WooCommerce Pricing 2022: What is the Real Cost of Building Your Online Store?

WooCommerce is an ecommerce plugin that runs on the WordPress content management system (CMS).

While both WooCommerce and WordPress are open-source software and are free to use, this does not necessarily mean you can build your online store using WooCommerce free of charge.

The base WooCommerce software is free to use because it does not provide many of the essential resources needed to run an ecommerce store such as web hosting or domain registration.

In this guide, we’ll break down all the costs associated with running a quality online store on WooCommerce so you can have an accurate picture of WooCommerce pricing.

Table of Contents

How Much Is WooCommerce Web Hosting?

The first cost you need to consider when building your e-commerce store with WooCommerce is the price of web hosting.

Many ecommerce platforms available today are provided as a SaaS (software as a service) solution. This means that the company offering the platform will also provide hosting on their own infrastructure so that your online store is available on the web.

WooCommerce on the other hand is an open-source software and does not come with native hosting. As such, you are responsible for setting up your own hosting environment to run your online store.

Let’s take a look at some of the better hosting options for WooCommerce and see what they offer and how much they cost.

Bluehost

Bluehost is a popular web hosting provider and is one of the three solutions recommended by WordPress itself for hosting your site.

They offer a variety of different hosting plans, including plans designed specifically for WooCommerce.

When you sign up for the WooCommerce hosting plan from Bluehost, you will add the domain name you want to use to your account, and then WordPress will automatically be installed to your site. The WordPress installation will come with WooCommerce pre-installed, helping to reduce the manual steps you need to take to get your store up and running.

Bluehost’s WooComemrce hosting also comes with 24/7 customer support. This is an important consideration when choosing a web host as WooCommerce itself doesn’t offer the same level of support provided by other ecommerce platforms.

There are two options for WooCommerce hosting provided by Bluehost; standard and premium. The cost of each plan will depend on the length of the term you select. Bluehost offers 1, 12, and 36-month payment installments with the following prices.

WooComemrce Standard

• 1 month: $29.95 per month
• 12 months: $19.95 per month ($239.40 payment)
• 36 months: $15.95 per month ($574.20 payment)

WooCommerce Premium

• 1 month: $49.95 per month
• 12 months: $32.95 per month ($395.40 payment)
• 36 months: $24.95 per month ($898.20 payment)

As you can see the cost of hosting is significantly higher when paying in monthly installments. If you want to minimize your costs, it is recommended to at least go with the one year plan.

Additionally, if you are able to handle some of the technical aspects of running a WooCommerce store on your own, you can go with a regular shared hosting plan from BlueHost that starts at $3.95 per month.

SiteGround

Like Bluehost, Siteground is one of the three web hosting providers recommended by WordPress to host your site.

They also have plans dedicated specifically to building a WooCommerce store

SiteGround offers three versions of their managed WooCommerce hosting plans:

• Startup: Starts at $6.99 per month
• GrowBig: Starts at $9.99 per month
• GoGeek: Starts at $14.99 per month

All plans come with a free SSL, free CDN, and unmetered traffic. Like most other hosting providers, you can lower your costs quite significantly by paying in longer installments.

WP Engine

If your WooCommerce store has a larger product catalog or a high amount of traffic, you can benefit from a more powerful web host.

WP Engine can help in this regard as it is a managed WordPress hosting provider that offers exceptional quality.

WP Engine offers four plans with the following monthly prices:

• Startup: $27 per month
• Growth: $103.50 per month
• Scale: $261 per month
• Custom: Contact for pricing

As you can see, the prices for WP Engine are higher than other hosting providers. You can lower the cost a bit by paying in annual installments.

Web hosting estimated costs: $4 to $50 per month (or higher)

Do You Need to Buy a Domain Name?

A domain name is the name of your website and the address where users can find your site on the internet.

To be able to use a specific domain name, you must first claim the domain for yourself and register it with a domain registry.

