WordPress Cost: A One-Year Budget for Domain, Hosting, Themes and Plugins
If you choose WordPress among the many CMSs for running a website, it costs money just like any other CMS. WordPress cost is what you pay for a domain and hosting, plus any themes and plugins you choose to add. I split the cost of running one self-hosted WordPress site for a year into these four lines and calculated the first- and second-year budgets with prices checked on the official pricing pages and the actual checkout screens.
1️⃣ What's free about WordPress
When people say WordPress is free, they usually mean WordPress.org and free themes and plugins. WordPress distributed by WordPress.org is open source, so downloading and installing it costs nothing, but you contract the server to install it on and the site address separately.
WordPress.com, which has a similar address, is a hosting service run by Automattic, with a free plan and paid plans from $4 a month billed yearly. This article covers the self-hosted version, where you sign up for hosting yourself; for the differences in pricing and management responsibility between the two, see WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.
2️⃣ Domain cost: .com first-year price and renewal fee
The discounted .com price shown on a registrar's home page applies only to the first year of registration. By Namecheap's price list, the regular .com price is $14.98 for the first year, and from the second year you renew at $18.48; an ICANN fee of $0.20 is added at every registration and renewal.
The first-year price sometimes gets discounts such as a $6.79 new-customer coupon, but the renewal fee you pay from the second year is what really sets the cost of keeping the domain. The discount terms and the actual amount charged in the cart are in the Namecheap discount article, and some hosts, like Hostinger Premium, include a free first-year domain with a one-year plan.
3️⃣ Hosting cost: monthly and renewal prices for shared, cloud and managed
A domain stays under $20 a year, but hosting takes most of a WordPress site's yearly cost. The budget table includes one host from each of three types, shared, managed cloud and managed: shared hosting Hostinger Premium is $47.88 paid for one year ($3.99 a month), and renews at $10.99 a month in the second year.
Managed cloud Cloudways bills a DigitalOcean 1GB server at $11 a month for the hours you use, with no contract, and managed host Kinsta costs $350 billed yearly, the same in the second year. Hosting prices for the three types, including contract length, taxes and mailboxes, are in the web hosting cost article.
4️⃣ Theme and plugin cost: start free, paid ones are one-time or yearly
You can start with free themes and plugins. The official WordPress.org directories list 8,775 free themes and 71,778 plugins (as of October 16, 2026), and you install them straight from a search in the admin screen.
Paid themes come as one-time purchases or yearly subscriptions. Avada costs a one-time $69 for continued use on one site, with support for up to 6 months; GP Premium is $59 a year, and Astra Pro + AI is $99 the first year and $149 on renewal, paid every year, but you can try the free version first. A one-time license covers one site, so if you plan to build several sites, an annual subscription fits better.
Plugins work the same way. The page builder Elementor Pro costs $60 a year on the Essential plan (1 site), and the SEO plugin Yoast SEO Premium costs $118.80 a year (excluding VAT); you run on the free version and pay when you need a feature. For the difference between one-time and yearly licenses and theme prices by use, see The WordPress theme selection guide for details.
5️⃣ WordPress cost one-year budget: first and second year
Since WordPress pricing depends on which hosting and themes you pick, the table below adds up a one-year budget for three setups, each for one site. The shared hosting setup is Hostinger Premium paid yearly with free themes and plugins, the cloud setup is Cloudways DigitalOcean 1GB with GP Premium, and the managed setup is Kinsta paid yearly with GP Premium and Yoast SEO Premium; the domain is Namecheap's regular .com price including the ICANN fee.
| Item | Shared hosting setup, year 1 | Same setup, year 2 | Cloud setup | Managed setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Domain .com | $15.18 | $18.68 | $15.18 | $15.18 |
| Hosting | $47.88 | $131.88 | $132 | $350 |
| Theme | $0 (free) | $0 (free) | $59 | $59 |
| Plugin | $0 (free) | $0 (free) | $0 (free) | $118.80 |
| 1-year total | $63.06 | $150.56 | $206.18 | $542.98 |
The bars below put the table's four setups on the same scale; whichever setup you pick, hosting takes the largest share of the one-year budget.
Prices were checked in October 2026 on the official pricing pages and checkout screens; Cloudways, Kinsta and Yoast SEO Premium exclude tax.
The shared hosting setup is $63.06 in the first year but more than doubles to $150.56 in the second, because hosting renews at $10.99 a month instead of $3.99 and the domain goes from $14.98 to $18.48. Comparing only first-year prices throws the budget off, so compare hosting and domains by their renewal prices.
The cloud setup has no term discount, but hosting costs the same in the second year.
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