costs?
How costs? I thought Wordpress was free? Unfortunately far from it, there is no free website platform. Although Wordpress itself is free, it still requires a hosting package and lots of plugins.
When it comes to choosing a website platform, price shouldn't be the only exclusion criterion, but it still plays a major role for many customers. It therefore makes sense to know the approximate costs of a website with Wordpress and Webflow.
So in this post, we'll take a closer look at how quickly “free” WordPress can become an “expensive” WordPress, both in terms of material costs and in terms of price:
- Hosting
- Plug-ins
- Themes
Intangible costs include:
- Safety
- Platform and plugin updates
- Performance
In this comparison, the costs of a hosted Wordpress site are compared, as Webflow is also a hosted product.
Here are the total operating costs for a year with Webflow and Wordpress compared, if you omit the immaterial costs:
Webflow (hosting+designer) = 133,65€-463,12 € annually
Webflow (hosting + designer + CMS) = 178,20€-463,12€ annually
WordPress (Hosting + Advanced Custom Fields + Visual Builder) = 164,27€-3.027,46€ annually.
The cost of hosting
WordPress hosting
The cost of a custom domain above WordPress.com (hosted version) are between 4.64€ and 23.20€.
That makes for the year approx. 55.69€ - 278.43€.
Webflow hosting
The cost of a custom domain via Webflow is between €11.14 - €32.48 per month.
That are 133,65€ - 389,80€ per year.
In a direct hosting comparison, Wordpress is slightly ahead. However, hosting is only a small part of the costs, because you also pay for the design tools, the content management system and various plugins.
The cost of plugins
Plugins can incur a range of costs, both tangible and immaterial.
Although many plugins are free, you would need several paid plugins to achieve the features that Webflow comes with.
With Webflow, at no extra charge for plugins, you get great features like:
- Flexible, code-free design tools
- Fast, secure hosting
- Built-in SEO tools
- Easily customizable forms
- 100% user-defined content structures
- Easy Google Analytics integration
- Free, cloneable websites
- free staging domain
WordPress plugin costs
In Wordpress, there are plugins to solve almost any challenge. There are simple free plugins and quite complex plugins that can cost hundreds of euros. Here is a list of common Wordpress plugins and their prices:
- Jetpack (performance, security and support): 36.20€-277.50€ annually
- Yoast (SEO): 0€-82,60€ annually
- WPForms or Gravity Forms (forms): 36,20€-556,86€ annually
- Advanced custom fields (CMS/structured content): 0€ - 92.81€ annually
- MonsterInsights (analytics): 0€-742.48€ annually
- Sucuri (security): 0€-464.05€ annually
- A Visual Builder (Divi, Elegant, Elementor): 45,48€-370,31€ annually
and much more
These plugins alone can cost between €63.11 and €2,216.30 per year.
If we include the costs of the plugins, our calculation would look like this:
Webflow hosting + designer + CMS = 178,20€ - 389,80€ annually
WordPress hosting + Advanced custom fields + Visual Builder = 164,27€-2.865,04€ annually
Webflow offers almost all functions out of the box and therefore does not cause any problems with various plugins, such as
- Possible conflicts between plugins
- New security vulnerabilities
- Longer charging times and lower overall performance
- Sometimes long error analyses
- Free plugins, most commonly cause problems
The cost of themes/templates
There are themes and templates for both systems. However, this is where the systems differ fundamentally. Wordpress is based on templates, Webflow was developed to start from scratch and be able to creatively develop everything you have in mind.
Webflow templates have a very big advantage over Wordpress templates, they are 100% editable. This means that you are not limited in your design and can, if you want, throw around the entire template or adapt it to your needs. With Wordpress, most themes are very limited in their options if you don't want to customize everything in the code. In the past, it was more common that Wordpress templates were no longer supported and Wordpress users were not very happy about them.
Webflow themes: €0 - €116.01
WordPress themes: €0 - €162.42
- Some Wordpress themes require paid plugins to work smoothly.
Intangible costs of WordPress
WordPress is regularly cited for its problems in three key areas, which I call intangible costs — although their impact on your business may be anything but intangible. Some of the known issues include: slow load times, sub-optimal user experiences, time and costs for website/plugin/backup maintenance.
These areas are:
- Safety
- Platform and plugin updates
- Performance
Wordpress security costs
Security is probably Wordpress's biggest problem area. Attacks on Wordpress websites are usually successful because the website operator shows poor installation, maintenance and update practices - because with WordPress, all this work is up to you!
If your website gets hacked, that's a very tangible cost. It takes time and money to recover from it. It can cost even more if you have to contact professionals to solve your security issue for you.
The cost of platform, theme, and plugin updates
As a former Wordpress user, platform and plugin updates gave me the biggest headache. It felt like every time I logged in, there was something to update. This often distracted me from my actual projects.
There were also often unpleasant surprises when I found out that a plugin was no longer being developed and I had to look for a (hopefully free) replacement.
Considering how much time I spent on my Wordpress website just to make updates and fix bugs, Webflow now saves me money.
No maintenance - no headaches - no waste of time
Wordpress costs conclusion
Yes, it is possible to run a very cheap Wordpress website. This is made possible by cheap hosts and a collection of free plugins. But here you pay extra in the form of time & nerves or someone who takes care of it. But if you want a secure website with lightning-fast hosting on the Webflow standard, Wordpress is expensive and even more complicated.
Handling websites with Webflow has become much easier. In addition, Webflow already includes many functions that are only possible with Wordpress with additional plugins. Plus, you don't have to deal with terms like PHP, cPanel, and FTP first.
That's exactly why a platform like Webflow is just the right thing for anyone who wants to save time, nerves & money. You don't have to worry about issues like security, updates, backups, and loss of performance anymore because your website is up and running.
You can try out Webflow for free here:
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