Teardown · · 5 min
What it costs to run a WordPress site in 2026
Hosting is a small part of a WordPress bill. Here is every line around it, from premium plugins to developer hours and retainers, with each price and where it came from.
A business site on WordPress costs $4,800 a year to host on WP Engine’s Business plan. The premium plugins it runs add another $2,034.80. Then come the people: developer hours, a care plan and, often, an SEO agency.
On the example bill below, that comes to $53,555.60 a year. WordPress itself is free. The bill comes from everything around it.
What does WordPress hosting cost?
WP Engine’s Business plan starts at $400 a month billed yearly, or $4,800 a year. Its entry plan, Essential, is $28 a month billed yearly, or $336 a year for one site, at a first-year price. WP Engine’s plans page doesn’t show what either plan renews at.
Cheaper shared hosts exist too. On a business site, hosting is rarely the line that decides the total.
Which premium plugins does a business site pay for?
A business site pays for a page builder, an SEO plugin, a forms plugin, a cache plugin, security and analytics. Stores, membership sites and lead-generation sites add more. The prices below are the plans a larger business site runs, with the smaller plan beside each.
| Plugin | Job | Price a year | What the price covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elementor Pro | Page builder | $108 | Advanced plan, 3 sites. Essential is $60 for 1 site |
| Yoast SEO AI+ | SEO | $358.80 | Yoast SEO Premium, WooCommerce SEO and AI Brand Insights. Premium alone is $118.80 |
| Rank Math Pro | SEO | $107.88 | Renews at $8.99 a month, billed yearly |
| Gravity Forms Elite | Forms | $259 | Unlimited sites. Basic is $59 for 1 site |
| WPForms Pro | Forms | $399 | 5 sites. The first year is $199.50 |
| WP Rocket Plus | Caching | $120 | 3 sites, at the regular $10 a month. Single is $60 |
| Wordfence Care | Security | $590 | Wordfence sets it up, monitors it and handles incidents. Premium alone is $149 |
| MonsterInsights Elite | Analytics | $599 | 5 sites. The first year is $299.50. Pro is $399 |
| WooCommerce Subscriptions | Store subscriptions | $279 | 1 site |
| OptinMonster | Popups | $210 | Basic, 1 site. The first year is $108 |
The business set (Elementor Pro, Yoast SEO AI+, Gravity Forms Elite, WP Rocket Plus, Wordfence Care and MonsterInsights Elite) comes to $2,034.80 a year. These prices come from each vendor’s pricing page, at the price the plan renews at.
What do the people around the site cost?
This is the largest line, and the one most owners never add up.
A US web developer’s median pay was $92,650 a year in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over 2,080 working hours, that is $44.54 an hour. Freelancers and agencies charge more than the median salary works out to, so treat it as the floor.
| Developer time | A year, at $44.54 an hour |
|---|---|
| 5 hours a month | $2,672.40 |
| 10 hours a month | $5,344.80 |
| 20 hours a month | $10,689.60 |
A care plan covers updates, backups and small fixes. Most agencies don’t publish a price. WP Buffs does: its Perform plan is $239 a month, or $2,868 a year, for updates, backups, edits, security, speed work and malware removal.
SEO is the line that can dwarf the rest. SEO agencies charge $3,209 a month on average, in Ahrefs’ survey of 439 SEO providers, last updated in August 2024. Over a year that is $38,508.
Where does the money go on one example bill?
Take a business site on WP Engine Business with the plugin set above, the WP Buffs Perform plan, 10 developer hours a month and an SEO agency at the survey average.
| Line | A year | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting (WP Engine Business) | $4,800 | 9.0% |
| Premium plugins (the business set) | $2,034.80 | 3.8% |
| Care plan (WP Buffs Perform) | $2,868 | 5.4% |
| Developer, 10 hours a month | $5,344.80 | 10.0% |
| SEO agency | $38,508 | 71.9% |
| Total | $53,555.60 |
Hosting and plugins together are 12.8% of that bill. The people around the site are the rest. The WordPress Cost Calculator opens on this same site; change any line to see yours.
Why does the bill keep growing?
Renewals, security fixes and speed work push it up every year.
- Renewals. Several plugins sell the first year at a discount and renew at full price. MonsterInsights Elite goes from $299.50 to $599, WPForms Pro from $199.50 to $399, and OptinMonster from $108 to $210. WooCommerce.com extensions renew at 100% of their current list price.
- Security fixes. Patchstack counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025. 91% were in plugins, and 46% had no fix when they were disclosed. Each one is developer time, or a risk someone has decided to carry.
- Speed work. In September 2026, 48.3% of WordPress origins passed all three Core Web Vitals on mobile, according to the HTTP Archive. The rest need caching plugins, image plugins or a developer to close the gap.
What does the same site cost to run in code?
We moved Mockey’s blog off WordPress in September 2026: 328 posts, onto Astro, GitHub and Cloudflare. The site stack now costs $0 a month, and Claude co-authored 70% of its site commits from September to October 2026 (319 of 455).
In code, the jobs plugins did are written into the site, so there are no licences to renew. Pages are built ahead of time, so there is no cache plugin. Claude makes the change a developer used to make, and a person approves it.
For client sites, our target is 80 to 90% less spent running the site. Most of that comes off the people and plugin lines, not the hosting.
When is WordPress still the cheaper choice?
When the site has a short plugin list, nobody pays a retainer, and it changes twice a year. The bill is small, and a move saves little. We compare the two in WordPress and an agency, or a coded site?
How do you add up your own bill?
Open the WordPress Cost Calculator, tick the plugins you pay for and type in your hours and retainers. If the total surprises you, book a time in the calendar below and we’ll go through it line by line.
Rajat and Mofid, 11 Nov 2026. Tools: WordPress, WP Engine, Elementor, Yoast SEO, Gravity Forms, WP Rocket, Wordfence, MonsterInsights, WP Buffs.
This work sits under WordPress to Claude.
