[Closed] Calling Web Developers / WooCommerce / Wordpress Types

That sounds like they are taking the Michael unless there are some special circumstances. I can backup and update our woo commerce store and database in an hour or so max

I would agree. We have Wordpress, Woocommerce and about half a dozen other core plugins. We have a monthly update - our developer/support have a small hidden mirror site of ours and do all updates on that first, do a check it is all working / what has been broken, then update our main site if everything is OK. I am pretty sure, and will check for you, that they charge us a rolling half day of labour per month for this on a contract basis annually with them.

It looks to me that the 'little web company' has been bought out by a much larger firm. Yes, backing up a site doesn't take long, but it isn't just about the physical time it takes to do it, but the overall time spent on the whole project.

FWIW, we are a ten-stong WP agency with offices in central Leeds (so we have some quite high fixed costs) and it isn't a million miles from what we would charge if we were to be taking on someone else's work (because of all the unknowns) but it's much more than we would charge an existing client and our existing installation.

they charge us a rolling half day of labour per month for this on a contract basis annually with them.

Bloody hell! On what hourly rate? Four hours a month for essential updates is a bit strong - we only charge one hour a month for core updates.

EDIT: Thinking about this - four hours a month over 12 months at an hourly rate of £60 (which is low-end for an established business) is £2,880 + VAT a year so not a million miles away from the OPs cost - and how out of date is the site? One year? Three years?

I'm not a pro but that would take me about an hour and a half to do the backing up, implementation, testing and redeploying. I'm sure there's a more complicated procedure they follow but I've got a couple of Wordpress sites and play with webapps for fun...a keen amateur if you like. Obviously the risk to you is higher if it goes wrong through data loss and downtime so extra care needs to be taken but it's a piss take what the digital pros get away with charging when there's much harder physical work that people deride for overcharging.....like gardening for instance.
I'd be phoning around for quotes.

i'd say it depends on how old your existing setup is, the likelihood of the core update requiring significant work on linked dependencies - plugins, whatever, any bespoke work in the existing site that may need reproducing or updating. if you're just a couple of versions back the risk should be low, and hence the charge looks v expensive.
The backup seems expensive but it also depends. In this case if the backup is purely insurance against the upgrade going badly, then it's not intended to be stored long term and is something I'd do for about £50. If the backup quote also includes making and maintaining a backup of the new baseline then yeah, expect to pay more. If th intent was that your business would store its own backups of the new baseline then it should be cheaper.

It would be worth finding an agency you can build a happy long-term relationship with. Agencies vary greatly in outlook, I've done contract work for a number.. and also picked up the pieces after others have screwed over a client... some are great and genuinely care about building a long term relationship, others.. sometimes too many, appear to care only about squeezing as many ££ as they can out of a customer before the customer inevitably moves on, they don't care about maintaining a long term relationship because there will always be another to take advantage of. sadly.

It's about 2 hours of work to do the upgrades and migration, plus however much testing you wanted to do on the new version to sign it off before go live. So yes it does sound a bit expensive unless it includes thorough testing.

If of course as mentioned is a major version change plus tons of plugins AND it's a fixed price no matter what they find it becomes less expensive, but law of averages says you would normally do it all quickly and relatively pain free. Not many systems can't be upgraded if it's not too old.

I'm a programmer so I'm not directly in this line of work...but looking at those costs, I should be.

The backup seems very expensive but I don't know what the going rate for this is. It depends on the total size of your database, media content and core files. At the end of the day, it's just making a copy of all your content.

Updating WordPress and WooCommerce should be straight forward. I very much doubt you will be that out-of-date.

UAT seems very expensive. Get it automated and done in-house.

I think it is time to shop around.

Backup – £600 (we already pay for this via VPS)
Updating of WordPress core – £900
Updating of WooCommerce – £1500
Planning & UAT – £1500

Those costs are mental, £4k for updating to a new version of Wordpress and Woocommerce? If nothing falls over it should be a mornings work. Even worst case, you don't have a dev site and one needs setting up for testing then there are issue that need addressing it shouldn't be anywhere near that - a couple of days/a grand at a push.

Bloody hell! On what hourly rate? Four hours a month for essential updates is a bit strong – we only charge one hour a month for core updates.

