Here is the number first. Fully managed WordPress hosting from us starts at £1 a day + VAT, which comes to about £30 a month + VAT. Look around the rest of the UK market and you will see WordPress hosting advertised from a couple of pounds a month upwards.
The gap between those two figures has almost nothing to do with disk space. It is about who does the work, and who picks up the phone when something goes wrong on a Sunday.
Why WordPress costs more to host than a plain website
A static website is a set of files. The server hands them over and that is the end of it, which is why hosting one is cheap and stays cheap. If that is what you have, the wider market and what it charges is laid out in what web hosting costs in the UK.
WordPress does not work that way. It builds every page on request: it runs PHP, asks the database a series of questions, and assembles the answer while the visitor waits.
Some of that work can be cached and reused. A few parts cannot be cached at all:
- The admin area, which is rebuilt for you on every single click
- Anything shown only to a logged-in user
- A WooCommerce basket and checkout, which have to be accurate to the second
- Scheduled jobs, which WordPress fires off the back of visitor traffic
That last one surprises people. WordPress has no clock of its own. It waits for a visitor to arrive and uses that visit to run whatever was due, so a quiet site does its scheduled work late and a busy site does it over and over.
On a server that is not already at full stretch, none of that is a problem. On an oversold one it is the difference between a page appearing before you have finished blinking and you sitting there watching a spinner.
The work behind the price
Take the hardware out of a managed price and what is left is labour. WordPress core ships releases through the year. A site of any age carries a long list of plugins, each on its own release schedule, and a theme sitting on top of them. Every one of those updates has to be applied and then checked, because the update that breaks something rarely announces that it has.
Half an hour a month spent updating and checking is six hours a year. Put your own hourly rate against that and the cheap plan looks different. It also assumes the month goes well, and the month it does not is never the month you had set aside for it.
That is what the difference in the price is buying. At this level a person is responsible for the site rather than a dashboard. Somebody notices when the site stops responding at ten to seven on a Friday evening, which is when these things tend to happen. What that person actually does with the time, week by week, is set out in managed WordPress hosting explained.
What you are paying now
None of this is a comparison until there is something on the other side of it, and that is not the monthly figure on your hosting invoice. Take a full year of it at the renewal rate, then add the last bill from whoever put the site right when an update went sideways, then add the six hours. We see this a lot: a business adds it up and finds they were already paying managed money for hosting that manages nothing.
Does paying more make the site faster?
Up to a point, yes. Moving off a crowded shared machine onto one with proper headroom makes an immediate difference, and so does having PHP and caching set up by somebody who knows what WordPress likes.
Past that point you are no longer buying speed. You are buying people. Nobody has ever built a server that phones you back, and a well-specified machine will still sit there doing nothing while a broken plugin takes your contact form down for a fortnight.
It also depends what is actually wrong. Where the delay is coming from the images and the plugin list rather than the machine, a bigger server buys very little, so the usual reasons a WordPress site runs slowly are worth ruling out before you spend anything at all.
What £1 a day covers
Our price buys UK data centres, security monitoring, backups written off the server every day, certificates that renew themselves, Cloudflare DNS, your email accounts, and every core, theme and plugin update handled for you. Migration from your current host is free, and you can have Plesk access if you like poking about. There is more detail on our WordPress hosting page.
Shops, several sites on one account, and an old system running alongside a new one all sit outside that figure and get priced on their own.
What pushes the price up as a site grows
The first bill is rarely the last one, and with WordPress the things that move it are fairly predictable.
Plugins are the main one. Anything that runs on the front end does work on every page view, so a site that started lean and has picked up another plugin every few months for years is asking the server for several times what it used to, on the same traffic.
Logged-in users are the second. Content behind a login skips the cache by definition, so a membership area, a client portal or a busy set of editors makes a site expensive to serve without one extra visitor arriving.
A shop changes the shape of it again. Order tables grow in a way a brochure site’s never do, the two pages that matter most cannot be cached at all, and the busy weeks land all at once rather than spread evenly across the year. That is why a WooCommerce site gets quoted rather than picked off a list.
That is not a reason to buy more server than the site needs today. It is a reason to be on something that can be made bigger without moving house.
WordPress hosting cost FAQs
How much does WordPress hosting cost in the UK?
Fully managed WordPress hosting from us starts at £1 a day + VAT, about £30 a month + VAT. That figure buys the core, theme and plugin updates, a check that the site still works afterwards, off-site backups taken every day, SSL, security monitoring and a free move from your current host. Shops and multi-site setups are quoted separately.
How much work does a WordPress site need each month?
Not much in a good month and a fair bit in a bad one. Core, theme and plugin updates come round constantly, and each one needs applying and then checking that nothing on the site broke. Half an hour covers a quiet month. The month a plugin update takes the contact form down, it does not.
Does a WooCommerce shop cost more to host than a blog?
Usually, yes. A shop runs more code on every page, keeps basket and checkout pages out of the cache, and gets busiest at exactly the times you cannot afford a slow site. We quote WooCommerce hosting per shop, based on catalogue size and order volume, rather than selling a fixed plan.
Is it cheaper to host several WordPress sites together?
Sometimes. It depends what the sites do and how much looking after they need, so we would rather look than promise. What one account does give you is a single renewal date, one invoice, and the same people answering about all of them. Tell us how many sites you have and what they are, and we will price the lot as a group.
Buying the hours back
If you would rather the updates, the backups and the checking afterwards stopped being your job, send us the address and tell us roughly how busy the site gets, or ring 01623 650 333 and describe it. Whatever the number turns out to be, from then on the six hours a year are ours.
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