WordPress agencies: hire for builds, migrations & care

Choose a WordPress specialist when Gutenberg/block themes, WooCommerce, multisite, memberships, custom plugins, or a messy migration are the core job. A general web agency is enough for a simple marketing site if they show recent WP proof and name who owns the stack day to day. Match the shop to the bottleneck — CMS craft, not a logo wall of unrelated Next.js apps.

Prefer custom or well-built block themes when performance, accessibility, brand systems, and long-term maintainability matter. Page builders fit when non-technical editors must assemble layouts constantly and you accept performance and lock-in trade-offs. Ask agencies to recommend against your editorial model and Core Web Vitals budget — not their default toolkit. “Unlimited flexibility” without an update and exit plan is a red flag.

You should. Keep hosting, domain/DNS, WordPress admin, staging, backups, and analytics in accounts your org controls; grant the agency the roles they need to ship. Require work-for-hire, plugin license ownership, and written offboarding (theme/plugin/content export). Agency-only managed hosting without export rights or your own admin access is lock-in unless you deliberately buy managed WP and still document ownership.

A focused marketing-site redesign on a clean WordPress stack often lands in the low-to-mid five figures. Content-heavy migrations, WooCommerce, multilingual sites, or custom plugin work commonly climb mid-five into six figures. Drivers are template complexity, content volume, integrations, and how much custom PHP you need. Distrust a single number with no inventory of must-have templates, redirects, and systems of record.

A retainer makes sense when you need ongoing core/plugin updates, security monitoring, light content support, and a named escalation path — and you will actually use that capacity. Skip open-ended “care hours” if you only need a rebuild; buy a defined SOW plus a short warranty instead. Prefer retainers that list environments, update cadence, what is out of scope, and who owns emergency response.