What WordPress Really Costs

WordPress is free. And at the same time one of the most expensive decisions a small business website can make.

That sounds like a trick. It is not. It is a miscalculation almost everyone makes at the start, because you do not see the costs when you make the decision.

What the bill really shows

Take a typical business website: home page, services, blog, contact. Professional hosting with enough resources costs between 15 and 40 euros a month. On top of that come the plugins WordPress can barely do without for a serious business site: one for SEO, one for security, one for performance, one for forms, one for backups. Each of them carries an annual licence, somewhere between 50 and 200 euros.

Add it all up and you land at 80 to 150 euros a month. Over five years that is up to 9,000 euros. For a site that, at its core, shows static content.

That is not wrong in itself, as long as the site delivers that value. The only question is whether it does.

The quiet burden of maintenance

What appears on no invoice is the time. And the unease.

WordPress updates arrive regularly: core updates, plugin updates, theme updates. Anyone handling this responsibly tests every update in a staging environment before it goes live. That is the right way to do it, but it costs hours you would actually need for your own business.

Skip it, and you live with a different risk. WordPress is the most attacked CMS in the world, because it is the most widespread. Outdated plugins are the most common attack vector. A missed security update can put customer data at risk or hand the entire site over to strangers.

The hardest part is the creeping dependency that builds up. At some point nobody knows exactly which plugins are still actively needed and what happens if you remove one. The site runs, so you touch nothing. That is not control. That is tolerance.

Why I built my own website differently

When I planned my website, I wanted to avoid exactly that from the start. I know the pattern from process consulting: systems that have grown over the years, that nobody really understands anymore, and that nobody wants to touch because you are not sure what happens next. That is not an IT problem. It is a structural problem.

I chose a static architecture: no database, no CMS backend, no plugin stack. Content lives as plain text files directly in the project folder. When you publish, the site is built once and delivered as finished HTML files. No server process per visit, no plugin loop, no data query.

The result: load times under one second, Lighthouse scores between 95 and 100. And no security holes that need patching, because there are no attackable structures. There is nothing to patch, because there is nothing to hack.

I run this site without ever having done a single maintenance cycle. It feels unusually quiet.

What actually changes

The running costs drop to three to ten euros a month. Content changes are possible at any time, directly in the files or with AI support in a few minutes. The entire code lives in a versioned repository, every earlier state can be restored.

What matters most to me: the site then truly belongs to the owner. Not to the plugin vendor, not to the hosting package, not to the service provider who is the only one who still knows how the site is built. That sounds obvious, but with grown WordPress sites it rarely is.

Who this fits

I am not saying WordPress is fundamentally wrong. For sites with complex e-commerce, membership areas or other dynamic requirements, there are good reasons to use it.

But for a business website that mainly shows static content, the question is worth asking: is the architecture proportionate to what the site actually has to do? Most of the time the answer becomes clear once you add up the total costs of the last three years.

If you want to check this for your own site, you will find all the details about my offer on the AI website migration services page.

Further reading

• Measure Core Web Vitals and load times with Google PageSpeed Insights

About the author

Jochen Stier brings over 20 years of experience from IT service management and process optimization. He knows how quickly systems grow and how hard it becomes to get them back under control. With website migration he follows the same principle: fewer dependencies, more control. After the migration, owners can maintain their site independently - without an agency, without plugin chaos.