Short answer: WordPress is free. A WordPress website isn't. In the UK in 2026, expect to pay £1,000 to £3,000 for a freelancer to build a small business WordPress site, £2,500 to £8,000 from an agency, and then £30 to £150 a month to host it and keep it safe. Build it yourself and the cash cost drops to a few hundred pounds a year, but the maintenance doesn't go away. It just becomes your job.
WordPress runs about 40% of all websites on the internet, and close to 60% of every site built on a content management system, according to W3Techs. There's a good reason for that. It's flexible, it's everywhere, and almost any web designer can work on it. But "the software is free" has led a lot of small business owners into budgets that fall apart in year two.
This guide goes line by line through what a WordPress site actually costs in the UK: the build, the hosting, the licences most people don't know they're paying for, and the maintenance that stops it getting hacked. Then it does the three-year sum, and is honest about when WordPress is the right call and when it isn't.
WordPress is free in the same way a puppy is free.
What "WordPress is free" actually covers
There are two different things called WordPress, and the confusion costs people money.
WordPress.org is the free, open-source software. You download it, install it on hosting you pay for, and you're in full control. When web designers say "we build on WordPress", this is nearly always what they mean.
WordPress.com is a paid hosting service run by Automattic, a company that uses the same software. It works more like Wix or Squarespace: monthly plans, with more features on the dearer tiers.
The free part is the software. Everything you need to turn it into a working business website costs something: a domain, hosting, usually a premium theme or page builder, a handful of plugins, and someone's time to build it and keep it updated. None of those are huge on their own. Together, they're a real budget line.
Getting it builtWhat a WordPress build costs in the UK
Build it yourself
Buy hosting, install WordPress with the host's one-click installer, choose a theme, add your pages. Plenty of people do this and it can work well.
The learning curve is real. Themes, page builders, plugins, caching, security settings, forms that actually deliver email. Most DIY WordPress sites end up slow, because every problem gets solved with another plugin. And you're now responsible for updates, which is the bit that bites.
Freelance WordPress designer
UK freelance web developers charge roughly £30 to £120 an hour depending on experience, and most quote a fixed price for a brochure site of 5 to 15 pages. Expect the lower end for a theme-based site with your content dropped in, and the upper end for custom design work.
Check three things: whose licences the premium plugins are on, who's paying for the hosting account, and whether ongoing updates are included. If the answer to all three is "mine", you're dependent on one person, which is fine until they get a full-time job.
Agency WordPress build
Design, build, content entry, basic SEO, training. WooCommerce shops typically start around £3,000 to £5,000 and climb with the size of the catalogue and the integrations (stock, delivery, accounting).
The care plan. Most agencies will want you on a monthly support contract after launch, often £50–£150 a month. That can be good value. Just make sure you know exactly what it covers before you sign.
The running costs, line by line
Whoever builds it, a WordPress site has the same set of running costs. Here's what each one is, what it typically costs in the UK, and where people get caught out.
Domain name: £10–£20 a year
Same as any website. Make sure it's registered in your name, with your email on the account. This matters more than anything else in this article.
Hosting: £3–£50 a month
This is where WordPress pricing gets slippery. Shared hosting is advertised very cheaply, but the low price is an introductory rate. SiteGround, one of the most popular WordPress hosts, advertises its plans from US$2.99 to $7.99 a month, renewing at roughly $17.99 to $39.99, according to this 2026 breakdown. That's a four- to six-fold jump in year two, and it's normal across the industry.
Managed WordPress hosting, where the host handles caching, backups and some security for you, typically runs £20 to £50 a month for a single small business site. It costs more, and for most businesses that aren't technical, it's worth it.
| Hosting type | Year one | From year two | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Budget shared hosting | £3–£8/month | £12–£30/month | Small, low-traffic sites with someone technical looking after them |
| Managed WordPress hosting | £20–£50/month | Usually the same | Most small businesses who don't want to babysit a server |
| Hosting bundled in a care plan | Included in £49–£150/month | Anyone who wants one bill and one person to call | |
Theme: £0–£90 a year
The theme controls how the site looks. Plenty of excellent free themes exist. Premium versions of popular themes usually cost £40 to £90 a year for updates and support. Watch out for the "multipurpose" themes sold on marketplaces with 50 demo layouts built in. They look impressive in the preview and load like a wardrobe on a phone.
