Short answer for 2026: a WordPress website built by us costs £1,495, fixed, for up to 15 pages with WordPress as the CMS you edit yourself, or from £3,995 for a WordPress online store or a build with integrations. The WordPress software is free. What you pay every year is hosting, a domain, any premium plugins and someone keeping it all updated. Below is each of those costs with a number and where it came from.
How much does a WordPress website cost in the UK?
The build is the big one-off cost, and the running costs follow you for as long as the site is live. Here is the whole bill on one screen.
| Cost | Typical UK figure | How often | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress software (wordpress.org) | £0 | Never | WordPress.org, open source under GPLv2 |
| Build, Hire The Creatives Business | £1,495 fixed, up to 15 pages | Once | Our packages |
| Build, Hire The Creatives Premium | From £3,995, shop or integrations | Once | Our packages |
| Domain name | £10 to £20 | Yearly | Our UK website cost guide |
| Managed WordPress hosting | £15 to £50 a month | Monthly | Our UK hosting guide |
| WordPress.com hosted plan (instead of your own hosting) | £36 to £432 a year | Yearly | WordPress.com, checked October 2026 |
| Premium SEO plugin, Yoast SEO Premium | £118.80 a year ex VAT | Yearly, optional | Yoast, checked October 2026 |
| Maintenance (updates and backups) | £30 to £50 a month | Monthly, or your own time | Our maintenance cost guide |
Why £1,495 and not our £495 Starter? Starter is a fixed small site of one to five pages. The package that lists WordPress as the CMS you run yourself is Business, so that is the honest number to compare against other WordPress quotes.
Is WordPress free?
Yes, the software is. WordPress is open source and licensed under the GPLv2, and it runs over 43% of all sites on the web according to WordPress.org (checked October 2026). Nobody charges you a licence fee for it.
The catch is that free software still needs somewhere to live. The moment you want it online at your own address, you are paying for hosting and a domain, and the moment you want it to look and work like a business site rather than a default theme, you are paying for someone’s time, either yours or a builder’s.
What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org on cost?
This trips up more people than anything else in WordPress pricing, because the two share a name and a logo.
- WordPress.org is the free software. You download it, put it on hosting you choose, and you control everything: plugins, themes, code and data. Your costs are hosting, a domain and whatever you add.
- WordPress.com is a paid hosting service run on the same software. You pay a plan fee and it looks after the server for you.
WordPress.com’s own price list in pounds, billed yearly and excluding VAT, was £36 a year for Personal, £84 for Premium, £240 for Business and £432 for Commerce when we checked its published plan prices (checked October 2026). The pricing page itself may show you US dollars depending on where you browse from; on the day we looked it showed US$4, US$8 and US$25 a month for the first three plans. Storage rises with the plan, from 6 GB on Personal to 50 GB on Business.
For a small business site, self-hosted WordPress.org on decent managed hosting is usually the better long-term buy, because nothing about the site is tied to one company’s plan and you can move host whenever the price or service slips.
How much does a WordPress website cost per year to run?
Roughly £550 to £1,340 a year for a self-hosted small business site, if you pay someone to maintain it. Here is the arithmetic, using the figures in the table above:
- Low end: £10 domain + £180 hosting (£15 × 12) + £360 maintenance (£30 × 12) = £550.
- High end: £20 domain + £600 hosting (£50 × 12) + £600 maintenance (£50 × 12) + £118.80 Yoast SEO Premium = £1,338.80.
If you do your own updates and backups, take the maintenance line out and the low end falls to about £190 a year. That only works if you actually do them: an out-of-date plugin is the usual way in for attackers, which our WordPress security guide covers in full. Business sites with us include 90 days of support, and Premium includes 12 months, before any ongoing plan is needed.
How much does WordPress customisation cost?
It depends on whether you mean tweaking a bought theme or designing the site from scratch, and those are very different jobs.
For a sense of the hourly market: Clutch’s web design pricing guide puts web design companies working on WordPress at $25 to $49 an hour, against $100 to $149 an hour for web design companies overall (US dollars, checked October 2026). Builder-based work is cheaper by the hour because much of the site already exists.
We do not bill customisation by the hour. The Business package includes bespoke design and animation, advanced SEO and speed work, and Stripe payments, all inside the £1,495. If what you want is changes to an existing WordPress site rather than a new one, send us the list and we will price it as a fixed sum before any work starts. For the full breakdown of how hourly rates turn into quotes, see how much web designers charge per hour in the UK.
How much does it cost to migrate a WordPress website?
Moving a WordPress site to a new host is mostly a question of size and of whether anything breaks on the way. For a small brochure site, many hosts provide their own migration tool or plugin, and the ongoing cost is simply the new hosting plan, typically £15 to £50 a month for managed WordPress hosting per our hosting guide.
Where migration gets expensive is when the old site is the problem: a theme nobody supports any more, dozens of plugins, or a shop with order history. At that point a rebuild can cost less than nursing the old site across. If that is where you are, include the migration in the brief and we will fix the price before we start.
Is there a WordPress website cost estimator?
Yes. Our website cost calculator asks four questions and gives you a build range, the running costs and a three year total for the UK or the US. No email required. It is not WordPress-only, which is the point: if a website builder would be cheaper for what you need, it will say so. Our website builder cost guide has the plan prices for the main alternatives.
Is WordPress the right platform for my budget?
For most UK small businesses, yes. It is cheaper to build than a bespoke React site because the contact forms, blogs and booking tools already exist as plugins, and you own the code and the data, unlike a hosted store platform you rent. Our WordPress vs React vs Shopify comparison sets out when each one wins. If you are selling products and nothing else, Shopify can be quicker to market; if your site is really an application, React earns its higher price.
Want an actual number? See our fixed-price packages or tell us what you need and we will send a fixed price within 24 hours.
Get web & SEO tips that actually move the needle
Short, occasional emails for business owners: what's changing in Google, how to win more enquiries, and the fixes worth your time. No spam, no jargon.