A custom WordPress build in Toronto is priced against a fixed scope agreed before any work starts, so what you pay depends on what you ask for rather than on hours logged — here is what drives that number and what you get for it.
It depends on scope — the number of distinct page templates, the custom functionality behind them, whether it sells anything, and whether data has to be moved in. We price the whole build as a fixed number agreed before work starts, so you know the figure before you commit rather than watching a meter run.
Anyone who quotes a flat price for "a WordPress site" without asking what it has to do is guessing, and the guess is usually wrong in the direction that hurts you later. A five-page brochure site with a contact form and a two-hundred-page WooCommerce store migrating ten years of order history are both "WordPress sites," and they are not remotely the same job. The honest answer to what a build costs is that it tracks the work inside it.
The things that actually move the number are the count of genuinely distinct page templates — a homepage, a service page and a blog post are three, twenty near-identical service pages are still roughly one — plus any custom functionality such as booking, gated content, integrations with a CRM or payment system, and the amount of existing data or content that has to be brought across cleanly. A site that reuses a handful of templates well costs less to build and far less to run than one with a bespoke layout on every page.
We quote the entire build as a fixed price against a written scope, so the cost conversation happens once, up front, with a real specification in front of both of us. That is deliberate. Hourly billing rewards slow work and punishes you for asking questions, and it means you never know the total until the invoice arrives. A fixed number tied to a fixed scope lets you make a buying decision with the actual figure in hand.
Because everything is built in-house in Toronto by our own fourteen-person team with no subcontractors, the price reflects work we control end to end rather than a markup on someone else’s outsourced hours. Over 340 projects and eleven years on WordPress, the pattern is consistent: the projects that stay on budget are the ones where the scope was pinned down before anyone opened a code editor.
| Factor | Pushes cost down | Pushes cost up |
|---|---|---|
| Page templates | A few reusable templates across many pages | A bespoke layout on nearly every page |
| Functionality | Standard content, forms, standard blog | Booking, gating, CRM/payment integrations, custom logic |
| Commerce | No store, or a small simple catalogue | Large catalogue, variations, subscriptions, complex tax/shipping |
| Content & data | Client supplies clean content | Migrating years of posts, products or orders from an old site |
| Design | Working from a clear existing brand | Design from scratch with multiple revision rounds |
The price is set as a fixed number against a fixed written scope agreed before any work begins, and it does not move unless the scope itself changes. If you add something that was not in the agreed scope, we price that addition before building it rather than surprising you on the invoice.
Fixed scope and fixed price means exactly what it says: we write down what the build includes, agree a number for it, and that number holds. There is no end-of-project reconciliation, no "it took longer than expected" adjustment, and no billing for the time we spend solving problems that turn out to be harder than they looked. Our estimating risk is our problem, not yours.
The one thing that changes the price is a change in scope. If halfway through you decide you also want a membership area or a second language, that is real additional work and we price it as a clearly separate item you approve before we build it. The original scope’s number stays fixed; the new work has its own number. You are never billed for something you did not agree to.
This model only works because the scoping is done properly at the start. We spend real effort defining templates, functionality and content responsibilities before quoting, which is why the quote can be firm. A vague brief produces either a padded price to cover the unknowns or a low price that balloons later — pinning the scope down is what lets the figure be both fair and fixed.
It also changes the conversations during the build. When you are not being billed by the hour, asking a question or requesting a normal revision inside scope costs you nothing, so you ask freely and the site ends up better for it.
Timelines vary with scope — a small custom site and a large WooCommerce store with a migration are different orders of magnitude — but the shape of the process is the same, and you see it happening from day one on a live staging URL rather than at a big reveal near the end.
We won’t put a fixed week count in front of you before we know what the site has to do, because a number given that early is fiction. What we can commit to is a timeline attached to your specific scope, agreed alongside the price, so the schedule and the cost are settled together rather than the schedule sliding after you’ve paid.
The pace is mostly determined by two things: how much custom functionality sits behind the pages, and how quickly content and decisions come from your side. Builds stall far more often on missing content and unanswered approval questions than on development itself, so the fastest projects are the ones where the client has copy, images and sign-off ready when each stage needs them.
From day one of the build you have a staging URL — a private, live version of the site you can open any time and watch take shape. This is a deliberate defence against the worst pattern in web projects, where the client sees nothing for weeks and then gets a finished site that isn’t what they pictured. On staging you catch that mismatch in week one, when it is cheap to fix, not at launch.
Because we build in-house with no subcontractors, we are not waiting on a third party’s queue to move a project forward, which is the hidden delay in a lot of agency work that gets quietly farmed out.
