WordPress to static: a worked cost example
Illustrative example. This is a worked example, not a customer story. The site and the prices below are assumptions chosen to be typical. Swap in your own bills to get your real number.
The example site
A small business site: about 15 pages and 40 blog posts, one contact form, a few hundred form submissions a year, and nobody but the owner logging in.
Assumptions
- Managed WordPress hosting: assumed $30 a month. A budget shared host is assumed at $5 a month.
- Premium form plugin: assumed $60 a year for a licence with email notifications and integrations.
- Backup and security plugins: assumed $100 a year combined.
- Domain: assumed $15 a year. It stays the same after the move.
- Static hosting: the free tier of Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages or Netlify, which covers a site this size.
- Form backend: FormRill Free, which includes 500 submissions a month with email notifications.
The math
| Per year | Managed WordPress | Budget WordPress | Static + FormRill |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting | $360 | $60 | $0 |
| Form plugin or backend | $60 | $60 | $0 |
| Backup and security | $100 | $100 | $0 |
| Domain | $15 | $15 | $15 |
| Total | $535 | $235 | $15 |
Under these assumptions the static site saves $520 a year against managed hosting and $220 against budget hosting. Backups cost nothing because the site lives in Git, and there is no PHP or database left to protect.
The one-off cost: your time
Assume the migration takes 8 hours and you value your time at $50 an hour, so $400 once. Against managed hosting, that pays back in about 9 months ($400 ÷ $520 × 12 = 9.2). Against budget hosting, it takes about 22 months ($400 ÷ $220 × 12 = 21.8). If you build sites for a living, the migration is faster and the payback shorter.
When the numbers change
- More than 500 submissions a month, or Sheets and CRM delivery: FormRill Pro will be $9 a month once billing launches (free during the beta), or $90 a year if you pay yearly. On yearly billing the static column becomes $105 a year. It is still cheaper than either WordPress column.
- Free plugins already: if you use free form and backup plugins, remove those rows from the WordPress columns. Hosting is then the whole saving.
- Daily non-technical editing: a static site may need a Git-based CMS for your editors, which can add its own cost.
Ready to try it? Follow the step-by-step guide to move WordPress to a static site.
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- Move WordPress to a static site and cut hosting costs
The step-by-step migration.
- Send form submissions to email
What the free plan does.
- FormRill pricing
Free and Pro.