WordPress Cost Calculator

The realistic range is $70 to $140 per month in software and services: hosting, premium plugins for SEO, caching, security, backups and forms, a theme, and a CDN. Add the 4 to 8 monthly hours of maintenance those parts demand and the true cost of a typical business blog lands between $370 and $740 per month.

The "WordPress is free" framing survives because each cost arrives separately: hosting on one invoice, five plugin renewals spread across the year, and the maintenance hours never invoiced at all. The calculator above puts them on one line.

Every plugin in the stack ships updates on its own schedule, and any update can conflict with any other. Someone has to apply them, test the site afterward, monitor for the vulnerabilities that make WordPress the most attacked CMS on the web, verify backups, and chase down why pages got slower. That work never stops, and it scales with every plugin you add.

We broke this down in detail in our WordPress maintenance cost guide, and the pattern from hundreds of migrations is consistent: teams underestimate the hours until they price them. At $75 per hour, 6 hours a month is $5,400 per year spent keeping software alive instead of publishing content that ranks.

WordPress earns its bill when you need what only WordPress does: a heavily customized site, WooCommerce, a specific plugin your business depends on, or an in-house team that already maintains it for other reasons. For those cases, the cost buys real flexibility.

A company blog needs none of that. It needs fast pages, correct SEO output, a good editor, and zero downtime. Paying the full WordPress overhead for a blog is renting a factory to store a filing cabinet, which is why migrating the blog off WordPress while the main site stays put has become the default move for growth teams. Superblog runs the blog at yoursite.com/blog, keeps every URL, and the migration takes minutes.