Thirty Dunedin microsites, thirty Elementor licences, and one communications person who cannot patch them all before Friday

A shared theme and block library with up to eight sites migrated runs NZ$22,000 to NZ$45,000 over 6 to 10 weeks. A full multisite estate covering twenty five or more sites is NZ$62,000 to NZ$95,000 over 3 to 5 months. If the immediate problem is security rather than consistency, remediation alone at NZ$14,000 to NZ$30,000 buys you time.

Multisite suits estates with shared branding, shared users, and one team responsible for updates, which describes most Dunedin institutions. Separate installations with a shared theme are safer where sites have genuinely different risk profiles or may be spun out later. Ask your developer to explain the failure mode of each, because that is the real difference.

For an estate you intend to keep patched, yes, and the honest reason is that page builders make updates risky enough that they get delayed. Structured blocks give editors a constrained set of layouts that survive updates without page-by-page checking. Departments will push back for a month and then stop noticing.

Roughly a day per twenty to thirty simple pages once the block library exists, considerably longer for pages with unusual layouts. Automation gets you part of the way and a human has to check every page, so count your pages honestly before agreeing a fixed price. Most estates find a third of their pages should simply be deleted.

Name that person or agency in a written maintenance agreement before the build starts, with a defined patch window and an incident response time. A governed estate can be patched centrally in an afternoon, which is the whole point of consolidating. Without an owner, you will be having this same conversation again in three years.

Yes, through role-based publishing that lets them edit pages and post news without touching plugins, themes, or configuration. That split is what makes the estate safe to maintain while keeping departments self-sufficient. Set the roles during discovery with the departments in the room, so the boundaries are agreed rather than imposed.

WordPress remains a sensible choice when you have many non-technical editors and frequently changing content, which describes most Dunedin institutions. Moving to a headless setup adds developer dependency for changes your comms team currently makes alone. Change platform for a real reason, not because the current one has been neglected.

Yes, WordPress skills are among the most available technical skills in the city, and that is a genuine argument for staying on the platform. What is scarcer is someone who has run a governed multisite estate rather than built individual sites. Look for that specific experience when you hire or contract.

Expect a monthly retainer covering patching, backups, uptime monitoring, and a small change allowance, scaled to the number of sites. Consolidation typically reduces this because you are maintaining one plugin set instead of thirty. Ask for the pricing to be per estate rather than per site, since that is what aligns your interests.

A one-page brief beats a 40-page requirements document: the business problem in plain words, who will use the system, the 5 to 10 workflows it must handle, the tools it must connect to, and your budget range and deadline driver. You do not need wireframes, a specification, or technical vocabulary; producing those is the agency's job during discovery. Stating a budget range up front is the single best move, because it gets you honest scoping instead of a quote engineered to win the meeting.

Yes, products, customers, and order history all export and import cleanly, with one caveat: customer passwords cannot be migrated from Shopify, so buyers will reset them on first login. A typical store migration with data cleanup, redirects, and payment gateway setup takes 3 to 6 weeks. Run the new store on staging in parallel and reconcile order and customer counts against the old platform before switching the domain.

Plan on 4 to 8 weeks for a custom-theme marketing site and 10 to 14 weeks for a WooCommerce store with CRM or ERP integrations. Across Digital Heroes projects, the biggest schedule variable is content: clients who deliver final copy and images before development starts launch around 3 weeks earlier than clients who send content page by page.

Keep URL structure identical wherever possible and set a 301 redirect for every URL that changes, using a full crawl of the current site as the master checklist. Build on staging, verify the redirect map there, then submit the updated sitemap in Search Console on launch day. Done this way a wobble of a few weeks is normal and recoverable; the horror stories come from sites that redirected every old page to the homepage.

A custom-designed WordPress site for a small business typically runs $3,000 to $10,000, and WooCommerce stores land between $8,000 and $25,000 once payments, shipping, and tax rules are configured. Across 2,000+ projects delivered by Digital Heroes, most small business builds close in the $4,000 to $7,000 range for a 6 to 10 page site on a custom theme. Quotes under $1,000 almost always mean a premium theme with your logo dropped in, which is a different product, not a cheaper version of the same one.

For testing whether anyone wants the product, yes, and Bubble's paid plans start at $29 a month, which is the cheapest validation you will ever buy. The ceiling arrives with complex data relationships, heavy integrations, performance at a few thousand users, and the fact that you cannot export a Bubble app to servers you control. A path many Digital Heroes clients take: prove demand on no-code, then rebuild custom once revenue justifies it, treating the no-code version as a paid prototype rather than a foundation.

For a focused first build, most small businesses land between $8,000 and $60,000: roughly $8,000 to $45,000 for a custom website and $25,000 to $60,000 for an internal tool or simple web app, based on Digital Heroes delivery across 2,000+ projects. Customer-facing products with payments, logins, or a mobile app start around $40,000. Quotes far below these bands usually mean a template with your logo on it, not software shaped around your workflow.

Digital Heroes builds custom WordPress development systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Dunedin. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.