WordPress website design
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WordPress runs a large share of the web and it is a reasonable choice for some businesses and a poor one for others. This page is the arithmetic rather than the argument: what a WordPress site costs to build, what it costs to own, what the security picture actually looks like with numbers attached, and how to tell which side of the line you are on. Prices as of September 2026.
What does WordPress website design cost?
The build is the smaller half and the only half most quotes cover. Two lists, and the second one never stops.
| Once | Typical | Every year after | Typical |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelance build | $1,500–$5,000 | Hosting | $180–$600 |
| Agency build | $3,000–$10,000 | Plugin and theme licences | $0–$500 |
| Theme licence | $0–$100 | Maintenance, if bought | $600–$6,000 |
| Migration of an old site | $300–$2,000 | Maintenance, if you do it | Your hours |
The row that decides everything is the last one. WordPress is free software with a recurring job attached, and the job does not go away because you stopped paying attention to it. Either you buy that time or you spend it. See how much a website costs for the same arithmetic across every route, not only this one.
Is WordPress secure?
WordPress core is not the problem, and saying "WordPress is insecure" is lazy. The plugins are the problem, and the numbers are public. Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2025 reports that "7,966 new security vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem in 2024" — 96% in plugins, 4% in themes, and seven in core itself.
The figure that matters more for anyone buying a care plan is the next one: the same report finds that "in 2024, 33% of vulnerabilities were not fixed in time for public disclosure". A third of the time, the update you are paying somebody to apply did not exist on the day the flaw became public. That is an argument for running fewer plugins, not for buying a bigger maintenance plan.
The practical version: a typical small business WordPress site runs 20 to 40 plugins. Your exposure is roughly proportional to that number, and it is the one variable entirely within your control.
Do you actually need WordPress?
Three honest yeses, and one honest no.
| Your situation | WordPress? |
|---|---|
| You edit the site yourself most days | Yes. The editor is the product and it is genuinely good |
| You need a specific plugin nothing else replaces | Yes, and that plugin is now a dependency to maintain |
| You are running a shop, memberships or bookings on it | Yes, or a specialist platform built for that one job |
| Four to eight pages that change a few times a quarter | No. You are buying a maintenance job to solve a publishing problem you do not have |
That last row is most small business websites. Hours, prices, a service added, a few photographs swapped — a handful of changes a quarter does not justify a plugin stack, a monthly patch cycle, and a login that has to be defended.
What do you build instead, and why?
We build in Next.js and serve from our own servers. Not because it is fashionable — because of the table above. There are no plugins to break, no database to inject, and no admin login to brute-force, which is why our maintenance price is what it is rather than a reflection of how little we do.
The honest trade, stated plainly: you do not get a WordPress dashboard. If editing the site yourself every day matters more to you than never thinking about it, WordPress is the better buy and we will say so. What you get instead is 30 minutes of somebody else's time each month, and a site with nothing on it that needs patching.
We also do not build shops, bookings or membership portals on any platform — except an online store, which we build on Shopify so that Shopify carries the checkout, payments, tax and uptime.
Can you rebuild my existing WordPress site?
Yes, and it is the most common thing we do. Your services, hours, photographs and wording are already published on it, so we take them from there and you send us nothing. Every existing page address is mapped to its new one before anything changes, which is the step that decides whether the rebuild costs you rankings — redesigning without losing your rankings is that process in full.
$299 charged only when you approve the design, then $69 a month. We rebuild your homepage free first, so you compare the two before any money moves. If you look at it and decide you would rather keep WordPress, that is a legitimate outcome and it costs you nothing.
Weighing platforms more broadly? Moving off Wix or Squarespace covers what you can and cannot take with you, and what website maintenance should include prices the ongoing half against published care plans.
Common questions
- How much does a WordPress website cost?
- The build is the small half. A WordPress site commonly costs $1,500 to $5,000 from a freelancer or $3,000 to $10,000 from an agency, and then $15 to $50 a month in hosting, $0 to $500 a year in plugin and theme licences, and either your time or a care plan at $50 to $500 a month to keep it patched. Budget the second list before you sign for the first: it is the part that runs forever.
- Do I actually need WordPress?
- You need it if you want to edit everything yourself daily, if you need a specific plugin that exists nowhere else, or if you are running a shop or a membership site on it. You do not need it for a four-to-eight page business site that changes a few times a quarter — which is most small business websites, and which is where the maintenance burden buys you nothing.
- Is WordPress secure?
- WordPress core is not the problem; the plugins are. Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2025 reports that "7,966 new security vulnerabilities were found in the WordPress ecosystem in 2024", with 96% of them in plugins, 4% in themes and only seven in core itself — and that "in 2024, 33% of vulnerabilities were not fixed in time for public disclosure". A typical small business site runs 20 to 40 plugins, so the exposure scales with how much you have installed.