Most teams never see the true cost of their WordPress site, because it never arrives as one invoice. It arrives as five small ones, spread across the year, each easy to wave through. Put them on a single line and the number changes the conversation.
The bill nobody adds up
A typical business-critical WordPress site is quietly running a stack like this:
| Line item | Typical annual cost |
|---|---|
| 4–5 premium plugin licences (forms, SEO, security, builder, backups) | £600 – £2,000 |
| Managed WordPress hosting | £600 – £3,000 |
| Maintenance / care-plan retainer | £2,400 – £9,600 |
| Occasional “something broke” developer time | £1,000 – £5,000+ |
Call it £5,000 to £20,000 a year to keep a site running that, on a good week, you don’t think about, and on a bad week, is down.
Every one of those line items is recurring. None of them makes the site faster, and most exist to stop it getting worse.
Why the retainer never ends
The maintenance retainer is the tell. You’re not paying it to improve the site. You’re paying it because the platform needs continuous attention just to stay where it is:
- Core, theme, and plugins all update on their own schedules, and updates can conflict.
- Every update is a small risk, so someone has to test and babysit them.
- Security patches aren’t optional, so the retainer can’t be either.
That’s a subscription to entropy management. The cost doesn’t buy progress; it buys standing still.
Rebuild as a payback calculation
Once the annual number is on the table, the framing flips. A rebuild isn’t a cost centre; it’s a way to switch off most of those recurring lines:
- Static, pre-rendered architecture removes the plugin licences and the security-patch treadmill.
- Edge hosting costs a fraction of managed WordPress hosting.
- With almost nothing to break, the care-plan retainer shrinks to near zero.
Add up what you’d stop paying, divide the rebuild by the annual saving, and you get a payback period, often measured in months, not years. That’s the honest way to price our Replatform & Performance Rescue: not as an expense, but as the point where the bleeding stops.
Want the real number for your site? Request a fit check and we’ll help you run the payback maths.