What WordPress actually costs per year

WordPress the software costs nothing, and running a WordPress site costs a surprising number of small somethings. The honest stack is hosting, a domain, email, plugins, a theme, and your own time, which is the line item nobody prices and is often the largest. A personal site can run on modest hosting plus a domain renewal. A commercial site adds specialist email, a few licensed plugins, a bigger server, and maintenance hours. Below, each cost is presented as a shape rather than a quote, because most of these numbers move constantly and the two that do not are marked as anchors.

Hosting, the biggest variable

Hosting is where the money moves, and the market splits into recognisable shapes.

Mass-market shared hosting is cheapest on the first invoice and renews at a visibly higher rate, with your site living on a crowded server alongside many others. That shape holds until the site gets busy or the first renewal lands, at which point people start reading guides like this one. Raw VPS hosting bills the least per month and collects the difference in hours: you become the person patching, monitoring and recovering it at odd times. Managed cloud hosting sits between the two. You pay the cloud provider's rate plus a management margin, and in return the patching, the monitoring and the 3am recovery are somebody else's job. Cloudways' entry server is a stable anchor here, audited rather than estimated: $14 a month for 1GB of RAM, one vCPU and 25GB of NVMe storage, with the renewal at the same number, because managed cloud pricing skips the introductory game entirely. Premium managed WordPress platforms charge comfortably more for a more curated experience. Across these shapes the spread is wide, which is the point: hosting is the decision that dominates this whole page.

A domain, every year, forever

The domain is the smallest major line item: a yearly renewal that never ends, frequently discounted for the first term and billed at the standard rate afterwards. Its shape matters more than its price. Register somewhere you can leave. Keep the registration in your own account instead of bundled invisibly into a hosting plan. Expect the renewal to cost more than the first year did, and budget for the reality instead of the promotion.

Email, because good hosts do not do it

Competent hosts specialise, and email is the service they most reliably decline. Cloudways, deliberately, does not host email at all, and the reasoning is sound: mail deliverability is its own discipline, and doing it badly is worse than declining it. So a realistic WordPress budget includes a specialist mailbox, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or Fastmail, billed per mailbox per month. For a one-person site that is one mailbox. For a business it is everyone's mailbox, and it can add up faster than the hosting does. Connecting the mailbox to your domain, and making WordPress send reliably through it, has its own guide: WordPress and email.

The plugin question

Free covers more than people expect. SEO, contact forms, caching, security basics: the free tiers of the major plugins handle all of it well, and a site can run for years on free plugins alone.

What justifies a license is specific. A serious forms plugin, once you are building anything with conditional logic or payments. A backup tool, if your host's backups are thin, though many managed hosts include respectable ones. And one niche plugin that matches how the business genuinely makes money: bookings, memberships, the WooCommerce extension doing the specific thing the store needs. The rule worth internalising is to buy after a free plugin has visibly failed you, and rarely before. The stack of five licensed plugins doing jobs free tools already do is a real phenomenon, and it is usually what buying during a panic looks like afterwards.

The theme, and what it is not

The default WordPress themes are good now, and the established free themes with paid upgrades cover most small sites. A premium theme is typically a one-time purchase in the modest range rather than a subscription. Custom design is where this line stops being small: a designer and a developer building a bespoke theme costs more than everything else on this page together. It belongs in the budget as design cost, though it lands in the same spreadsheet.

The cost nobody prices

Hours. Updates, breakages, spam, speed work, the staging habit, the 11pm recovery when something has gone wrong. An owner running their own VPS to save the management margin is paying in the currency they invoice at, and the arithmetic often looks bad once the hours are priced honestly. This is the gap the VPS versus managed TCO calculator exists to close: it prices the hours alongside the invoices so the comparison stops flattering the cheap option.

The shapes, summed

A personal site: the smallest sensible hosting, a domain, free plugins, a free theme. Entry managed cloud puts a stable floor under that shape at $14 a month, the audited Cloudways entry price, with everything above it optional.

A business site: managed cloud hosting, specialist email for everyone who needs a mailbox, one or two earned licenses, and the hours, either yours or somebody's you pay. Add Cloudflare Enterprise from $4.99 per domain per month if the audience is genuinely global; most are not.

A busy store: a larger server, more add-ons, the licensed WooCommerce extensions the catalogue needs, and the maintenance hours grow until somebody is doing them as a job.

None of these are quotes. They are shapes, and the only stable numbers in them are the two anchors above. If the hosting shape is the decision in front of you, the managed WordPress buyer guide walks the options by the kind of site you run.