In short
- WordPress itself is free. Hosting, premium licenses, security, maintenance and the eventual redesign are not, and most of them recur.
- In our builder-site example, the $7,000 launch price turns out to be less than a quarter of what the site costs over five years.
- A small WordPress site kept lean, maintained by an owner who knows it, can be the cheapest option of all. We show that too.
- The math flips toward Next.js when a site carries a page builder, paid plugins, a monthly retainer and a redesign around year four.
- Prices vary by vendor and change often. Use the line items, put in your own invoices and run the numbers yourself.
The price is one number. The cost is a list.
Picture a landscaping company that signs a proposal for a WordPress site at $7,000. The site launches in spring and looks good. In June a charge appears for a page builder license. In August a premium forms plugin renews. In October the care plan's invoice arrives, and it turns out the care plan doesn't include the security service, which bills separately, or the hosting, which also bills separately. None of it is hidden, exactly. It's just spread across six vendors and twelve months, where nobody adds it up.
WordPress itself is free software, in the sense that a boat a neighbor gives you is free. Nobody charges for the download. Everything required to keep it running, safe and current has a price, and most of those prices come back every year.
This guide adds it all up over five years, because five years is about how long a small business site is expected to last before somebody says the word "redesign." We'll use ranges first, then a worked example with every assumption on the table. Prices vary by vendor and change often, so treat the figures as a way to check your own invoices, not as a quote.
Nobody sells you WordPress. They sell you everything it needs, one renewal at a time.
Every line item, in the order the invoices arrive
A WordPress site's costs fall into eight lines. Some bill monthly, some yearly, and a few arrive without warning. These are typical ranges for a small business site; your vendors will differ.
| Line item | Typical range | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
| Build | $1,500 to $5,000 for a template site; $6,000 to $20,000 custom | Page count, custom design, who writes the copy |
| Hosting | Roughly $10 to $30 a month shared; often $20 to $60 managed, more for busy sites | Traffic, and whether staging, backups and support are included |
| Premium theme and page builder | Roughly $50 to $250 a year together | Yearly renewals for updates and support; multi-site tiers cost more |
| Premium plugins | Often $50 to $200 a year each | Forms, SEO, caching, backups, sliders, booking, store add-ons |
| Security and backups | $0 if the host includes it; roughly $100 to $300 a year if not | Firewall, malware scanning, off-site backups that actually restore |
| Maintenance | Roughly $50 to $250 a month, or your own hours | Updates, testing after updates, small edits, monitoring |
| Emergency fixes | A few hundred to a few thousand dollars per incident | Hack cleanup, an update that broke the layout, a blank white screen |
| Redesign | Often close to the original build price | Builder layouts rarely survive a new theme, so pages get rebuilt |
Ranges reflect what small business sites commonly pay as of 2026. Vendor prices change, and some plugins discount the first year and renew at full price.
Two lines deserve a closer look. Premium plugins are each cheap and collectively not. A site that needs a form builder, an SEO add-on, a backup tool, a security scanner and a slider has five renewals, each on its own anniversary, each with its own login and its own idea of what "lifetime" means.
The redesign is the line owners forget, because it's three years away on launch day. Page builder layouts are tied to the builder and often to the theme, so a new look usually means rebuilding pages rather than restyling them. The same structure that makes those pages expensive to redesign also makes them heavy to load, which the guide to why WordPress sites slow down takes apart.
The line that never appears on an invoice
If you skip the maintenance retainer, you are the retainer. That's a reasonable choice for an owner who knows WordPress and an expensive one for an owner who doesn't, because the cost arrives in evenings rather than dollars.
The chores are small and constant. Updates to core, theme and plugins arrive most weeks. Most are harmless. Some conflict, and the conflict tends to show up as a contact form that quietly stops sending or a layout that breaks only on phones. Somebody has to update, then check.