Page builder: £0–£160 a year
Page builders like Elementor let you design pages by dragging blocks around. Elementor Pro's plans run from US$59 a year for one site up to $399 for 25, and they auto-renew annually at full price (pricing as of 2026). WordPress's own built-in block editor has improved a lot and does the job for most small business sites without a page builder at all.
There's a less obvious cost here too: lock-in. Pages built with a page builder are stored in that builder's own format. If you stop paying or switch builders later, those pages often need rebuilding.
Premium plugins: £0–£450 a year
Plugins add features: contact forms, SEO settings, backups, security, caching, booking, reviews. Most have a free version that's genuinely fine, and a premium version with annual licences. A typical small business site that leans on premium versions for forms, SEO, backups, security and caching can easily run £250 to £450 a year in licence renewals. Stick to well-chosen free plugins and that can be close to zero.
"Nulled" plugins are premium plugins cracked and shared for free. They're a well-known route for malware. If a designer offers you premium plugins "included, no licence needed", ask exactly where they came from.
SSL certificate: usually free
Almost every host now includes a free certificate. Anyone charging a small business a yearly fee for a basic one in 2026 is padding the bill.
Developer time: £30–£120 an hour
For changes you can't make yourself, fixes when an update breaks something, and new pages. Some care plans include an hour or two a month.
The part people skipMaintenance: why it isn't optional on WordPress
Here's the honest bit. Because WordPress is so popular, it's also the most targeted website platform on the internet. Most of the risk doesn't come from WordPress itself. It comes from plugins and themes that don't get updated.
The numbers from Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2026 report make the point plainly:
- 11,334 new security vulnerabilities found in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, up 42% on the year before
- 91% of them were in plugins, 9% in themes, and just 6 in WordPress core
- 5 hours: the weighted median time from a vulnerability becoming public to the first attack attempts
So a WordPress site that nobody updates for six months isn't a site that's "fine for now". It's a site with a list of known weaknesses that automated tools are actively scanning for. When small business WordPress sites get hacked, it's rarely a targeted attack. It's a bot that found an old plugin.
Proper maintenance means: updating WordPress, the theme and every plugin regularly, testing that the site still works afterwards, keeping off-site backups you can actually restore, monitoring for downtime and malware, and removing plugins you don't use.
| How it gets done | Cost | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| You do it | £0 + 1–2 hours a month | Updates sometimes break things. You need to know how to roll back. |
| Auto-updates switched on | £0 | Better than nothing. Still needs someone checking backups and fixing what breaks. |
| WordPress care plan | £49–£99/month for most brochure sites | Good ones are worth it. Check what "support" includes and whether hosting is in the price. |
For reference, UK care plans commonly sit in that £49 to £99 range (ours are on our WordPress page). WPMaintain, for example, charges £79 a month for a brochure site and £99 for WooCommerce, including hosting, backups, security and an hour of development time.
Compare like with likeThe three-year sum
Here's what a typical small business WordPress site costs over three years by each route. The figures are midpoints from the ranges above. Your quote will differ, but the shape won't.
| Route | How the sum works | 3-year total |
|---|---|---|
| DIY, free plugins only | Domain £36 + budget hosting (£60 year one, £200 a year after) + free theme and plugins | about £500 + 40 hours to build + 1–2 hours a month to maintain |
| DIY, premium stack | As above + about £300 a year in theme, page builder and plugin licences | about £1,400 + your time |
| Freelancer, you maintain it | £2,000 build + £20/month hosting + £300 a year licence renewals from year two | about £3,300 + your time and the risk |
| Freelancer + care plan | As above + £60/month care plan | about £5,500 |
| Agency + care plan | £4,000 build + £99/month care plan including hosting | about £7,600 |
For comparison, our full UK website cost guide runs the same sum on Wix, subscription deals and managed static sites.
Where the money leaksFive WordPress cost traps
- The year-two hosting jump. The intro price was for year one only. Budget for the renewal price, not the advertised one.
- Licences on someone else's account. If your designer bought the premium plugins on their account, they stop updating when that designer stops paying, which quietly turns into a security problem.
- Plugin pile-up. Every problem solved with a new plugin adds weight, more updates and more risk. Sites with 40+ plugins are common and almost always slow. A slow site costs you enquiries; we covered how in page speed is costing you deals.
