What a small-business website actually costs
The build is the down payment. Both columns of the five-year math, laid out honestly — including the one I sell.
Ask what a website costs and you'll get a number for the build. That number is the down payment. The real cost is the build plus everything the site quietly bills you for over the next five years. Let me lay out both columns honestly — including the one I sell.
The WordPress column
The build: anywhere from $500 (a template, lightly configured) to $10,000+ (custom design from an agency). Say $3,000–$6,000 for a decent custom job.
Then the meter starts:
- Managed WordPress hosting: $25–$60/month. WordPress runs a server that assembles every page on demand, so you pay for that server to exist, forever.
- Plugin and theme licenses: the useful ones are subscriptions — forms, galleries, SEO tools, page builders. $100–$400/year is normal.
- Maintenance: WordPress and its plugins need updates, and updates break things, so the ecosystem sells maintenance retainers — $50–$150/month for updates, backups, and security monitoring. Skip this and you're the person doing it, or the person whose site gets compromised.
- The periodic rebuild: themes age out, builders get abandoned, PHP versions move on. The typical WordPress site gets rebuilt every 3–5 years, and each rebuild is a new build-sized check.
Five-year total for a well-run setup: roughly $8,000–$20,000, most of it spent keeping the site alive rather than making it better.
The static column
The build: $5,000 fixed is my number for a migration — content moved, design rebuilt, every URL redirected, rankings preserved. Comparable to the WordPress build cost.
Then:
- Hosting: static pages are files on a CDN. $0–$20/month, and the low end is genuinely fine for most businesses.
- Licenses: none. There are no plugins.
- Maintenance: there is no software stack to patch. No updates on Tuesday that break the contact form on Wednesday. A static site left alone stays exactly as fast and exactly as secure as the day it shipped.
- Changes: you pay for actual changes when you actually want them — or a retainer if you want a standing arrangement, but it's optional, not life support.
Five-year total: roughly the build, plus whatever improvements you choose to make.
The honest asterisks
Three of them, because this column has costs too:
- Content editing. WordPress gives you an admin panel. A static site's editing story has to be designed — a lightweight CMS, or a per-change arrangement. If you publish daily with a team, WordPress is genuinely better for you. I put that in writing.
- E-commerce. A deep WooCommerce store shouldn't naively migrate. Different problem.
- The switch isn't free. That's the $5,000. If your site is costing you $30/month and working, the math says stay. The math only favors migration when you're paying the full WordPress overhead — hosting, licenses, maintenance, and slow-site bounce — for capabilities you don't use.
How to check my math
Pull up your last 12 months of website spend — hosting invoices, plugin renewals, the maintenance retainer, that one emergency fix. Most owners have never added it up. That number, times five, minus one rebuild you won't need, is what's actually on the table.
If you want, I'll do it with you: a free written audit that includes the cost math for your specific site alongside the speed numbers. No call required. The verdict comes in writing, and sometimes the verdict is "you're fine."
Tony builds websites and AI systems at OtrovertLabs in Newark, Delaware. Fixed prices, measured claims, honest verdicts — the migration offer is all three.