Every domain is unique and there cannot be two versions of the same domain name. Because of this, the domain you want to use for your online store may not be available.

The price for domain names can vary considerably based on the particular name you are looking to register.

The base price tends to range between $15 and $25 per year.

More valuable domains are often considered premium names and will require a substantial one-time fee on top of the recurring cost.

Many web host providers will offer a free domain for a year with most of their plans. Be aware, that this will not cover any extra costs for premium domains.

Domain estimated costs: $15 to $25 (potentially free)

How Much Are WooCommerce Themes?

While there is no shortage of free themes available for WooCommerce, most do not offer the quality needed to make your store as good as it can be.

To add to this, most free themes come with a credit to the creator appended to the footer that you are unable to remove.

Free themes also don’t offer any support to help you when you run into issues designing your store.

There are plenty of high-quality WooCommerce themes available. You can use the ThemeForest marketplace to browse an assortment of different themes.

Here are some of the best themes for WooCommerce:

Astra WooCommerce

Astra offers a free version with limited functionality and a comprehensive paid version called Astra Pro.

Both versions are fully responsive and will load quickly on mobile devices while also making it easy to customize your website without using code.

Astra Pro starts at $47 per year for one site.

Ocean WP

Ocean WP is the fastest growing WordPress theme and is a great choice for designing an attractive WooCommerce store.

The theme is built with SEO best practices in mind, it is fully responsive, and it scores some of the highest grades from a WordPress theme for speed testing tools.

OceanWP comes in both free and paid versions with prices for the premium theme starting at $39 per year for one website.

Divi

Divi is the most popular WordPress theme and provides its own powerful visual builder you can use to create a beautiful storefront. The editor is easy to use and the theme comes with over 800 pre-made designs and over 100 full website packs.

Pricing for Divi starts at $89 per year for a single site. Be aware that this price includes access to other Elegant Themes plugins including Bloom and Monarch.

Flatsome

Flatsome is a widely popular WordPress theme built specifically for WooCommerce.

It provides an intuitive drag and drop builder and tons of pre-built templates for designing an attractive store.

Flatsome requires a $59 one-time fee. When you buy the theme you get a license that comes with six months of support.

Best Free WooCommerce Themes

If you don’t want to pay out of pocket for a WooCommerce theme, there are some free options that will work for your store.

While most free themes won’t provide the same level of features as premium themes, you should expect to find all the core functionality needed to build your ecommerce store.

Here are some of the best available free WooCommerce themes:

• Astra
• OceanWP
• Zakra
• Hestia Lite
• Storefront
• Shopping Cart

A great way to supplement some of the lost capability of choosing a free theme is to use a high-quality page builder like Elementor or Thrive Architect. This will provide you more options for customizing the look of your store.

There are also plenty of free plugins you can use to add more features to your store.

WordPress theme estimated costs: $39 to $89 per year

How Is WooCommerce Security?

Like web hosting, security is a necessary part of running your online store. While hosted solutions like Shopify will handle all the essential security features for you, with WooCommerce you will need to take care of many of these yourself.

Here are the main security features you will need for your online store along with their estimated costs.

SSL Certificate

A secure socket layer (SSL) certificate is the foundation of security for your e-commerce store. It helps to encrypt the data that moves between a customer’s computer and your website.

You can quickly tell if your website has an SSL certificate as URLs with an SSL certificate begin with HTTPS as opposed to HTTP and there is a lock symbol next to the web address.

There are free SSL certificates available but they often don’t provide the full level of security you want for your e-commerce store.

An SSL from a reliable provider will cost anywhere from $9 to $150 or more.

Many hosting providers will provide a quality SSL certificate for free with their hosting plans.

Anti-Malware Tools

SSL certificates are just the beginning of securing your online store. If you want to take your security to the next level, you’ll need to take extra precautions including anti-malware tools.

Some web hosting providers will include anti-malware tools in their plans.

