Web Design · 2026-08-11

Leaving WordPress: What Conversion Costs and What Your Maintenance Bill Stops Paying For

Pull up your last twelve months of website invoices. Not the build — the recurring stuff. Hosting, the security plugin, the backup plugin, the forms plugin, the SEO plugin, and the monthly "maintenance" line from whoever you pay to keep it all from falling over.

Now ask what any of it did for your business.

That's not a rhetorical trick. It has a real answer, and the answer is: it kept a piece of software from breaking. That's the entire product. It's a legitimate service — someone genuinely has to do it — but it's worth understanding that you're not buying growth. You're buying the absence of a problem that only exists because of the tool you picked.

What the care economy actually costs

We priced this out in August 2026, from live carts and published rate cards.

The infrastructure half. A realistic small-business setup — site hosting, SSL, daily backups, security, a CDN, a staging environment, two real mailboxes — at year-two renewal rates runs from about $19 to $69 per month depending on the host. Cheap end means weekly backups instead of daily. The premium end of that range comes from hosts that, in writing, offer no email at all.

The human half. Someone has to apply the updates, test that they didn't break the checkout, and clean up when a plugin author abandons their project. The agency care market prices that at roughly $89 to $239 a month retail. Underneath it, white-label providers sell the same work to agencies starting around $39 — which tells you what the labor costs and what the markup is.

Add them up and a small business running a maintained WordPress site is realistically spending $108 to $158 a month, forever, before anyone writes a word of new content or changes a single page.

And the number moves. The headline hosting price you signed up for is not the price you pay in year two. We cart-verified renewal multiples between 2× and 6× across the major budget hosts — one popular plan advertised at $2.99 a month renews at $17.99. Another required a 48-month prepay to get its headline rate. One host was running two different renewal prices on the same day, apparently testing which one people would swallow.

None of that is fraud. It's all disclosed somewhere. It's just structured so the year you compare prices is not the year you pay them.

What conversion actually means

Here's the part people get nervous about, so let's be specific.

We convert WordPress sites into our own format. Your content comes across — pages, posts, images, structure. What doesn't come across is the machinery: the theme, the plugin stack, the admin panel, the update queue, the login page that bots hammer all night. Underneath the finished site there's no WordPress to attack, because there's no WordPress.

Three things worth knowing before you consider it:

It's a redesign, not a copy. We don't rebuild your existing theme pixel-for-pixel in a new format — that would preserve every compromise you made because the theme wouldn't do what you wanted. You get a custom design. The content is the thing being preserved. Our recent project work shows what that looks like on the other side.

Your URLs and your search rankings are the sensitive part. Any conversion that changes your page addresses without mapping the old ones forward will cost you search traffic, and that's the single most common way these projects go wrong. Ask anyone quoting you a conversion how they handle redirects. If the answer is vague, that's your answer.

Not everything on a WordPress site should survive. Most sites we look at have pages nobody has visited in two years and three plugins doing jobs that are now just part of a modern site. Conversion is the cheapest moment you'll ever get to delete them.

We don't publish a flat conversion price and we're not going to invent one here, because the honest driver is how much content there is and how tangled it's gotten. It's priced through our estimate flow — you tell us the site, we look at it, you get a written number before anything starts.

What the bill looks like after

Our hosting is $29 a month, flat. Not a promo, not a first-year rate. Global edge hosting and CDN, SSL that was never an add-on, daily backups with free restore, security headers and monitoring, and your domain stays yours. The first year is included with every build.

The comparison that matters isn't month one, it's month twenty-four. Every host we measured raises the bill between 172% and 501% going into year two. Ours goes up by zero percent, which is easy for us to promise because our costs don't have a promotional-pricing hole to climb out of.

Above that there are two care tiers, both published on our shop page so you can check the math yourself:

$79 Care adds content updates when you need them, a monthly report on traffic and leads and what changed, and priority support from the people who built the thing. Compare that to the cheapest credible hosted-and-maintained WordPress combination we could assemble at $107.99 — you're paying about 27% less and none of it goes toward patching.

$199 Growth adds an SEO article every month written for your customers, unlimited small edits, a quarterly design refresh pass, and search monitoring. The closest apples-to-apples WordPress equivalent we could build landed at $208.99, and it doesn't include the content.

The distinction we care about isn't price, though. It's what the money buys. On a WordPress care plan, your monthly fee is mostly defensive — it exists so a plugin update doesn't take down your contact form. There's nothing to defend against here, so the same money goes toward the business: pages, copy, search, the things that bring someone to your door.

Is WordPress ever the right answer?

Yes. If you have a large editorial team already trained on it, a genuinely unusual plugin doing something custom and irreplaceable, or a developer on staff who likes it — stay. Switching costs are real, and "everyone says WordPress is bad" is not a business case.

The businesses that should leave are the ones paying a monthly fee for a tool they never log into. If you haven't opened your admin panel in six months and you're still paying someone to update it, you're renting a maintenance obligation you don't use.

Find out what your site would take

Send us your current site through the free assessment — two minutes, no phone tag. We'll tell you what converting it involves, what it would cost in writing, and whether we think it's worth doing at all. Sometimes the answer is that your site is fine and you should just move it somewhere with an honest renewal price.

If the recurring bill is the part that's bothering you, the care plan breakdown is the fastest way to see where you'd land. Go look at your renewal date first, though. Most people are surprised by what they're actually paying, and that surprise is designed in.