What WordPress plugins cost per year
Seven paid plugins on one site, at regular renewal prices, come to $644.68 a year. Every price is the list price on that vendor’s own pricing page, checked at the time of writing.
- WP Rocket, caching: $59
- Sucuri Basic, security: $229
- UpdraftPlus Premium Personal, backup: $70
- Gravity Forms Basic, forms: $59
- Elementor Pro Essential, page builder: $49
- Imagify Growth, images: $59.88
- Yoast SEO Premium, page titles: $118.80
A leaner stack covering the same seven jobs comes to $376: WP Rocket $59, Wordfence $0, UpdraftPlus Premium $70, Gravity Forms Basic $59, Divi $89, ShortPixel $0, All in One SEO Basic $99. Same pages, same date.
So the range is roughly $375 to $650 a year in licences for one site. Not the thousand dollar plus figure that gets repeated around.
Hosting is a separate line. WP Engine’s entry plan is $30 a month for the first year, or $360. Their pricing page says that rate is for new customers only, so renewal costs more and is not stated.
Watch the renewals. WPForms and All in One SEO advertise 50 percent off the first year, and both say on their own pages that renewals are full price. Jetpack VaultPress Backup is $4.95 a month in year one, then $9.95, or $119.40.
The plugins a static site does not need
Caching, security and backup come off the bill by how the site is built, not by swapping in something cheaper.
A cache plugin saves a copy of a page so the server does not rebuild it. A static page was already built before anyone visited. Astro’s docs: “By default, your entire Astro site will be prerendered, and static HTML pages will be sent to the browser.” Cloudflare’s docs say “requests to static assets are free and unlimited”.
Free cache plugins exist: LiteSpeed Cache has over 7 million installs, and its own FAQ says it “will always be free and open source”. The true line is not that caching costs $59 a year. It is that plenty of owners pay it when a free one is right there.
Security is about surface: fewer moving parts is a smaller target. BleepingComputer ran the headline “Over 90 WordPress themes, plugins backdoored in supply chain attack”. A static site has no database, no login page, and no plugin code on the server. That does not make it safe. Your domain account, your email and your Google login still need protecting, and we cannot promise you will not be hacked.
Backups too. The site is a folder of files in version control, so it can be rebuilt and put back. Free backup exists on WordPress: UpdraftPlus free runs on more than 3 million sites and already handles scheduled backups and restores.
What replaces your forms, images and page titles
Images are the clean swap. Astro’s built in Image and Picture components run Sharp. They resize at build time and write avif and webp, with a png fallback. Loading is lazy, decoding async, and the width and height ride along so the page does not jump as the picture loads. That is the work Imagify and ShortPixel do, at no extra cost.
Forms are real work, not a free swap. A static site has no database, so the message has to go somewhere. That is a service with its own bill, or Reception, which answers messages and books jobs.
Yoast, All in One SEO and Rank Math give you two fields: the short title that shows in a Google result, and the sentence underneath. Those get written into the page once, by whoever builds it.
There is no page builder. Somebody writes the page. On our builds that is Stablehand, and nothing goes live until you approve it.
If you liked dragging blocks around at 11pm, you give that up.
Why fewer plugins will not fix a slow site
The objection is correct. Plugin count on its own is not the problem. Which ones you run, and how well they were built, matters more.
What we can defend is narrower. These seven categories exist to patch something the platform needs. A site with no database, and nothing assembled while your customer waits, does not need the patch. That holds whether the plugins were good or bad.
The site we can point to in full is our own. It scores 100 on Google’s PageSpeed test, desktop and mobile. We do not publish client case studies and will not invent one. We cannot promise you a number.
What a rebuild does not save you
You swap one bill for another. Our pricing page lists all three tiers, what each includes, and the extras that stay separate.
Hosting does not disappear. Cloudflare’s free plan states 500 builds a month, 20,000 files, and 25 MiB per file. The limits page states no bandwidth cap.
If you sell online, run memberships, or need customer logins, this article does not apply to you. Those need a database.
The prices above are list prices, checked at the time of writing. Vendors change them, and several charge more at renewal.
No new feature is one click away. On WordPress you install a plugin and it is there in a minute. Here somebody writes it, and that takes time you have to ask for.
Who updates the site when there is no plugin dashboard
You do not log in, and you do not maintain anything. You ask for a change, in writing.
If you add Site Crew, Stablehand writes pages and fixes breakage. Steward keeps the log and sends the report. Nothing goes live until you approve it, and every action is written to a dated log you can read. See what each agent does.
Add up every plugin renewal date you have coming in the next year. Then put that number next to our prices.