The "small" book of big WordPress plugins & prices (Part 4)

Hi, my name is Raitis Sevelis and I have analyzed the prices and licenses of the most popular WordPress plugins. All these plugins represent different categories but have a freemium model in common. This is what I found. 👇

How many plugins should you have (and their costs) 💵

What is the average number of plugins on a regular WordPress site?

According to WPBeginner, this number varies from 20 to 30 different plugins. More advanced sites may require even more plugins they say. WPBeginner admits having 62 plugins installed on their site (come on, to me this is way too much). 🤯

At the same time, Torque says that the number should not exceed 20. I tend to agree with their estimates.

Nevertheless, to get an independent opinion, I decided to talk with WordPress developers myself.

Most of the respondents tend to come up with the number 10, but admit that this is an ideal scenario. In real life (and life is not a piece of cake), the number of active plugins does not exceed 20. Yes, guys from Torque are right.

Plus, if you check out the categories of the leading plugins, you will see that plugins from 20 different categories are more than enough to build a decent site.

Since I am interested in WordPress plugin prices, I wanted to understand the average costs on plugins for building a site.

The simple way to calculate it is to use the average price of all WordPress plugins and multiply it by the number of required plugins. I will stick to number 15 since it is in the middle of our ideal world (10) and maximum (20).

As for the average plugin price, I took only single site premium licenses that resulted in $100.47 being an average.

Let's do the math. The price we get is $1507.05. A bit too much for a regular WordPress site, isn't it?
True, since we don't use only premium versions of the plugin. Premium plugin versions rarely go above 33% of all plugins installed on your site. With that in mind, we need to calculate costs of 5 plugins which is $502.35.

Of course, as a web developer, you are more interested in agency license types to lower the costs per project. This means that $502.35 is the price for a company that wants to build a site on their own.

For the agencies, the formula is a bit different though. Calculate the total costs of all your plugins and divide them by the number of sites you deliver annually. The more sites you deliver, the lower your costs are. 👨🏽‍💻

Should you try to lower the costs? Yes and no.

Of course, you should try to increase the number of projects you deliver. At the end of the day, this is your revenue.

At the same time, I would avoid reducing the number of plugins in your stack. Such an approach could lead to limited functionality and a longer delivery time for a single project.

Afterwords

Did you enjoy my findings? If you want to reach out to me, feel free to join the Facebook group 'WordPress for Business' with other WordPress professionals.