and upper end. The work involves a custom theme written from scratch, a stack of plugins picked deliberately, ACF or Gutenberg blocks for the editor experience, and a deployment pipeline that’s not just SFTP into production.
We don’t sell page-builder rebadged Avada projects. If your budget says Avada with a $99 add-on, that’s a real choice and a fine one, but it isn’t us. The kind of site we build runs for five to ten years, ships features without breaking, and survives an agency handoff.
Most agency sites hide pricing behind “Request a quote.” We don’t. The numbers below are real ranges from our last 18 months of WordPress builds. If your project doesn’t fit any of these brackets, that’s a useful signal — say so and we’ll either propose a fixed scope or honestly tell you we’re the wrong fit.
5 to 12 pages. Custom theme on top of a starter (we use a stripped Sage/Bedrock setup or a hand-rolled _s fork depending on hosting). Standard plugin set: RankMath for SEO, Wordfence for security, WP Rocket for caching, Gravity Forms or Fluent Forms for inquiries. Editor uses Gutenberg with 6 to 10 reusable blocks. No e-commerce, no multilingual, no integrations beyond Google Analytics and one CRM webhook.
Typical client: a B2B service company that wants a real site replacing the marketing-template thing from 2018. See WordPress for corporate sites for the exact build pattern.
15 to 40 pages, custom post types, advanced editor experience with ACF Flexible Content or custom Gutenberg blocks built in React. Includes one significant integration (HubSpot, Salesforce, an inventory feed, a search engine like Algolia or Elasticsearch). Multilingual if needed — we default to Polylang Pro at $99/year, not WPML. Cases like Aria Fashion’s WooCommerce launch sit at the top of this bracket.
Typical client: a brand with an editorial calendar, a real content team, and either e-commerce or membership content. This bracket is where most of our work lands.
Multilingual from day one (3+ languages). Multi-author editorial workflow with approval gates. Custom REST endpoints for a mobile app or marketing tools. Often runs on WordPress VIP, Pantheon, or a custom Kubernetes setup we wire up with the client’s DevOps team. Includes a staging-to-production pipeline through GitHub Actions, plus visual regression testing through Percy or BackstopJS.
Typical client: media publisher, a SaaS company with a marketing site separate from the product, a public sector body. This is also the bracket where we run our Premium support tier in parallel from week one.
Some clients arrive with a stack already chosen. When we’re free to pick, here’s what we use and why.
Theme foundation. Sage 10 with Bedrock on most custom builds. The Composer-driven plugin install and the Blade templating cut down our build time by about 30% versus a vanilla theme. For smaller brochure work we use a stripped _s fork — Sage is overkill if there’s no JS-heavy front end.
Editor experience. Custom Gutenberg blocks built in React for layouts the marketing team will touch every week. ACF Flexible Content for layouts the team will touch every few months. We don’t use page builders like Elementor or Divi on builds we’re invoicing more than $5,000 for — they’re slower in the editor, harder to hand off, and the markup is hostile to anyone who needs to touch it later.
Hosting. Cloudways with Vultr High-Frequency for sites under 100k monthly visitors ($14/month, ssh access, staging environments included). Kinsta for sites that need it ($35/month and up, better support tier, faster MySQL on larger plans). WP Engine if the client insists. Nothing on shared hosting from GoDaddy or Bluehost — that’s not a stack, that’s a hostage situation.
Plugin baseline. RankMath for SEO (read why we picked it on the RankMath module page), Wordfence for security on most sites, WP Rocket for caching, Query Monitor in development. We avoid plugins that haven’t shipped an update in 12 months and we avoid bundles that arrive with a $200/year subscription for one feature.
The Custom build bracket is the most common, so this is the typical timeline for that bracket. Weeks shift for the other two.
Stakeholder interviews (2 to 4 sessions, 60 minutes each). Content inventory of the existing site if there is one. Sitemap and IA workshop. Tech audit if there’s a current site we’re replacing. Wireframes for 6 to 10 key page types, not for every page. Deliverable: a brief that the marketing team and dev team both sign.
Figma file with desktop and mobile for the same 6 to 10 key page types. A small design system: 8 colours, 4 type styles, a button grammar, 12 to 16 components. We don’t design every page — we design every component, and your editor team composes pages from them. Deliverable: signed Figma file and component spec.
Custom theme work in a feature branch. Plugin install and configuration. Custom Gutenberg blocks or ACF Flexible Content layouts. Editor training scaffolding (placeholder content in admin, tooltips, a 1-page guide for non-technical editors). Deliverable: staging site with all templates working, lorem ipsum content, and a feature checklist that says what’s done.
Either client team migrates content using the editor we built, or we do it for an extra fee ($60 to $90 per page depending on complexity). Cross-browser QA. Lighthouse pass — we target 90+ on mobile performance and 95+ on accessibility for every public template. Schema validation through Google’s Rich Results Test for every content type that should have schema.
DNS cutover (we use Cloudflare as a proxy so cutover is a single record change, not a four-hour wait). 301 redirects from old URLs if applicable. Post-launch monitoring for 48 hours: we watch the error log, the analytics, and the Search Console crawl stats. Deliverable: live site, handoff repo on GitHub, 30-page documentation PDF, a 60-minute training video for the editor team.
Any bug we shipped is on us. We fix it without a separate ticket. After week 10 the warranty becomes a support contract — usually our Standard or Premium tier.
The last one matters. Every build involves choices we made for speed, budget, or simplicity that won’t be the right call forever. We write them down so the next agency or in-house team isn’t guessing.
Worth saying out loud, since most agency pages won’t.
If WordPress isn’t the right fit after we talk, we’ll say so. We also build on OpenCart, Drupal, and Magento. The pricing brackets are similar; the stack details differ. The honest “when not to hire us” list above stops mattering as soon as the platform conversation changes.
If this matches what you’re looking for, the form below is the fastest path. Tell us the bracket you think you’re in, the rough timeline, and one sentence about what the site needs to do. We’ll reply within one business day with either a discovery call invite or a redirect to whoever’s a better fit.
If your build needs custom plugin work alongside the theme, see our custom WordPress plugin development page for the small, medium, and full-module brackets.
Not sure if you need a full development engagement or just a redesign? A WordPress redesign keeps your URLs, content, and SEO and reworks the visual + template layer only — usually 4–6 weeks vs. 12+ for a rebuild.
Before committing to development, sometimes you need a second opinion on architecture, stack, or hiring. See WordPress consulting for strategy-only engagements.
30-day post-launch warranty. Any bug we shipped, we fix without a separate ticket. After 30 days, ongoing care moves to a support contract or stays in your hands.
