WordPress maintenance cost: what a year actually contains
**Hosting that is good enough.** Not the cheapest shared plan, which is where sites go to be slow. A WordPress site runs a database query for every visitor, so hosting is doing real work and has to be paid for accordingly.
**Premium plugins and theme licences.** These renew annually, individually, on dates nobody tracks. The forms plugin, the SEO plugin, the slider, the backup service, the security layer, the caching layer. Six to twelve renewals is normal.
**Backups and security, as services.** Not because WordPress is badly made, but because it is the most attacked software on the web by a wide margin, and “we will remember to update it” is not a security posture.
**Updates, applied by somebody.** Core, plugins and theme, monthly at least. The update itself takes minutes. Checking that nothing broke takes the rest.
The line nobody invoices for
The afternoon somebody spends when an update breaks the layout. It is not on any quote, it happens two or three times a year, and it lands on whoever is nearest — which in a small business is usually the person who can least afford the afternoon.
This is the actual difference between platforms, and it is invisible in every comparison table because it cannot be priced. A hosted platform is insurance: what you buy is the absence of that afternoon.
The second uninvoiced cost is delay. When editing feels risky, people stop editing. A site nobody dares touch quietly stops being current, and that costs more than the hosting ever did.
What the alternative bill looks like
One plan, one renewal, one invoice. Webflow's hosting includes the CDN, SSL, backups and the update path, because there is nothing for you to update. That is the whole argument and it is a narrower one than the marketing suggests: you are not buying better software, you are buying fewer moving parts.
The trade is real. You give up the plugin ecosystem, which is the largest in the world, and some of what it does has no equivalent — life after plugins is the honest inventory of what survives the move.
For a business site that publishes pages and takes enquiries, fewer moving parts is almost always the better trade. For a site with genuinely unusual selling logic, the ecosystem is worth the upkeep.
How to work out your own number
List every renewal that touches the website — hosting, plugins, theme, backup, security, monitoring, whatever email service the forms use. Most people discover two or three they had forgotten, which is itself the point.
Then add whoever spends time on it. If it is your developer, that is an hourly rate times a real number of hours. If it is you, put your own rate on it, because that hour is not free just because nobody billed for it.
Compare the total against a hosted plan plus a support arrangement. If your total is lower and nothing has broken in a year, you have a well-run WordPress site and should keep it — that is a legitimate outcome of this exercise and worth saying, since most articles on this subject exist to sell the move.
If you are running the comparison to decide about moving, what a migration costs is the other half of the arithmetic.
Questions we get asked
How much does it cost to maintain a WordPress website per year?
It is not one bill. Capable hosting, six to twelve individual plugin and theme renewals, backup and security services, and someone's time applying monthly updates and checking nothing broke. The total is usually two or three times what people estimate, because it arrives in small separate pieces.
What is the hidden cost of WordPress?
The afternoon somebody loses when an update breaks the layout — two or three times a year, never invoiced, always landing on whoever is nearest. The second is delay: when editing feels risky, people stop editing, and the site quietly stops being current.
Is Webflow cheaper than WordPress in the long run?
For a business site that publishes pages and takes enquiries, usually — not because the software is better but because there are fewer moving parts and one renewal instead of nine. For a site with unusual selling logic, the plugin ecosystem is worth its upkeep.