The real cost of keeping a WordPress site running, and what a site built on us replaces it with.
Highlights
- A WordPress site that “costs nothing” runs on a stack of paid parts: managed hosting from $336 a year, a page builder from $60, an SEO plugin at $118.80, a forms plugin that renews at $399, and a contractor when something breaks.
- WordPress launched in 2003 and still works the 2003 way: core, theme, and plugins, each a separate codebase you owe updates to. Patchstack counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, 91% of them in plugins.
- A site built on Levelweb is the front end and back end you described, hosted, with no plugin stack. You change it by asking. 93% of the small business owners building on Bolt aren’t professional developers.
- What you give up: pixel-identical design, plugin parity, and a few site types that still belong on WordPress.
- How a move works today, in five steps, including the one that protects your Google rankings.
Elementor Pro, $60 a year. Yoast SEO Premium, $118.80. WPForms Pro, $399 when it renews. WP Engine’s smallest hosting plan, $336. None of that buys a website. It buys the right to keep one standing.
The money is the smaller cost. The larger one is attention: the update prompts you ignore, the plugin that stopped working after the last one you didn’t ignore, the afternoon you lost finding out why. That cost is the one that makes owners stop logging in, which is how a site ends up three years out of date with a contact form that broke in March and told no one.
What does a WordPress site cost to keep running?
WordPress is free. The stack that makes a WordPress site work for a business is not, and the labor to run that stack is the biggest line. From the vendors’ own pricing pages in October 2026: WP Engine’s entry plan is $28 a month billed annually, or $336 a year (WP Engine, 2026). Elementor Pro, the page builder on more than ten million sites, starts at $60 a year (Elementor, 2026). Yoast SEO Premium is $118.80 a year per site (Yoast, 2026). WPForms Pro is $199.50 the first year and $399 at renewal (WPForms, 2026).
Then the people. GoodFirms surveyed more than 300 web development companies in 31 countries for its 2026 cost report and found that 58% charge monthly retainers between $500 and $3,000, with US, UK, and Canadian hourly rates between $50 and $100 (GoodFirms, 2026). A $500 retainer is $6,000 a year to keep a site that isn’t changing.
The other end of the range is real, too. A lean site on shared hosting with free plugins and no contractor can run under $100 a year. That owner isn’t paying in money. They’re paying in the Tuesday nights spent reading plugin changelogs, and in the updates they skip because the last one broke the slider.
Why does WordPress need so much maintenance?
Because of how it’s built. WordPress shipped on May 27, 2003, and the model hasn’t changed since (WordPress.org, 2026). A site is a core, a theme, and a stack of plugins. Each is a separate codebase from a separate author. Each updates on its own schedule. Each is an attack surface whether you use it or not, and a typical business site carries a stack of them.
The numbers follow from the architecture. Patchstack, a WordPress security company, counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, up 42% from 2024 (Patchstack, 2026). Of those, 91% were in plugins and 9% in themes. WordPress core itself accounted for six. Of those, 46% had no patch available when they were made public, and for the most targeted bugs the median time from disclosure to first exploit was five hours.
So the owner’s rational response, which is to stop touching the site, is the one that leaves it exposed. The week a PHP bug took WordPress sites offline showed the other half of the problem: when the bug is below WordPress, in PHP itself, the owner can’t fix it at all. Only the host can. On a stack you assembled from parts, you’re responsible for parts you can’t reach.
What do you give up when you leave WordPress?
Four things, and they’re real.
- Pixel-identical design. A rebuild on Bolt matches your content and your intent, not your theme. If you love your current design down to the pixel, you’ll be describing it, not importing it.
- Plugin parity. There’s no plugin directory. The agent builds the feature instead, which is faster for a contact form or a gallery and slower for something like a paid membership paywall.
- A few site types. Stores that need WooCommerce’s checkout, order history, and payment plugins, membership and gated-content sites, and multilingual sites still belong on WordPress in 2026.
- The contractor ecosystem. Thousands of people fix WordPress for a living. A Bolt site’s maintainer is you, by asking. For most owners that’s the relief; for some it’s the adjustment.
One more that’s yours to protect either way: your search rankings follow your URLs. Move without redirects and Google loses the thread. Step four below handles it.
Who should stay on WordPress?
Move if you have a brochure or service site, a portfolio, or a local business with hours and a contact form. Move if you’re paying for maintenance you don’t understand on pages that haven’t changed since the site launched.
Pay a contractor $500 a month for 18 months and you’ve spent $9,000 to keep a website standing still. For $216 a year, you could have the one you’d describe if someone asked.
