How Much Does WordPress Cost? Real Numbers for 2026

WordPress is free. A WordPress website is not. That one sentence is behind most of the confusion when people ask how much WordPress costs, because two different questions are hiding inside it. One is “what does the software cost,” and the answer is nothing. The other is “what will my site actually cost me,” and that answer ranges from about $80 a year to six figures depending on who builds it and what it does.

Pricing out an online store too? The same ownership-versus-rental logic drives our look at Shopify alternatives and what they really cost.

We build and quote WordPress sites for a living, so we see the real invoices, not the marketing math. Below is every line item, with the numbers we actually charge and the ones we watch clients overpay for. No “$3 to $30 a month” hand-waving.

Running costs you pay every year, no matter who builds it

These are the unavoidable costs of keeping a self-hosted WordPress site online. The WordPress software from WordPress.org is free and always has been. What you pay for is everything around it.

Item	Realistic 2026 range	What we usually pick
Domain name	$10 to $15 a year	$10 at Cloudflare or Namecheap, no upsells
SSL certificate	$0	Free Let’s Encrypt, included by every decent host
Budget shared hosting	$3 to $8 a month	Fine for a hobby blog, a false economy for business
Solid managed hosting	$14 to $35 a month	Cloudways or SiteGround for most small business sites
Premium managed hosting	$30 to $115 a month	Kinsta or WP Engine when uptime is revenue

So the floor is real but low. A personal blog on Hostinger with a $10 domain runs maybe $80 to $130 for the first year. The trap is stopping there, because the hosting bill is rarely where the money actually goes.

The “free” plugins that quietly cost money

This is the part beginner guides skip. WordPress has 60,000-plus free plugins, and you can build a working site without paying for a single one. But the moment a site needs to be fast, secure, and findable, the free versions start nudging you toward their paid tiers. A typical small business stack we set up looks like this:

• Caching and performance: WP Rocket at $59 a year on a non-LiteSpeed host. Worth it, and we explain why in our WP Rocket breakdown. On a LiteSpeed server this is $0.
• SEO: Rank Math or Yoast. The free tiers genuinely cover most sites. Budget $0, or up to $79 a year if you want the premium redirect and schema tools.
• Forms: Fluent Forms or WPForms, free for a basic contact form, around $50 a year once you want conditional logic or payments.
• Custom fields and layout: ACF Pro at $49 a year if a developer is building custom content types, which most brochure sites do not need.
• Backups: free with most managed hosts, or $50 a year for an independent off-site backup you actually control.

None of these is expensive on its own. Added up, a real business site carries roughly $100 to $400 a year in plugin renewals on top of hosting. We tell clients to expect it, because the alternative is a site held together by abandoned free plugins, which costs far more to fix later.

Build cost: do it yourself, hire a freelancer, or hire an agency

The running costs above assume the site already exists. Building it is the bigger number, and it splits cleanly by who does the work. Here is the honest spread, including what we quote.

Who builds it	Typical cost	What you get
You, with a block theme	$0 plus your weekends	A real site if you enjoy the work and have the time
Freelancer or template assembly	$500 to $3,000	A decent brochure site, quality varies a lot
Agency, custom brochure site	$3,500 to $8,000	Custom design, proper content types, support
Agency, WooCommerce or complex	$8,000 to $20,000	Store, integrations, custom features
Enterprise build	$25,000 and up	Multi-site, heavy integrations, SLAs

The articles that quote “$25,000 to $100,000” are not lying, they are describing enterprise work and quietly skipping the 90 percent of sites that cost a fraction of that. Most small businesses that come to us land between $3,500 and $8,000 for a custom WordPress build, and we are happy to say so on the WordPress development page rather than make you fill in a form to find out.

The cost nobody warns you about: maintenance

A WordPress site is not a one-time purchase. Plugins update weekly, the core releases a few times a year, and a site left untouched for six months is the single most common way we see a hacked or broken WordPress install. Someone has to run the updates, check that nothing broke, and keep backups. That someone costs money or time.

If you do it yourself, budget two to four hours a month. If you outsource it, a care plan runs $50 to $200 a month depending on how critical the site is and whether it sells anything. For a business site this is the line item we most often see skipped at launch and regretted within a year, usually right after a plugin update takes the site down during business hours.

What we would budget for three common sites

Ranges are useless without a scenario, so here are three real ones with first-year totals, assuming an agency build and outsourced maintenance.

Site type	Build	Yearly running cost	First-year total
Personal blog (DIY)	$0	$80 to $150	~$120
Small business, 8 pages	$4,500	$600 to $1,200	~$5,500
WooCommerce store	$12,000	$1,500 to $3,000	~$14,000

The store’s running cost is higher because it carries more plugins, better hosting, and payment processing fees of roughly 2.9 percent per transaction that have nothing to do with WordPress but land in the same budget. Plan for them anyway.

So, how much does WordPress cost?

The software is free. A hobby blog you build yourself costs about $120 a year to run. A custom small business site costs $3,500 to $8,000 to build and a few hundred a year to keep healthy. A serious online store starts around $12,000 and climbs with complexity. Anyone who answers “how much does WordPress cost” with a single number is selling you something. If you tell us what the site needs to do, we will give you a real figure, and we would rather do that before you have spent a year paying for the wrong hosting.

FAQ

Is WordPress really free?

The WordPress.org software is free and open source, with no license fee ever. You pay for hosting, a domain, and any premium themes or plugins you choose. WordPress.com is a separate hosted service with monthly plans from $0 to about $45, where the free tier puts you on a subdomain with ads.

What is the cheapest way to run a WordPress site?

Self-host with a $10 domain, budget shared hosting around $4 a month, a free block theme, and only free plugins. That keeps a small blog under about $130 for the first year. It is the right choice for a hobby site and the wrong one for anything that earns money, where slow hosting costs you more in lost visitors than you save.

Why do agencies charge thousands when WordPress is free?

You are paying for design, custom development, content structure, and the time of people who have built hundreds of sites and know what breaks. The software being free is like lumber being cheap: it does not build the house. A custom small business build from us runs $3,500 to $8,000, which covers the work, not the WordPress license, because there is not one.

How much does WordPress hosting cost?

Budget shared hosting runs $3 to $8 a month, solid managed hosting like Cloudways or SiteGround is $14 to $35, and premium managed hosting like Kinsta or WP Engine is $30 to $115. For most small business sites we recommend the middle tier, since shared hosting becomes a bottleneck the moment you get real traffic.

What are the hidden costs of a WordPress site?

The three that surprise people most are premium plugin renewals (roughly $100 to $400 a year), ongoing maintenance ($50 to $200 a month if outsourced), and the eventual migration off cheap hosting when it can no longer keep up. None of these are huge alone, but they are real and worth budgeting for at launch.

WordPress.com or WordPress.org, which is cheaper?

For a tiny site, WordPress.com’s free or $4 plan is cheaper and simpler. For anything that needs custom plugins, real SEO control, or a store, self-hosted WordPress.org is cheaper in the long run despite the setup, because WordPress.com only unlocks plugins on its $25-a-month Business plan and up.

Pricing another stack against WordPress? Our OpenCart vs WooCommerce breakdown compares running costs on both.