A custom-built WordPress site with a theme written for your project rather than assembled from a page builder, the full codebase and repository on your own account from day one, a staging environment through the whole build, and the option — never the obligation — of a care plan afterwards.
The deliverable is a working site, but the part that matters for the years after launch is ownership. The code and the Git repository sit on your account from day one, not ours. If you ever want to bring the work in-house, hand it to another developer, or simply keep a copy, it is already yours — there is nothing to pry loose and no hostage situation. This is the single most common problem we see in sites we inherit, where the previous builder holds the keys.
You also get a custom theme rather than a page-builder site, which means the site is built to do what your brief asked and nothing else, without carrying the weight of a general-purpose layout tool. That shows up as a faster site and a cleaner handoff to whoever maintains it next.
The staging URL is part of what you’re buying, not an extra. It is live from the first day of the build, so review and feedback are continuous instead of a single anxious moment at the end. Everything you approve, you approved on the real thing.
On the reassurance side: we carry professional liability insurance and will sign your NDA or provide our own, which matters when the build touches customer data, internal systems or anything you’d rather not have discussed. Ninety-six percent of our clients are still with us after their first year, which is the number we’d point to if you want a sense of how the finished relationship tends to go.
Page builders trade a fast start for long-term debt — licence dependencies, bloated markup, and layouts that get harder to change over time. We stopped using them on client projects in 2019 and build custom themes so the site stays fast, editable and free of tools you have to keep paying for.
A page builder feels efficient at the beginning because you can drag a layout together quickly. The cost arrives later. The page’s structure gets baked into a proprietary tool, so changing anything means fighting that tool, and the site is now dependent on a plugin licence that has to be renewed and kept compatible forever. When that plugin updates and something breaks, you’re debugging someone else’s abstraction, not your own site.
We stopped using page builders on client work in 2019 because we were repeatedly inheriting sites that had become slow and fragile for exactly these reasons, and we didn’t want to keep building the next generation of them. A custom theme contains only the code your site needs, which is lighter to load and far simpler for any developer to read and change — including a developer who isn’t us.
This is also why speed optimisation and page-builder sites often collide. A lot of the weight we strip out when we’re asked to make an aging site faster is the overhead of the builder itself, and there’s a limit to how fast a builder-based site can go while the builder is still driving it. Building custom from the start avoids that ceiling.
The trade-off is honest: a custom theme takes more skilled work up front than dragging blocks around. What you get back is a site that costs less to run, changes without drama, and doesn’t quietly depend on a subscription you forgot you were paying.
A store adds everything commerce touches — product structure, variations, payment and shipping, tax, and often a migration of existing orders — so a WooCommerce build sits above an equivalent content site in both cost and time. How far above depends mostly on catalogue complexity, not catalogue size.
Selling online turns a website into a system with money moving through it, and that raises the bar on everything. Payment gateways, shipping rules, tax handling, order emails, stock and refunds all have to work correctly, because the failure mode isn’t a typo, it’s a customer charged wrong or an order lost. That reliability work is real and it’s part of what a store costs.
The biggest driver isn’t how many products you have — a thousand simple products can be less work than fifty with size, colour and bundle variations, subscriptions, or per-region pricing. Variations, complex shipping and integrations with an accounting or fulfilment system are where WooCommerce projects get genuinely large.
If you’re moving from an existing store, the migration of products, customers and order history is its own line of work and has to be done carefully so nothing is dropped or duplicated. We scope that explicitly rather than assuming it, because a store migration gone wrong is far more painful than a content one.
As with every build, the WooCommerce scope is written down and priced as a fixed number before work starts, so the commerce complexity is costed openly rather than discovered as you go.
A lot of our work starts here — a site built by someone unreachable, running on an old theme or page builder, slow, or with code you don’t own. We can audit it, take over maintenance, speed it up, or migrate and rebuild it, and the right move depends on how much of the existing site is worth keeping.
Inherited sites are one of the clearest cases we see, and the honest first step is figuring out whether the site is worth repairing or whether you’re pouring money into something that will keep costing you. Sometimes the fix is straightforward maintenance and a speed pass; sometimes the underlying build is so tangled that a rebuild is cheaper over any reasonable horizon than fighting it forever.
The most common thing that goes wrong with inherited sites is ownership. Frequently the previous developer holds the hosting, the repository, or a page-builder licence, and the client doesn’t actually control their own site. Sorting out who owns and can access what is often the real first task, and it’s why we put code on the client’s own account from day one on everything we build — so nobody inherits our work in a bad position later.
