WordPress review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

What it costs to run, year one and year two

Contractors pass this advice around, and it is half right. On a thread about winning roofing work, one person's whole recommendation was to use WordPress because it is very cheap.

Cheap in year one, yes. Another small business owner puts the entry cost about where it lands: a few dollars a month for hosting and about nine dollars for the domain.

Then the intro rate lapses. One host advertises $3.99 a month and renews at $9.99. Another advertises $2.99 and renews at $17.99, with its bigger plans renewing at $29.99 and $44.99. So a site that cost $63 in year one, hosting plus domain, can cost $135 in year two on the same plan. Nothing broke. The discount ended. Do that math before you compare a $9 a month WordPress site against a $29 Wix plan, because you are comparing year one against forever.

Nothing books a job until you add a plugin

WordPress out of the box is pages and posts. It does not take a booking, it does not take a card and it does not send a reminder. Each of those is a plugin you choose, install, set up and keep updated.

Booking is the one that matters for a trade. Amelia has a free Lite version with paid licenses from about $59. Bookly has a free tier, and Bookly Business is $149 a year for one site. Free tiers work, but a setup with several techs, staff calendars and reminders is a paid plugin plus an afternoon of configuring. Taking money means WooCommerce, or a form plugin like WPForms to collect a deposit.

Add it up honestly. Ten dollars a month of hosting, a $149 a year booking plugin and a domain is about $23 a month in year two, and you do all the work. Wix Core is $29 a month with booking and payments in the same account. WordPress wins on price by about $6 a month, and loses on your time. If you like the tinkering, that is a good trade. If you do not, it is not.

One owner who built this way, with a bought theme and a page builder on top, came out the other side describing it as too many subscriptions he did not need.

Somebody has to keep it running

This is the honest weak spot, and no plugin fixes it. Core updates, plugin updates, backups, security and anything that breaks after an update are yours. There is no vendor to call. Help is the community forums plus whatever your host will cover on the server side. Compare that with a builder, where there is a support queue with your name in it.

Owners describe the same two failures over and over. The first is time. One owner spent weeks trying to get a WordPress site to look right on a phone, gave up, and had a working site somewhere else in an hour.

The second is things breaking on their own. Another owner who moved to a builder names it plainly: no plugins to manage and no updates breaking the site overnight.

Neither is an argument that WordPress is bad. Both are an argument that WordPress is a job. If the person doing that job is you, price your Saturday. If it is somebody you pay, get the monthly number in writing before you agree to the build, not after.

The one place it clearly beats a builder

Local search. A trade business lives on being found for a town and a job, and WordPress gives you more control over that than any hosted builder. A free plugin like Yoast, which has over ten million installs, or Rank Math gives you full control of page titles, meta descriptions, structured data and your XML sitemap. You can build a page for every town you cover and control exactly how each one shows up in search results.

The second thing you get is ownership. The files and the database are yours. You can move the whole site to another host without rebuilding it. On a hosted builder you rent the site, and leaving means starting again. If you plan to be in business in ten years and hate the idea of a rebuild, that is worth real money.

Themes are the other strong point. There are thousands, free and paid, and most of them look better than what you would make yourself. Picking and setting one up is where a lot of owners give up and hire someone, which is the moment WordPress stops being free.

The other WordPress

Two products share the name and they are not the same thing. Everything above is WordPress.org, the free software on your own hosting. WordPress.com is a hosted service from Automattic, sold in plans, and it behaves like Squarespace or Wix.

Read its prices carefully. The cheap yearly numbers you see are first-year promotions. Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce advertise $4, $8, $25 and $45 a month for the first year, then renew at $6, $10, $30 and $57. Month to month they are $9, $18, $40 and $70. The free tier puts WordPress.com ads and a wordpress.com address on your pages, so it is not a company site for a trade business.

There is one real reason for a shop to look at it. On the Business plan, Automattic handles the hosting and takes real-time backups, so the maintenance job above stops being yours. Paid plans get staffed chat and email support, and Business and Commerce get it around the clock. There is still no phone number.

Who should build on it

Build on WordPress if one of two things is true. Either you enjoy this work and will keep the site updated yourself, or you already pay someone who does. A shop with twenty town pages, a blog that answers the questions customers phone about, and a booking plugin bolted on can beat a builder site in local search for years. It costs $10 to $30 a month in hosting to keep alive.

The reasonable middle is the one an experienced user describes: WordPress is more technical than a drag and drop builder, and that is the whole trade you are making.

Do not build here if any of this sounds like you. If you want a site live this weekend and never want to log in again, buy a builder. If nobody in your shop will notice a broken update for three weeks, buy a builder, because a broken site costs more than the license you saved. And if online booking is the point of the whole exercise, count the plugin, the configuring and the maintenance before you tell yourself WordPress is the cheap option. WordPress pays us nothing, and we would still point plenty of shops away from it.

What owners actually say