Introduction
You’ve installed WordPress. It’s free. That’s amazing, and you get to stand on the shoulders of giants with all those great plugins. BUT! Developers need to get paid and a lot of the plugins have paid versions with the full range of features. So what can a fully fedged WordPress installation cost? This is the unspoken secret of WordPress.
The Plugins
These are the plugins I’m using:
- Hosting. Not really a plugin. It’s easy to get free/cheap hosting but with a WordPress site taking multiple seconds to load, especially if you have plugins enabled. As a benchmark, the personal purchase on wordpress.com is $39 (£30) per year, but doesn’t really give you that much.
- Akismet anti-spam adds better statistics and support for £44 per year.
- Cloudflare. You are running this, right? For free it gives you SSL, translation of http to https, DDoS protection, CDN caching (for the speed!), for $20 (£15) you get more as well as firewalling.
- With Jetpack you get a load more content stuff and lazy image loading for $9 (£7) per month.
- WP-Smush, one of my favrourites which crushes images, for really useful enhancements will set you back $49 (£38) per month.
- Updraft plus, the dedicated backup solution, for many, many more features and support will cost you £54 in total.
- WP Total Cache with more, possibly useless, caching features will be $99 (£77) per year.
- Wordfence security, which bugs me nearly daily to upgrade plugins and also does much more, is $99 (£77) per license.
- Yoast SEO which has certainly enhanced my writing for the web, is £79 per license.
- And finally something not WP related but which I think is REALLY useful is Grammarly which has also knocked some corners of my writing style. This is £108 per year, and if I were a professional writer, it would be totally worth it.
- The AliExpress plugin is worth it if you want a drop shipping store, and who doesn’t? This is $14 (£11) per month.
Therefore in total, we’re looking at £1156 for the first year! Not insignificant, but developers have to eat!