“The website doesn’t cost us anything, it just runs.” We hear that a lot, and it’s almost never true. A WordPress site doesn’t come with one monthly bill that has everything on it. It comes with six small ones spread across the year, and one of them never shows up in your accounts: your time. Here is the whole bill, item by item, with a worked example for a typical business website: 20 pages, a contact form, no shop. All prices exclude VAT.

1. The bill you can see: hosting and domain

This is the one everybody knows, and it’s smaller on the advert than on the renewal. SiteGround’s entry plan is £1.99 a month for the first year and £13.99 after it; IONOS goes from £1 to £9. Krystal skips the introductory offer and charges £7 to £19 a month from the start. Managed WordPress hosting (20i, Kinsta, WP Engine) starts at about £10 and runs to £50 a month. A .co.uk domain adds around £8 a year.

Example: about £10 a month with the domain, £120 a year.

2. Licences that fall due every year

WordPress itself is free. But the site you paid for usually runs on parts that renew every year: a premium theme or page builder (Elementor Pro, Divi), a forms plugin (Gravity Forms, WPForms), a cookie banner that follows the UK rules (CookieYes, Complianz), a backup plugin (UpdraftPlus Premium), an SEO plugin (Yoast Premium), and WPML if your site has more than one language. Most are priced in dollars; each costs roughly £30 to £100 a year. Often the licences run through your agency, and you only find out about them once the agency has gone and the theme stops getting updates.

Example: £150 to £400 a year; we’ll use £250.

3. The upkeep: updates, backups, security

This is where the part most people never add up begins. A WordPress site is WordPress, a theme, ten to twenty plugins and the PHP version underneath. Every part gets updates, some of them weekly, and every update can break something else. The flaws of 2026 (wp2shell in July, PHP2Shell in October) showed that “we’ll update when we get round to it” no longer works: attackers scan automatically for sites that haven’t caught up, within hours.

Two ways to handle it:

  • Do it yourself. One to two hours a month if nothing goes wrong: take a backup, run the updates, click through the site afterwards. Plus reading your host’s emails (“your PHP version is reaching end of life”) and understanding them.
  • A maintenance plan. UK agencies and specialists charge £30 to £150 a month for a business site: 365i starts at £30, Rivmedia charges £40, £80 or £150, Toast Support £60 to £240. US surveys put business sites at $100 to $300 a month. Plans usually include updates, backups and a report. Changes to your content mostly aren’t included, or only a few minutes of them; more on that next.

Example: £60 a month, £720 a year.

4. The changes: “Could you just update our opening hours?”

The item that annoys people most, because it looks so small. New opening hours, someone leaves, a new photo, the prices that went up in April. Every one of these goes to the agency or freelancer, who charges £30 to £110 an hour (one UK agency’s published rate card says £85, or £60 for content entry), often with half an hour or an hour as the minimum. And it waits: two days, a week, “after the holidays”.

Six small changes a year isn’t many. Plenty of businesses would like twenty, but make six, because each one costs money and effort. That’s the hidden price: the website that has shown the wrong team for two years.

Example: six changes of an hour each at £75, £450 a year.

5. The day something breaks

It doesn’t happen every year, but it happens. Three typical cases:

  • After an update, the site is a white page. An afternoon of the agency’s time, a few hundred pounds, plus the hours in which customers saw an error message.
  • The site has been hacked. A professional clean-up costs from about £250 for a simple case to well over £1,000, plus the Google warning that keeps visitors away for days after the clean-up (what to do then). Security services that include clean-ups, such as Sucuri or Wordfence, cost $229 to $590 a year.
  • The rules. Since February 2026 the ICO can fine breaches of the cookie rules as heavily as data protection breaches, up to £17.5 million. So far it has written to the operators of the UK’s 1,000 biggest websites, not to small businesses, and says fines are for the most serious cases. But a cookie banner that sets tracking cookies before anyone clicks “Accept” is a breach, and a site nobody looks after is where that happens.

Averaged over five years, that comes to a reserve of a few hundred pounds a year.

Example: £250 a year, as a reserve.

6. Your time

The bill that appears nowhere. The email from your host, the call to the agency, the waiting, the chasing, checking whether the change has gone in, puzzling over “PHP 8.1 end of life”. For businesses that do everything themselves, that’s easily 20 to 40 hours a year. For businesses with an agency, still five to ten, just for coordinating. Value your hour however you like; we’ve used a cautious £50.

Example: 8 hours with an agency, £400 a year. Without one: 30 hours, £1,500.

The worked example

A business website with 20 pages, a contact form, no shop. All amounts per year, excluding VAT.

Item With an agency and a plan Doing it yourself
Hosting and domain £120 £120
Licences £250 £250
Upkeep (updates, backups) £720 your time
Small changes (6 a year) £450 your time
Reserve for when it breaks £250 £250
Spending £1,790 £620
Your time 8 hours, £400 30 hours, £1,500
Total about £2,200 about £2,100

Two things stand out. First, both ways cost about the same, just in different currencies: money or evenings. Second, neither column contains a single improvement to the website. It’s the price of keeping it as it is.

What you get for it, and what you don’t

For around £2,000 a year you get a website that looks the way it did on the day it was handed over, that works most of the time, and where every change is a small project. What you don’t get: protection from the next PHP2Shell (the fix arrives when your host and your agency have reacted, not before), speed (the site gets slower with every plugin, not faster) and the twenty changes you’d have liked to make.

What it costs on Johnny

Johnny moves your WordPress site, same look and same addresses, and runs it from then on. The price is one package:

  • €490 once for the move (a promotion price until 31 December 2026): every page rebuilt, every address kept, forms, analytics and cookie banner carried over, every page checked on computer, tablet and phone.
  • €99 a month on the yearly plan (€119 on the monthly plan, cancel any month): hosting with SSL, backups and security, and changes by message with preview and undo, unlimited within fair use.

Johnny charges in euros, plus VAT; at the time of writing a euro is about 85p. If you’re not happy in the first 30 days, you get everything back.

In the table above, that replaces the rows for hosting, licences, upkeep and changes, and most of the reserve: €1,188 a year, roughly £1,000, or €1,678 (about £1,430) in the first year with the move. No PHP runs on your domain, and there are no plugins and no admin login, so there’s nothing there for you or us to update ever again. And you change your opening hours by telling Johnny.

To be honest about it: if you do everything yourself and don’t count your evenings, you’ll spend more money on Johnny and get your evenings back. If you need an online shop or a members’ area, Johnny can’t take your site yet. And if you have a developer in-house, you probably don’t need us. For the business with an agency and a maintenance plan, which is most of them, Johnny costs less and is quicker.

All prices in detail: Pricing.

Sources