A WordPress site's monthly chores
- Apply core, theme and plugin updates, on a staging copy first if you have one
- Submit every form after updating and confirm the email actually arrives
- Check the site on a phone, not only on the desktop you updated it from
- Confirm last night's backup exists somewhere other than the server it backs up
- Restore a backup to a test copy now and then, because an untested backup is a rumor
- Read the security plugin's alerts and act on the real ones
- Renew whichever license expired this month, and remember what it was for
- Clear out the spam comments and junk form submissions
Call it one to four hours a month for a lean site, more in a month when something breaks. Over five years, two hours a month is 120 hours. Put your own hourly value on that before deciding the do-it-yourself route is free.
A worked example: three sites, five years
Numbers are easier to argue with when they're specific, so here are three imaginary sites priced with midpoint figures from the ranges above. They are example scenarios, not quotes.
Lean WordPress. Ten pages on an inexpensive theme with about eight plugins, mostly free, on budget shared hosting. The owner does the updates. No redesign within five years.
Builder WordPress. Twenty-five pages on a premium theme with a pro page builder, about twenty-five plugins of which five are paid, on managed hosting, with an agency care retainer. One hack cleanup and one bad-update repair over five years, and a redesign in year four.
Next.js with a custom CMS. The same twenty-five pages, built as a fixed-price custom site with an editor for services, posts and team. Hosting and a maintenance plan, no theme, builder or plugin licenses, a design refresh in year four and a small allowance for the unexpected.
Five-year cost, three example sites
| Line item | Lean WordPress | Builder WordPress | Next.js + custom CMS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build | $3,000 | $7,000 | $12,000 |
| Hosting ($20, $50 and $20 a month) | $1,200 | $3,000 | $1,200 |
| Theme, builder and plugin licenses | $500 | $3,250 | $0 |
| Security and backups | $0 (host-included) | $1,000 | Included in plan |
| Maintenance ($0, $150 and $100 a month) | $0, plus about 120 of your hours | $9,000 | $6,000 |
| Emergency fixes | $500 | $1,500 | $500 allowance |
| Redesign or refresh, year four | $0 | $7,000 | $3,000 |
| Five-year total | $5,200 plus your hours | $31,750 | $22,700 |
Example scenarios built from midpoints of typical ranges, not quotes or current vendor prices. Lean licenses: $100 a year. Builder licenses: $150 a year for theme and builder plus five plugins at $100 a year. Security on the builder site: $200 a year. Change any assumption and the totals move; that is the point of showing them.
The builder site's $7,000 launch price turned out to be less than a quarter of what it cost. By the end of year five its owner had paid about four and a half times the number on the proposal. The Next.js site started $5,000 more expensive and finished about $9,000 cheaper. The lean site beat both by a wide margin, as long as nobody bills for the owner's evenings.
Where the math flips
Running totals tell the story better than final ones. Here are the builder site and the Next.js site from the example, year by year, with the hack cleanup landing in year two, the bad update in year three and the redesign in year four.
| End of year | Builder WordPress | Next.js + custom CMS | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | $10,250 | $13,440 | Next.js costs $3,190 more |
| Year 2 | $14,500 | $14,880 | Next.js costs $380 more |
| Year 3 | $18,250 | $16,820 | WordPress costs $1,430 more |
| Year 4 | $28,500 | $21,260 | WordPress costs $7,240 more |
| Year 5 | $31,750 | $22,700 | WordPress costs $9,050 more |
Same assumptions as the example above. Recurring costs: $3,250 a year for the builder site, $1,440 a year for the Next.js site. The Next.js allowance is spent in year three.
In this example the lines cross during year three. Two numbers move the crossing point more than any others: the monthly retainer and the redesign. Raise the retainer to $250 a month and the builder site is the more expensive one by the end of year two. Drop the retainer entirely and do the work yourself, and the two sites finish five years within $50 of each other in cash. Your hours make up the difference.
The redesign matters because of how each site is put together. A builder site's design lives inside every page, so a new look tends to mean rebuilding the pages. A Next.js site's design lives in shared components and templates, so a refresh changes those and every page follows. That's why the example prices the year-four refresh at less than half the builder redesign. A custom CMS helps here too: content sits in fields rather than in layouts, so it survives the redesign untouched.
