How to find the best WordPress developers for you: Part 3 – Price

This is the third post in a series of posts about “How you can find the best WordPress developers for you“.

In yesterdays post we talked about how important expertise is and in the first post in this series we discussed the developer’s experience. Today’s topic is typically at the forefront of everyone’s minds:

3) Price

For a lot of agencies, the most important thing to look out for is the price of the project. Making a good margin on a website is paramount to you being able to continue in business and if your margin is low then it puts a squeeze on other parts of your business to take up the slack.

We recommend a 50% to 70% margin on web projects so if your client’s budget is £20k then we would say look for a development team that is around the £5k to £8k mark to build the website. This gives you the remainder of your income for design and project management. Sometimes you can have a higher budget of say £30k and can also get the development completed for £5k, in that case, that’s awesome.

Yes, you can get developers who will build sites for £300 and charge around £20 per hour. Steer clear of these as they are cheap for a reason. They are either early in their WordPress development careers or do not value their work enough, either way, you need to avoid these at all costs.

The race to the bottom doesn’t have a finish line.

The best WordPress developers will be charging £45 to £75 per hour of development time or £360 to £600 per day so make sure you consider this when pricing up your next project.

Questions to ask:

• What is your hourly and daily rate? – (if they don’t know the answer to this question then I would suggest steering clear of them).
• How long would it take you to produce this site? (show them an example) – This is an important test as it will show their ability to think on their feet and provide a realistic estimate of how long something will take. If they say something silly like a day of development for a full site then something is definitely wrong.
• Do you provide a fixed price for the site development? – This might not be a deal breaker, it’s just something to be aware of as you will need to keep an eye on your profit like any business. A fixed price allows for you to successfully budget however it’s not always feasible to get this in place especially for larger enterprise level projects which can change in scale quite dramatically.

In the next post in this series, we will cover one of our favorite topics, ‘Standards‘