What your WordPress really costs you per year (the full bill)

"WordPress is free." The software is. The website isn't. When someone tells us their WordPress "costs them almost nothing", it's almost always because they've never added up the full bill. Let's add it up, in euros, no frills.

The bill you do see

• Managed hosting: between €15 and €40 a month so the site doesn't crawl. €180–480 a year.
• Premium plugins: the forms one, the paid version of the SEO one, the security one, the page builder, the backups one. Easily €200–500 a year in licences that need renewing.
• Premium theme: €50–80 a year if it's a subscription.

With that you're already at €430–1,060 a year without having touched the content.

The bill you don't see (the expensive one)

The hidden costs, in hours and euros

Maintenance: updating core, plugins and theme without anything breaking. If an agency does it, €30–80/month. If you do it yourself, count the hours.

Incidents: the plugin that breaks the site after an update, the incompatibility with the new PHP version, the white screen of death. It doesn't happen every month, but when it does it takes an afternoon and sometimes an emergency technician.

Security: an unattended WordPress is a target. Cleaning a hacked site costs from €150 and a scare; recovering your rankings afterwards, much more.

Downtime and slowness: every extra second of loading is traffic and customers walking away. It's the hardest cost to see on the bill and the most expensive of all.

The honest total

Adding up the visible and a cautious estimate of the invisible, a "normal" business WordPress easily costs between €700 and €2,000 a year just to keep it alive and decent. And that figure doesn't buy growth: it buys the site carrying on working the same as yesterday.

We're not saying WordPress is a scam. We're saying its real cost is spread across many small lines — and across your own hours — that nobody adds up. When you do add them up, the conversation changes.

What changes when you migrate to Next.js

A static site in Next.js turns almost every one of those lines around:

• Hosting: from pennies. Many small-business sites fit in their provider's free plan.
• Plugins: zero. No licences to renew or update.
• Security maintenance: the PHP + plugins attack surface disappears.
• Speed: stops being a cost and becomes an advantage.

What used to be an open-ended monthly fee becomes a one-off investment — our Express plan starts at €600 — and a recurring bill close to zero. Do the maths on how many months it takes to pay for itself.

If you want the exact number for your case, the audit is free: we tell you what it costs you today and what migrating would cost. And if you're into the technical detail, see what this looks like from the inside in our autopsy of a real WordPress or in the complete migration guide.