Is my client getting overcharged?

[Lebron27]

My client has medium sized website (15k pages).

They have a company that takes care of everything related to the website.

Recently they decided to put a wordpress blog on the site, with a bought theme that only needed the yoast SEO plugin. On an extension like this www.domain.com/blog  I could do this very quickly and I am not a professional programmer.

The company claims it took them 40 hours and charged 40 x 125$ = 5,000 $ for it. That does not make sense to me at all. Can anyone explain to me how a clean wordpress install with a preselected theme can take 40 hours? Especially when the people that are installing it call themselves wordpress experts and make custom themes etc.

Thanks in advance.

[Lebron27]

Thanks for your answer.

They did not optimize anything.... But for the rest it is plausible that it took quite some time, yes.

This blog won't need much optimization, Yoast is fine.

[EGOL]

It is really easy to say... "I could do that in FIVE MINUTES."

What if this site was hand-built with lots of different page formats and huge messy code from one of those old Apple WYSIWYG webpage creators, with lots of images, captions, in-text wrap arounds, etc.

This site has 15,000 pages!   So, I could easily imagine a briarpatch site that would take twice that amount of time to do a great job.

And, yes, you can plug in Yoast or any other magic plugin.  That will do the SEO, but will it be good SEO, making every page into a finely crafted arrow with KW research, onpage optimization, alt tags.

I am not saying that these people did all of this work.  I am just saying if you don't have any idea about what these people did, what they had to start with and what they produced....  then saying "I could do that in five minutes or five hours" could be way off.

[Lebron27]

You are right, I have not thought about that, but it is definitely important!

This is a simple theme, I used it on another domain of mine, it takes 5 minutes to setup.

[Lebron27]

good advice, thanks

[SorinaDascalu]

If they are WordPress experts like you say, they shouldn't stop at only installing Wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin - there are security plugins, backup plugins, analytics plugins, cache plugins, social involvement plugins that are on the "essential plugins list"  of every WordPress expert and when they care about their work they will add them without doubt.

Also, installing some premium Themes require more work then simply uploading the files to the server and hitting the "Activate" button.

WordPress install alone is a 5 sec job as we all know, but a robust installation of needed plugins and theme settings can take longer.

Even so, 40 hours looks a little too much in my opinion. You should ask for details.

[ssiebn7]

It is ridiculous that they charge this kind of money for just installing WP.

I think you can do your client a favor by telling him it usually doesn't take that amount of time and indeed like Martijn says that they need to specify their hours.

I'm in the same situation by the way. Doing some SEO consulting for a client and the webdevelopment company is charging 125 euro's an hour (which is not specifically bad) but counting a lot of hours for small tasks.

What we did.. I made a list of things that needed to be done and we visited them (physically). So I sat next to the developer while he was changing things and suddenly tasks that took 2 hours before were done in 15 minutes

[Lebron27]

Thanks for your response.

All I can think of is some tweaking of the http access? All they did was install the wordpress and install the theme, they did not tweak the theme.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hopefully they specified where they spend their time on? Because as you mention it, it looks like your client was overcharged. However maybe the pulled in some extra improvements which could be really worth the money.