- No maintenance, then a big bill. Skipping updates feels free until the site gets hacked. A professional malware clean-up is an emergency job priced like one, and that's before any damage to your Google listing or the days your site spends offline.
- The hosting account in the designer's name. If they hold the keys and then vanish, getting your site back is a slog. We wrote a full guide on what to do if your web designer disappears.
What it costs to sort out a WordPress site you already have
A lot of people reading this don't need a new site. They've got a WordPress site that a designer built a few years ago, nobody's touched it since, and something has started to go wrong. Here's roughly what each fix looks like.
A health check
The first step is always the same: find out what's actually installed. Which version of WordPress, which theme, how many plugins, when each was last updated, whether any have been abandoned by their developers, where the backups are (if there are any), and who holds the hosting and admin logins. For a typical brochure site this is a few hours' work for someone who knows what they're looking at. The answer decides everything else.
Catching up on updates
If the site is a year or two behind, updating everything in one go can break it, especially if the theme or a plugin is no longer supported. A sensible catch-up means taking a full backup, updating on a copy of the site first (a "staging" site), fixing what breaks, and only then updating the live one. Budget a few hours of developer time for a small site, more if there's a page builder or WooCommerce involved.
Speed fixes
Slow WordPress sites are nearly always slow for the same handful of reasons: cheap hosting, too many plugins, a heavy theme or page builder, and images uploaded straight from a phone at full size. Fixing the images and removing unused plugins is cheap. Moving to better hosting adds a monthly cost. Replacing a heavy page builder is close to a rebuild.
A hacked site
If the site is redirecting visitors somewhere strange, showing spam links, or Google has flagged it, it needs cleaning properly: malware removed, every password changed, the hole that let the attacker in closed, and Google asked to review the site again. Restoring from a clean backup is the cheapest route, if one exists. Paying for a clean-up and then carrying on without maintenance just books the next one.
Fix it or replace it?
Our rough rule: if the fixes add up to more than half the cost of a new site, and the current site isn't winning you work anyway, replace it. If it ranks well and brings in enquiries, look after it, because those rankings are worth protecting. If you're not sure which camp you're in, the free revenue gap calculator is a good place to start.
Honest adviceWhen WordPress is the right call, and when it isn't
We build on what fits. Sometimes that's WordPress, sometimes it isn't. Here's how we'd decide.
- You or your team want to edit the site yourselves, often
- You publish a lot of content: news, blogs, guides, listings
- You need a specific plugin that does the job well, like WooCommerce or a membership system
- You already have a WordPress site in decent shape that just needs looking after
- You want the widest possible choice of people who can work on it later
- You're a local service business that needs 15 to 40 strong pages, not a publishing platform
- Nobody in the business will log in and edit it week to week
- Speed on a phone matters more than having an admin panel
- You don't want to own the job of updates and security at all
For most owner-operators in the second column, a fast static site with the updates handled for you is cheaper to run and has almost nothing for a hacker to attack. For businesses in the first column, a well-built WordPress site on decent hosting, with a short plugin list and someone responsible for updates, is a very good choice. The mistake is picking the platform first and the reason second.
Before you signQuestions to ask a WordPress designer
- Whose name is the hosting account in? It should be yours, with them added as a user.
- Will I have my own administrator login? Not an "editor" account. A full admin account in your name.
- Which premium plugins and themes will the site use, and whose licences are they? Get the list in writing.
- Are you using a page builder, or the built-in block editor? Ask what happens to the pages if that builder is ever removed.
- Who does updates after launch, how often, and how do you test them?
- Where are backups stored, and have you ever restored one? A backup nobody has tested isn't really a backup.
- If we part ways, what do I get? The answer should be: everything, with nothing held back.
Our general questions to ask any website provider covers the rest.
WordPress isn't expensive. Neglected WordPress is.
Got a WordPress site that's slow, outdated or nobody's looking after? Our WordPress care plans start at £95 a month with hosting included, and fixes like a health check or hacked site clean-up are fixed price. Not sure what you need? Book a free 15-minute call and we'll tell you honestly what we'd do, including if the answer is "leave it as it is".
Keep reading: Is anyone looking after your WordPress site? A 10-minute check · Every Zenlio price on one page · Hacked WordPress site repair · Free WordPress site checker