One of the most popular anti-malware solutions is SiteLock. It has three plans costing $15, $30, and $50 per month.

Some of the features included in SiteLock’s most expensive plan include:

• File-level scanning
• Plugin Scanning
• Google blacklist monitoring
• Weekly Scan report
• XSS scripting protection
• SQL injection protection

Web Application Firewall

A web application firewall (WAF) helps protect your website by filtering and monitoring the traffic that comes to your site.

The most popular WAF for WooCommerce sites is Cloudflare. It’s easy to integrate with WordPress and will help ensure that your store is PCI Compliant.

It also comes with a global CDN that will help your store’s pages load quickly in any location.

Cloudflare’s CDN is free to use but to get the WAF you will need at least the Pro plan which costs $20 per month.

Their most expensive plan provides even more performance benefits and costs $200 per month

Estimated security costs: $20 to $250 per month (or higher)

What Are Plugins and How Much Do They Cost?

Plugins are software extensions designed for WordPress that you can use to add extra functionality to your online store.

Like themes, there are thousands of free and premium plugins available meaning there is no limit to how much you can customize your WooCommerce store.

Let’s take a look at some of the best and most important plugins you’ll want to consider using for your WooCommerce store.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a caching and performance plugin used to speed up the load times of your web pages.

If you want your website to load quickly a caching plugin is a must for your WooCommerce store.

The main benefit of WP Rocket is that it is easy to set up and use. This isn’t the case with other caching plugins as many require a degree of technical aptitude to ensure you configure your setting properly without breaking your pages.

Some of the main features of WP Rocket include:

• CDN integration
• Minification
• GZIP compression
• Cache preloading
• Browser caching
• Lazyload
• Defer JS loading

WP Rocket is a premium plugin and costs $49 for one website. This will provide one year of support and updates, after which you will need to renew your license to receive any updates to the software.

Yoast SEO

If you are familiar with WordPress you have likely heard of Yoast SEO.

It is the most popular SEO plugin on the market and makes it easy for anyone to optimize their website for search engines.

With Yoast SEO, you can easily create a sitemap, choose to no-index pages, and avoid duplicate content.

It also allows you to set a target keyword for each web page and post and provides suggestions on how to optimize your content for that keyword.

Yoast comes in both free and premium versions. The free version offers a solid amount of features but there are some useful items only available on the premium including internal linking suggestions and the redirect manager.

Yoast SEO premium costs $89 for one site with one year of support and updates.

RankMath

RankMath is an up and coming SEO plugin that many site owners regard as a better solution than Yoast SEO.

The reason RankMath is gaining popularity is because its free version offers many of the features provided by Yoast SEO premium.

RankMath just launched its paid version which includes the robust set of features present in the free version along with many others including:

• Advanced Google Analytics integration
• Keyword rank tracker
• The most advanced schema generator
• Google Trends integration
• WooCommerce SEO PRO

RankMath Pro costs $59 per year for an unlimited number of websites.

Google Product Feed For WooCommerce

If you want to connect your WooCommerce store to Google Merchant Center to be able to have your products show up in Google Shopping listings, you will need to use a plugin.

This plugin is an official extension from WooCommerce and provides the best option for linking your store to Google Shopping.

With it, you will be able to automatically generate your product feed and upload it to your Merchant Center account.

The Google Product Feed Extension for WooCommerce costs $79 per year.

Estimated essential plugins costs: $0 to $217 per year (or higher)

Does WooCommerce Need Third-Party Extensions?

Email Hosting

As an online business owner, you will need a professional email address that includes your domain name.

While you may be able to use your WordPress host for your emails as well, there are some drawbacks to doing so.

To start, using your WordPress host for emails can lead to deliverability issues. It can also drain server resources, negatively impacting the performance of your website.

To avoid this, you will need to set up a third-party email provider to be able to host your email accounts.

Here are some of the best options for managing your email accounts for your WooCommerce store.

