The real yearly cost of a WordPress site in Canada

Free software is not a free website

Ask what WordPress costs and you will often hear one word: free. That is true of the software itself. Hostinger, one of the biggest web hosts, puts it plainly: WordPress is free to download and use ^[1].

Your website is a different story, because a business site needs a lot more than free software. You rent space to keep it online, you may buy add-ons so it can do useful things, and someone has to keep it patched and updated. That someone is either a paid helper or you, late at night.

Google's own AI answer says a WordPress website can cost anywhere from $75 to over $25,000 ^[2]. That range covers everything from a do-it-yourself hobby site to a custom build, which makes it useless for an owner trying to set a budget. So let's build a sample Canadian bill, line by line, from published prices.

My view, up front: for a small business with one site and some paid help, a realistic yearly budget is about $1,150 to $3,000, before the domain name. Most of that money goes to keeping the software and its add-ons running, and very little of it pays for new pages, photos or marketing.

Hosting and the renewal jump

Hosting is the rent you pay to keep your site online, and it is often where owners get their first surprise.

Take Hostinger's Canadian WordPress hosting. The Premium plan is advertised at CAN$2.99 a month on a 48-month term, but the small print says it renews at CAN$15.39 a month ^[3]. That is about five times the price you signed up for.

Here is the math. The sign-up price works out to about $36 a year, paid upfront for all four years. Once the term ends, a renewal year costs $15.39 times 12, or about $185. Write that renewal date down now, so the jump doesn't catch you off guard four years from now.

Managed hosting, where the host looks after more of the technical work, starts higher. WP Engine's cheapest one-site plan is CA$36 a month billed yearly, which comes to CA$432 a year, or CA$45 a month if you pay monthly ^[4]. Check what it renews at, too.

Neither price is outrageous on its own. The problem is that hosting is only the first line on the bill.

Plugins and themes, billed in US dollars

Plugins are add-ons that give a WordPress site its features, such as contact forms, search tweaks and page designs. Many come in a free version and a paid one, and many paid licences renew every year.

Here is a common, modest set, all priced in US dollars:

• Yoast SEO Premium, a search plugin: US$118.80 a year, for one site ^[5].
• Gravity Forms Basic, a form builder: US$59 a year, for one site ^[6].
• Divi, a theme and page builder: US$89 a year, or US$249 once for lifetime access ^[7].

On yearly billing, that adds up to US$266.80. At the Bank of Canada's rate of 1.4123 on November 9, 2026 ^[8], it comes to about $377 Canadian a year. When the Canadian dollar slips, a US-dollar bill gets bigger, even though nothing on your site has changed.

Plenty of sites carry far more than three add-ons. Nemanja Đokić, who runs the web agency Recursion, lists a typical stack of hosting and paid extras: theme, page builder, search, security, backups, forms, speed and email. His total comes to $678 to $1,898 a year ^[9], and he calls the “free” platform a “$1,000+/year subscription trap” ^[9].

He also names the hidden cost. When WordPress, the theme or one of the plugins updates, something can break, and then you pay again to have it fixed ^[9]. In my experience, that is the line owners rarely budget for.

Care plans and the cost of a bad day

WordPress, its theme and its plugins all need regular updates. You can do them yourself or pay someone else to do them, and the paid option is usually called a maintenance or care plan.

Ambrite, a web firm in Kelowna, B.C., publishes its prices. Its basic Care Plan is $49 a month for one site, and its Growth Plan is $99 a month. Both include 30 minutes of edits a month, extra work is billed at $50 an hour, and unused minutes do not carry over ^[10].

Do the math on that edit time. Thirty minutes a month adds up to six hours a year, so on the Growth Plan you pay $1,188 a year for updates, backups and six hours of changes. If you need new holiday hours, a new service page and a price update in the same month, you may go over your limit.

Ambrite's own guide says most Canadian small businesses spend $50 to $200 a month on maintenance ^[11]. It also tells owners to set aside $500 to $1,000 a year for unexpected problems ^[11]. Your own repair history is the best guide to how much you really need.

The costliest problem is a hack. Patchstack, a security firm that tracks WordPress flaws, found 11,334 new ones in 2025, which is 42% more than the year before ^[12]. Of those, 91% were in plugins and 9% were in themes ^[12]. Approximately half of high-impact flaws are exploited within 24 hours, and 46% had no fix from the developer when they became public ^[12].

If your site does get hit, Ambrite lists emergency cleanup at $500 to $2,000, plus $300 to $500 to get your site off Google's blacklist ^[11]. That is before you count the days your site is scaring customers away.