When WordPress really is the cheaper choice
The lean column in the example is not a straw man. For plenty of businesses it's the right answer, and saying so is the only reason you should believe the rest of this page.
WordPress probably wins on cost if
- The site is small, mostly brochure pages, and changes a few times a year
- You, or someone on staff, already knows WordPress and doesn't mind the upkeep
- You run an inexpensive theme and a short list of mostly free plugins
- You publish often, and the blogging workflow is the main thing you need
- A specific plugin does something your business depends on, and nothing else does it as well
- The budget for the build is under about $5,000 and financing isn't an option
If most of those describe you, keep the site lean, keep it updated and spend the difference on photos and reviews. When it does need help, our WordPress repair guides cover the common breakdowns, and our WordPress web design work builds sites that should stay on WordPress.
The math flips the other way once a site has grown a builder, a paid stack of plugins, a retainer and a redesign on the horizon. That's the profile in the middle column, and it is a common one.
Run your own numbers
- 1
Pull twelve months of statements.
Search the card and bank statements for the host, the theme vendor, the builder, every plugin and anyone you paid to fix something. Most owners find a renewal they'd forgotten.
- 2
List what renews and when.
Write down each line with its yearly cost and renewal date. Monthly items get multiplied by twelve. This is your recurring number.
- 3
Count your hours.
Estimate the time spent on updates, fixes and chasing vendors in a typical month. Multiply by twelve and by what an hour of your time is worth.
- 4
Add the one-offs.
Any cleanup, emergency fix or developer invoice from the last three years. Divide by three for a yearly average.
- 5
Ask about the redesign.
If the site is two or more years old, ask a developer what a new look would involve: restyling or rebuilding. The answer is your year-four number.
- 6
Get a comparison.
Run the free Should I Leave WordPress? check for a rough conversion estimate, or ask for a fixed quote on a WordPress to Next.js move.
On the Next.js side, our custom builds are a fixed price, most often $6,000 to $20,000, and 0% financing spreads the cost with 25% down. The $12,000 build in the example would be $3,000 down and $750 a month for twelve months, with no interest. Set that monthly figure next to the renewals and retainer you just added up.
Where to go from here
Cost is one reason owners leave WordPress. Speed is usually the other, and the two are connected: a good share of the plugins in the license line exist to patch performance the platform doesn't provide on its own. The guide to slow WordPress sites covers that side. For the whole decision, start with WordPress vs. Next.js for a small business. And if you're wondering how a custom build fits inside a fixed price, how AI agents build websites shows where the saved hours go.
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Questions people ask
Straight answers
The software is. You can download WordPress and use it without paying anyone. Running it is another matter: hosting, a domain, a theme, usually several premium plugins, security, backups and someone's time for updates all cost money or hours. For a small business site, those running costs typically add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, depending on how the site was built.
Most sell a yearly license that covers updates and support. If you stop paying, the plugin usually keeps working, but the updates stop, including security fixes, and outdated plugins are a common way in for attackers. So the renewal is optional in theory and close to mandatory in practice. Five or six of them together make a meaningful yearly bill.
When it stays small and simple. A brochure site on an inexpensive theme with a short list of mostly free plugins, maintained by an owner who knows WordPress, can cost far less over five years than any custom build. The math changes once a site carries a page builder, several paid plugins, a monthly care retainer and a likely redesign.
Many small business sites get redesigned somewhere around year three to five, when the look dates, the builder changes or the business outgrows its pages. On builder-based WordPress sites the redesign often means rebuilding pages, because the layout lives inside each one. Budget for it from the start rather than treating it as a surprise.
Yes. If you do your own updates, backups and fixes, you're paying with hours instead of a retainer. Two hours a month comes to about 120 hours over five years. Whether that's a bargain depends on what else those hours could earn and whether you enjoy the work. Many owners don't count it until the night an update breaks the contact form.
Yes, smaller and fewer. You'll pay for hosting, which can be modest for a pre-built site, and usually a maintenance plan for updates, monitoring and small changes; plans for coded sites commonly run about $50 to $200 a month. There are no theme, builder or plugin licenses to renew. New features are development work and are quoted separately.
Where to go from here