The Hidden Costs of Staying on WordPress in 2026

"Free" Is the Most Expensive Word in Tech

WordPress is open source. Free to download, free to use. This fact alone has powered its dominance for two decades. But in 2026, the true cost of running WordPress is measured in hours, not dollars — and the hours are adding up.

Let's break down what a typical business actually pays to keep a WordPress site running:

Hosting: $30-150/month

A WordPress site needs PHP hosting with a MySQL database. Not a static file host — a proper LAMP/LEMP stack. The cheapest shared hosting ($5/month) will give you 3-5 second load times and regular downtime. Managed WordPress hosting from WP Engine, Kinsta, or Flywheel costs $30-150/month for decent performance.

A comparable Next.js site costs $0-20/month on Vercel, Netlify, or a basic VPS. Static pages are served from a CDN for free. Server-rendered pages run on edge functions that cost fractions of a cent per request.

Premium Plugins: $200-800/year

Most WordPress sites rely on premium plugins for essential functionality:

• Yoast SEO Premium: $99/year
• Gravity Forms or WPForms Pro: $59-299/year
• WP Rocket (caching): $59/year
• Wordfence Premium (security): $119/year
• ACF Pro (custom fields): $49/year
• Premium theme: $59-200 one-time

Each of these solves a problem that doesn't exist in a modern stack. Next.js has built-in SEO, built-in performance optimization, built-in security, and TypeScript-defined data structures. You're paying $200-800/year for what code gives you for free.

Maintenance: 2-4 hours/month

This is the cost nobody tracks. Every month, a WordPress site requires:

• Core updates (major and minor)
• Plugin updates (average 20 plugins = 20 potential breaking changes)
• Theme updates
• PHP version compatibility checks
• Database optimization
• Backup verification
• Security scan review

If you're doing this yourself, it's 2-4 hours of tedious, anxiety-inducing work every month. If you're paying a developer or agency, it's $100-500/month for a maintenance retainer.

A Next.js site? Push code to GitHub. CI/CD deploys automatically. No plugins to update. No PHP versions to manage. No database to optimize.

Security Incidents: $0-∞

WordPress is the most targeted CMS on the internet. Not because it's insecure, but because it's ubiquitous. Automated bots scan for vulnerable WordPress installations 24/7. One outdated plugin with a known exploit, and your site is compromised.

The average cost of a WordPress security breach for a small business is $3,000-10,000 — between cleanup, lost business, and reputation damage. It doesn't happen to everyone, but when it happens, it's devastating.

Performance Optimization: Endless

WordPress sites slow down over time. Post revisions bloat the database. Plugin CSS and JavaScript accumulate. Image uploads go unoptimized. Every year, you spend more time fighting performance issues that shouldn't exist in the first place.

The Opportunity Cost

This is the biggest hidden cost, and it doesn't show up on any invoice. Every hour you spend maintaining WordPress is an hour you're not spending on your business. Every feature you can't add because WordPress doesn't support it is revenue you're not earning.

And in 2026, there's a new opportunity cost: AI velocity. While your competitors are using Claude Code to ship new features daily, you're clicking through the WordPress admin panel trying to figure out why your latest plugin update broke your contact form.

The Three-Year Comparison

Let's add it up over three years:

WordPress (Total 3-Year Cost)

• Hosting: $1,080-5,400
• Premium plugins: $600-2,400
• Maintenance (DIY at $50/hr): $3,600-7,200
• Security (one incident avg): $3,000
• Total: $8,280-18,000

Next.js (Total 3-Year Cost)

• Hosting: $0-720
• Plugins/services: $0
• Maintenance: Near zero (automated deploys)
• Security: Near zero (no server-side attack surface)
• One-time migration cost: $3,000-8,000
• Total: $3,000-8,720

The migration pays for itself within 12-18 months. After that, it's pure savings — plus you get a site that AI tools can edit, that loads in under a second, and that you never have to worry about getting hacked.

When to Stay on WordPress

To be fair: WordPress is still the right choice in some situations.

• You need WooCommerce and it's deeply integrated with inventory, accounting, and shipping systems
• Your team is non-technical and needs the WordPress editor specifically (though modern headless CMSs are catching up)
• You're running a membership site with complex access control that would be expensive to rebuild

For everyone else? The math doesn't lie. WordPress in 2026 is expensive, slow, and increasingly irrelevant in a world where AI can edit code directly.