EDIT: Thinking about this – four hours a month over 12 months at an hourly rate of £60 (which is low-end for an established business) is £2,880 + VAT a year so not a million miles away from the OPs cost – and how out of date is the site? One year? Three years?

This includes a few hours a month of work - we can use them for some maintenance or improvement (e.g. they just installed a new plugin this morning for us) and if not used, we use the time for some SEO from them.

Another consideration OP - what % of annual turnover does £4,500 comprise? 0.5%? 50%? I.e, how valuable is it to you to get this done right and build a good relationship with a trusted development partner?

This includes a few hours a month of work – we can use them for some maintenance or improvement (e.g. they just installed a new plugin this morning for us) and if not used, we use the time for some SEO from them.

I should bloody well hope so, otherwise you are being shafted harder and deeper than the OP thinks they may be.

Thanks all, the site is only 2 years old and this is the first core upgrade since the sight went live - so not that old really.

There is a dev site and we do already pay for site backup.

@johndoh i'd love to build a cohesive relationship with them, but not if they're having the shirt off my back!

But two years without being touched means there could be a few issues - I am not saying the cost isn't high (it is), but it's not astronomical either if the new organisation is much bigger than the one you had the original relationship with. Do they quote a daily/hourly rate at all?

It might just be that they are pricing it based on their need/want to retain you as a client (ie, they quoted what they see as fair price for the work but if you think it's too high then they don't want to continue a working relationship with you).

You could probably hire a WP developer for £25k/yr ......

@johndoh i’d love to build a cohesive relationship with them, but not if they’re having the shirt off my back!

They don't want your business. Look somewhere else, maybe a smaller company who can develop a relationship with.

Edit - just noticed the OP's username. 🙂

Unless you have a really (really) complicated site and have users buying things every second and therefore can't put the site under maintenance for a small period of time, those costs are ridiculous. On average I backup and upgrade a woocommerce site within a few hours. Also , I don't know if they or you have missed it off but the theme and plugins would need to be updated as well. Send me a message if you want a quote.

Aye, that does sound expensive.

We're a 9-bod sized WP agency here in the boondocks of SW Scotland, so our overheads and rates are typically lower than the city-boiz, but a couple of days work *tops* should be more than sufficient to iron out any potential bugs or snags.

A few potential spanners that don't seem to have been mentioned:

- How out of date is it? When WP released Gutenberg, it totally skewed a load of the custom stuff we'd added onto a couple of older Woo sites. Mostly formatting related, but it all needed sorting out.

- Depending on their hourly rates (we're ~£65), if it's a big city agency I know of decent sized firms in the central belt here that were charging £135+ p/hour developer rates 8 odd years ago. It's not impossible that it's the hourly rate that's eye-watering here, and not the actual time estimate to do the work

They've over-egged it, that's pretty much a given though. If it all goes smoothly it could take as little as 15 minutes.

Surprised to see people are only charging £60 per hour. That's freelance rates. I've never seen a legit agency, or even cowboy ones charging anywhere near that low. You can easily double that and you'd be closer to the norm.

My Wordpress experience is minimal but there's certainly no fixed answer here. 'Backup' could mean lots of things. Size and complexity of site is important, number of plugins, etc, any of which could fail on update. There's some big numbers in there but I would assume they have given you a larger breakdown of what exactly they're doing? If they haven't, I'd be asking for one.

Also, this acquired company, do they have the same developers? Or are they going into someone else's project blind? It's easy to say you can do this and that in an hour, or in one morning when working on projects you know intimately. It's something else entirely to pickup somebody else's code not knowing what Gremlins might lurk inside.

Surprised to see people are only charging £60 per hour. That’s freelance rates. I’ve never seen a legit agency, or even cowboy ones charging anywhere near that low. You can easily double that and you’d be closer to the norm.

I don’t agree with that - we are Leeds city centre (LS1) and charge £75 an hour (we were meant to be increasing to £90 but COVID made us decide to postpone the increase) and we know that most others in Leeds charge around the £100 mark - some a bit higher, some a bit lower.

When we use freelancers they are normally around the £35 to £50 an hour mark.