Running a site
The real cost of owning a WordPress site
16 July 2026 · 6 min read
On this page
WordPress is free, which is where the confusion starts. The software costs nothing; running a site that stays online and secure does not.
Here are realistic annual numbers for a small business site.
The unavoidable costs
Domain: $12–20 a year. Set it to auto-renew and check the card on file annually. Domains expiring by accident is more common than it should be, and recovering one after it lapses is expensive if someone else takes it.
Hosting: $60–400 a year. The range is enormous and it matters more than anything else on this list. At the bottom is shared hosting at $5 a month, which is usually the largest single cause of a slow site. Decent WordPress hosting is $20–30 a month.
SSL: $0. Free through Let's Encrypt at essentially every host now. If yours charges for a basic certificate, that is a signal about the host.
Subtotal: $72–420 a year to have a site that exists.
The costs people forget
Premium plugins: $0–600 a year. Most sites have a few. A form plugin, an SEO plugin, a booking system, a WooCommerce extension. Each is $50–200 annually, and they renew quietly.
A premium theme: $50–100 a year if you use one with ongoing licensing.
Email: $70–150 a year for a proper mailbox on your domain, plus a transactional sending service if you run a shop. Sending mail through your web server stopped being viable once the big providers tightened authentication requirements.
Backups: $0–100 a year. Free with UpdraftPlus to your own Google Drive, more if you want managed off-site storage with retention.
The cost nobody counts
Maintenance. Either your time or someone else's.
Done properly, a small site needs three to five hours a month: updates applied and checked, backups verified, security watched, the occasional fix. That is 36–60 hours a year.
If your time is worth $50 an hour, that is $1,800–3,000 a year of your own capacity, spent on work nobody sees.
If you pay for it, a care plan is $79–279 a month, so $950–3,350 a year.
If you do neither — which is the most common choice — you are not saving that money. You are deferring it, and the deferred version arrives as an emergency.
The emergency costs
These are not annual, but they are not rare either:
- Malware cleanup: $150–500, once
- Emergency fix when something breaks: $95–200 an hour, at short notice
- Rebuild, when a neglected site is past repair: $2,000–10,000
- Lost revenue during downtime: entirely dependent on your business, and usually the largest number here
Realistic totals
Bare minimum, doing everything yourself: around $150 a year, plus 40 hours of your time, plus the risk.
Sensible small business site: roughly $1,500–2,000 a year all in — decent hosting, a couple of premium plugins, proper email, and a maintenance plan.
Small ecommerce: $2,500–4,000, mostly because hosting and maintenance both need to be better.
What is worth paying for, in order
- Hosting. The single highest-return upgrade available, and the one people cut first.
- Maintenance, whether that is your time genuinely spent or someone else's.
- Backups, off-site and tested.
- Only the plugins you actually use. Audit annually — most sites carry two or three renewals nobody needs.
Where people waste money
Bundled hosting-and-maintenance packages that make leaving hard.
Premium plugins doing what WordPress does natively. Contact forms, galleries, SEO basics.
Accessibility overlays, which are $500–1,000 a year and do not do what they claim.
Page builder licences on sites that have not been edited in two years.
The cheapest hosting, which is a false economy paid for in conversions and in emergencies.
The honest summary: budget around $1,500 a year for a site that matters to your business, and treat anything much below that as a decision to spend time instead of money — which is fine, as long as you actually spend the time.