WordPress plugins cost?

wordpress logoIntroduction

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Akismet anti-spam adds better statistics and support for £44 per year.
  3. 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.
  4. With Jetpack you get a load more content stuff and lazy image loading for $9 (£7) per month.
  5. WP-Smush, one of my favrourites which crushes images, for really useful enhancements will set you back $49 (£38) per month.
  6. Updraft plus, the dedicated backup solution, for many, many more features and support will cost you £54 in total.
  7. WP Total Cache with more, possibly useless, caching features will be $99 (£77) per year.
  8. Wordfence security, which bugs me nearly daily to upgrade plugins and also does much more, is $99 (£77) per license.
  9. Yoast SEO which has certainly enhanced my writing for the web, is £79 per license.
  10. 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.
  11. 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!