The real cost of a WordPress website over three years
The real cost of a WordPress website over three years: hosting, plugins, updates, security and the unbilled fixes, added up honestly before you quote.
When an agency quotes a WordPress site, the quote covers the build. The client hears "WordPress is free" and assumes the rest is cheap. Three years later, both sides have paid a good deal more than either expected, and nobody can say exactly where it went.
This post adds it up. It's a worked example, and every figure in it is illustrative. Don't quote our numbers. Copy the line items, put your own figures against them, and you'll have the real cost of a WordPress website for a client you actually have.
Where WordPress is genuinely cheap
Start with what's true. WordPress core is free and open source. Hosting for a small site can cost very little. There's a vast pool of developers, so you're never stuck for help, and most clients have used it before. For a simple site with few plugins, the running cost can be very low indeed.
None of that is in dispute. The cost shows up in the lines around it.
The line items
Here is a three-year model for a typical brochure site with a contact form, a blog and a handful of plugins. All figures are illustrative.
Hosting. Managed WordPress hosting at £25 a month. Over three years: £900.
Premium theme and plugin licences. A premium theme, a page builder, a forms plugin, an SEO plugin, a backup plugin and a security plugin. Annual renewals of around £300 combined. Over three years: £900.
Update time. Updates every month, with a check afterwards. Thirty minutes a month at £75 an hour is £37.50 a month. Over three years: £1,350.
Security incidents. Not every site gets compromised, so treat this as probability times cost. Say a one-in-five chance over three years of an incident that takes eight hours to clean up and costs a day of the client's reputation. The time alone is £600, so the expected cost is £120. Adjust the probability to what you've seen in your own portfolio.
Unbilled fixes. The small things the client broke and you fixed for free. The unbilled hours works through this. Say twenty-five minutes a month. Over three years: around £1,125.
The eventual rebuild. At some point the page builder changes, the theme stops being maintained or the plugin stack becomes too fragile to update. If you plan for a rebuild every four or five years, three years carries a share of it. Put a number on it, even a rough one.
Without the rebuild, the illustrative total is around £4,400 over three years. More than half of that is time, not licences. That's the line most quotes leave out.
Why the time lines matter most
Licence fees are visible. They arrive as invoices, and somebody notices them. Update time and unbilled fixes don't. They arrive as interruptions, spread across a team, logged against nothing.
They also scale with the number of sites you run. One site with thirty minutes of monthly updates is nothing. Thirty sites is fifteen hours a month, every month, and it never goes away. Every plugin is a decision you have to keep making covers why.
The same three years on a hosted platform
Now run the same site on a hosted platform where the platform does the updates. We'll use our own prices, because those are the ones we can stand behind.
On Contentive's Agency plan, £39 a month includes three live sites, and each live site after that is £10.99 a month. For one additional client site, that's £10.99 a month, or about £396 over three years. If you only run one site, the Starter plan is the same £10.99 a month for one live site. The price includes hosting, staging and the platform updates. There are no plugin licences to renew and no plugins to update.
What it doesn't remove is your own work. The theme still has to be built and occasionally changed. The content still has to be written. Support questions still arrive. Your care plan should still charge for those, and you should still log them.
The honest comparison isn't "free versus £10.99". It's the whole column of time on the left against a smaller column of time on the right.
What it costs to switch
Switching isn't free either, and a fair model has to include it.
A migration means moving the content, rebuilding the theme and checking every page. Posts, pages, media, categories and slugs transfer from WordPress. Plugin data and theme customisations don't. Moving a WordPress site to Contentive walks through what moves and what has to be rebuilt.
For a site that's eighteen months from a rebuild anyway, switching at the rebuild costs very little extra. For a site that was rebuilt last year and runs well, the switch may never pay for itself. Some sites should stay where they are, and our WordPress comparison says so.
What this model gets wrong
Any three-year model is a guess. Some WordPress sites run for years with almost no attention. Some clients never touch the site, so there are no unbilled fixes. If your sites look like that, your numbers will be lower, and that's the right answer for those sites.
The model also undercounts things that are hard to price, like the evening lost to an update that broke the contact form. Leave those out rather than invent them. A smaller number you can defend is worth more than a bigger one you can't.
Build the spreadsheet
Take your three oldest client sites. For each one, list every line above and fill in what it actually cost over the last three years, from invoices and from time logs. Where you don't have the time logs, estimate and mark the estimate. Then compare the total to what the client paid you for upkeep. That gap, if there is one, is the number to bring to your next pricing review.