Google Workspace (Formerly G Suite)

When you set up G Suite as the email service provider for your business you will be able to use your business email addresses with the same interface as Gmail, bringing with it all the reliability and ease of use of the platform.

Pricing for Google Workspace starts at $12 per user.

Keep in mind that each user is only allowed one email address. As such, if you want to have different emails for say support, orders, newsletter, your name, etc., each will need its own user account costing $12 per month.

Zoho

Zoho provides a comprehensive suite of products to manage your business. Among them is a feature-rich email hosting interface.

Zoho mail comes with three different options:

• Mail lite: $1 per user a month (billed annually)
• Mail Premium: $4 per user a month (billed annually)
• Workplace: Starts at $3 per user a month (billed annually)

Similar to Google, each user is only allowed one email address.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a must for any type of business as it provides the highest average ROI of any type of marketing.

For ecommerce stores, it is even more important as you can use it to send highly-targeted campaigns to your subscribers.

While WooCommerce provides native support for transactional emails such as order confirmations and tracking info, it does not allow you to seamlessly create, send, and manage email marketing campaigns.

For that, you will need a third-party email marketing service. There are plenty of options to choose from. Here are two that work well with WooCommerce and provide all the essential features you’ll need.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a widely popular email marketing service and is likely the first provider you will come across when researching solutions

Mailchimp has a generous free plan that allows you to send up to 10,000 emails a month while having an email list of up to 2,000 subscribers.

Beyond that pricing, starts at $29.99 per month and increases the more subscribers you have.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a newer email marketing solution designed specifically for ecommerce stores.

It allows you to deliver more personalized experiences to your customers and provides many useful features including email automation, list segmentation, SMS marketing and more.

It comes pre-configured with several different email campaigns you can simply activate from within your dashboard.

This includes:

• Abandoned cart campaign
• Pre purchase campaign
• Post purchase campaign
• Win back campaign

The platform integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and your product catalog is synced to your Klaviyo account so you can easily add products to your email messages.

Klaviyo is free to use for up to 250 subscribers. Beyond that, prices start at $20 per month and increase based on the size of your email list.

Estimated third-party extensions costs: $1 to $42 per month (or more)

How Much Does It Cost to Provide Customer Support?

If you have a large product catalog and are selling a lot of items to a large customer base, you’re likely going to need help with customer service.

This will involve investing in support staff who can handle customer requests for you.

You may also choose to invest in chatbots to be able to provide 24/7 assistance to users.

This is where your costs can really add up. Keeping a dedicated support staff on hand will cost you thousands a month.

Fortunately, this won’t be a concern unless you’re already selling a lot of products.

WooCommerce Pricing Summary

So how much is WooCommerce monthly?

Let’s add up the costs from each section to get an estimated monthly cost for running a WooCommerce store with the essential ecommerce features.

For the sake of calculating the total, annual charges have been broken down into their monthly equivalent.

• Web hosting: $4 to $50 per month (or higher)
• Domain name: $0 to $2 per month (or higher)
• Theme: $0 to $8 per month
• Security: $20 to $250 per month (or higher)
• Plugins: $0 to $18 per month (or higher)
• Third-party extensions: $1 to $42 per month (or higher)
• Customer support: $0 to $1,000s per month

Total estimated monthly WooCommerce costs: $25/month to $370/month or more

Keep in mind that this only covers the expenses needed to provide the core functionality of a high-quality ecommerce store.

If you are looking for additional features such as subscriptions, memberships, wish lists, multilingual support, upselling and cross-selling, and others, this will cost you more.

And although they are present on every ecommerce platform, you also need to consider processing fees for different payment gateways.

For example, WooCommerce provides native support for Paypal and Stripe but each will still cost you 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction.

Overall, when you add up the total costs needed to run a great ecommerce store, WooCommerce certainly isn’t free.

That being said, the cost of web hosting, plugins, and extensions will end up costing you close to the same as you would pay for a BigCommerce or Shopify plan plus apps.