What it adds up to in a year

Here are two example budgets built from the prices above. All figures are in Canadian dollars, before tax, and they leave out the domain name.

A lean setup

• Budget hosting at the renewal price: about $185 ^[3]
• Three paid add-ons, including the theme: about $377 ^[5][6][7][8]
• Basic care plan at $49 a month: $588 ^[10]
• Total: about $1,150 a year

A fuller setup

• Managed hosting: $432 ^[4]
• The same add-ons and theme: about $377
• Growth care plan at $99 a month: $1,188 ^[10]
• Money set aside for problems: $500 to $1,000 ^[11]
• Total: about $2,500 to $3,000 a year

Without the set-aside money, the fuller setup costs about $2,000 a year, or $6,000 over three years. Apart from six hours of edits a year, none of that money goes to new pages, better photos or marketing. Mostly, it just keeps the lights on.

Picture a dental clinic on the fuller setup, budgeting about $210 to $250 a month. When it hires a new hygienist, it still has to email the web person to update the team page, and that small job uses up part of its 30 minutes.

The cost you don't see on an invoice

Some owners skip the care plan and do the work themselves. That saves cash, but it costs time. Ambrite estimates basic do-it-yourself upkeep at 10 to 15 hours a month, and at a modest $50 an hour, it puts that at $500 to $750 a month in lost time ^[11].

That estimate comes from a firm that sells care plans, so compare it with the hours your own site actually takes. Even half of it is five to seven and a half hours a month. For a landscaper in spring or an accountant in tax season, those hours are worth far more than $50 each.

When WordPress still makes sense

The fair objection goes like this: WordPress can be cheap if you are careful. Google's AI answer puts a basic do-it-yourself site at $75 to $400 for the first year ^[2], and with free plugins, cheap hosting and your own updates, that can be close to right.

There are two catches. First, watch out for sign-up prices, because Hostinger's Premium plan renews at about five times its starting monthly rate ^[3]. Second, doing it yourself only stays cheap if your time is free, and no business owner's time is free.

Đokić also gives WordPress its due. He says it still fits large content sites with many editors, as well as complex online stores ^[9]. His advice is that if your site is fast, secure and bringing in customers, you shouldn't rebuild it just for the sake of it ^[9]. I agree.

Now think about a site of five to fifteen pages that changes a few times a year. If that sounds like your site, my view is that the routine of plugins, updates and care plans is the wrong tool for the job. AI editing tools now let an owner describe a change in plain English, check a preview and approve it. My bet is that, for simple sites, this will make it much harder to justify paying every year to keep an admin screen and its add-ons running.

What to check this month

You don't need to move anything today, but you do need to know what you pay. Set aside half an hour and pull up these five things:

• Your hosting renewal date and price. Find the renewal rate, not the price you signed up at, and ask your host to confirm it in writing.
• Every plugin and theme licence. Look for yearly charges in US dollars on your credit card, then ask your web person which ones the site truly needs.
• Your care plan's edit time. Find out how many minutes of changes you get each month and what extra work costs per hour.
• Your last three change requests. Check how many days each one took. A good answer is “same day”, and a worrying one is “we'll fit it in next week”.
• Your hack plan. Ask who fixes the site if it is hacked, how fast they will do it, and whether that is included or billed separately.

Then add it all up for twelve months and multiply by three. If the number surprises you, it is worth asking what each of those dollars actually does for your customers.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Hostinger, Is WordPress free? An overview of contributing factors (October 14, 2026)
2. Google, Google search results and AI Overview for “wordpress website cost” (checked November 10, 2026)
3. Hostinger, WordPress hosting (Canada) (checked November 10, 2026)
4. WP Engine, WP Engine plans and pricing (checked November 10, 2026)
5. Yoast, Yoast SEO Premium (checked November 10, 2026)
6. Gravity Forms, Gravity Forms pricing (checked November 10, 2026)
7. Elegant Themes, Join Elegant Themes (Divi pricing) (checked November 10, 2026)
8. Bank of Canada, Daily exchange rates (November 9, 2026)
9. Nemanja Đokić, Recursion Agency, Is WordPress Dead? Why AI Is Replacing CMS Tools in 2026 (March 27, 2026)
10. Ambrite Web Services, WordPress Maintenance & Security Plans Canada (checked November 10, 2026)
11. Ambrite Web Services, How Much Does WordPress Maintenance Really Cost (May 26, 2026)
12. Patchstack, State of WordPress Security in 2026 (February 2026)

Opinions and predictions in this article are the author's. Facts and figures are linked to their sources, checked when the article was published.

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