At Fhoke, most core website and eCommerce projects fall between £15,000 and £30,000, with larger or more technically complex projects exceeding that. A bespoke WordPress budget is driven by the problems being solved—strategy, UX, custom design, content architecture, integrations, migration and QA—not that WordPress itself is open source.
A useful way to think about budget
| Planning level | Typical characteristics |
|---|---|
| Around £15k–£20k | Focused bespoke marketing site, clear content model, custom WordPress theme and relatively standard integrations. |
| Around £20k–£40k | Larger information architecture, more audiences, search/filtering, CRM integration, substantial migration or multilingual needs. |
| Around £40k–£60k | Complex business site with deeper integrations, advanced content systems, multiple teams or significant migration risk. |
| £60k+ | Portal, custom application behaviour, multiple systems or unusually complex digital product requirements. |
Note: these are estimated price bands based on Fhoke’s years of experience and core project offerings, not fixed WordPress packages.
You are not paying for WordPress
WordPress is the content management system. The investment is in the strategy, design, and engineering that are wrapped around it. Two websites can both say ‘Built with WordPress’ while sharing almost nothing in the quality of their research, user experience, design system, code or editorial workflow.
What bespoke should mean
- Information architecture shaped around real audiences and business objectives.
- Wireframes and user journeys before visual styling.
- Interface design created for the brand rather than adapted from a purchased theme.
- A custom WordPress theme and reusable content components.
- Integrations built for actual business workflows.
- A CMS experience that internal teams can operate confidently.
- Migration, technical SEO, redirects, analytics and launch planning included in scope.
Real project complexity is often invisible
Salt Recruitment is a good example. The visible result is one coherent global recruitment site, but the implementation replaced fourteen regional sites, introduced multilingual publishing, migrated content and integrated Broadbean.
Lionheart Education combined a bespoke WordPress site with HubSpot, predictive search and controllable promotional banners. Another school’s website, Bryanston School, combined bespoke design with third-party systems and admissions-focused functionality.
Those are not ‘more pages’. They are more systems, more states, more content relationships and more organisational requirements.
What tends to push cost upward
- Multiple audiences or regional experiences
- Large or risky content migrations
- CRM and API integrations
- Advanced search and filtering
- Multilingual or multisite requirements
- User accounts or portal functionality
- Custom calculators, directories or data-heavy features
- Large stakeholder groups and extensive approval cycles
Fhoke’s view
If someone tells you a bespoke WordPress website costs a fixed amount without understanding your business, they are pricing a product rather than scoping a project. We prefer to understand the audiences, content, integrations, constraints and commercial job of the site first, then recommend the right level of investment.
We’re a UK web design agency and the experts in WordPress design and development working with businesses in London, Salisbury and far beyond. If you want to see if we’re the right fit for each other, head over to working with Fhoke to find out more.
How to control budget without cheapening the project
Prioritise outcomes, not a wish list. Separate launch-critical functionality from ideas that can be introduced later. A strong component system and clean technical foundation can make phased improvement much safer than trying to build every possible feature before launch.