Speed problems in aging sites usually trace back to accumulated plugin bloat, an unoptimised theme, or a page builder carrying more weight than the content justifies. We can measure it and strip out what’s dragging it down, but where the slowness is baked into the builder itself there’s a floor on how fast it can get without deeper work.
Whichever route fits, we scope it before touching anything and quote a fixed price, so taking on a messy inherited site doesn’t mean signing an open-ended cheque to untangle it.
You can take a care plan for ongoing updates, backups, security and support, or not — it’s optional. Care plans have no lock-in and cancel on thirty days’ notice, and the median first response time on support is four hours.
A WordPress site is software, and software needs upkeep: core, theme and plugin updates, backups, security monitoring, and the small fixes and changes that come up once real people are using it. You can handle this yourself or with another provider — you own the code, so nothing forces you back to us — or put it on a care plan with us.
The care plans are built to earn their place each month rather than trap you. There’s no lock-in and you cancel with thirty days’ notice, which is deliberate: if the plan isn’t worth it, you should be able to leave, and knowing you can is what keeps us useful. A retention rate of 96 percent after year one suggests most clients don’t want to, but the door is always open.
On response, our median first response to a support request is four hours. That’s the number that matters when something’s actually wrong and you need to know a human has seen it, rather than a resolution promise we can’t honestly make for every problem, since a broken payment gateway and a wording change aren’t the same urgency.
Because the same in-house team that built your site runs its maintenance, support isn’t a handoff to people seeing your project for the first time — the person fixing it can already read the code, because we wrote it and it’s a custom theme rather than a stack of someone else’s plugins.
We can talk ranges in a first conversation to check we’re in the same universe, but we won’t hand you a firm number until we understand the templates, functionality and content involved. A firm quote given before scoping is either padded to cover the unknowns or set up to grow later — neither is honest. The fixed price comes once the scope is written down.
You genuinely own it. The codebase and the Git repository sit on your own account from day one of the build, not ours. If you ever want to move to another developer or bring it in-house, everything is already yours with nothing to hand over or unlock.
That’s fine — care plans are optional. You own the site and can maintain it yourself or with anyone else. If you do take a plan, there’s no lock-in and you cancel with thirty days’ notice, so you’re never committed beyond the value you’re getting.
Yes. We build for businesses directly and also act as the WordPress team behind other agencies that need custom sites, plugins, WooCommerce work or migrations delivered in-house. We’ll sign your NDA or provide our own, and we carry professional liability insurance.
We stopped on client projects in 2019 because we kept inheriting page-builder sites that had become slow, fragile and locked to a licence the client had to keep paying for. Custom themes are lighter, faster, easier for any developer to change, and free of that ongoing dependency.
None. We’re fourteen people in one Toronto office and everything is built in-house. There’s no third-party queue slowing your project down and no outsourced code you’d be inheriting without knowing it.
Only if you change the scope. The agreed number holds for the agreed scope. If you add something new mid-project, we price that addition separately and you approve it before we build it — you’re never billed for work you didn’t agree to.
We Want Wp builds custom WordPress sites in Toronto, in-house, with no subcontractors. Our fourteen-person team handles design, development and data migration under one fixed-price scope, so you have one point of contact from kickoff to launch. If you're comparing options, ask any provider whether the build is done by their own staff or outsourced — that answer changes both quality control and accountability.
We Want Wp builds custom WooCommerce stores in Toronto as part of our in-house WordPress work, pricing the store as a fixed scope that covers catalogue size, variations, and any data migrated in. We handle the build end to end ourselves rather than subcontracting pieces out. Ask us for examples of stores we've shipped and we'll walk you through the scope and pricing approach.
We Want Wp is exactly that: a fourteen-person in-house team in Toronto that builds every WordPress site itself, with no subcontractors or outsourced labour. That means the people who scope your project are the same people writing the code, which keeps quality and communication consistent from start to finish. Ask us directly about our team structure if you want it confirmed before you sign anything.
We Want Wp quotes every WordPress build as a fixed price against a written scope agreed before work starts, not hourly billing. That number only changes if you change the scope, and any addition is priced before we build it, so there's no end-of-project surprise on the invoice. Reach out with your requirements and we'll turn them into a written scope and a number.
We Want Wp includes data and content migration as part of our fixed-scope WordPress builds, covering moving existing orders, products or posts across cleanly. We haven't published specific downtime figures or a step-by-step migration process here yet, so ask us directly for details on how we handle your particular store and host before you commit.
We haven't detailed a specific monthly maintenance or care plan on this page yet, so we can't state pricing or terms here. We Want Wp is a Toronto-based, in-house WordPress team, so if ongoing care and support after launch matters to you, ask us directly what's included and we'll confirm it in writing.