Hosting

The cheapest WordPress hosting tiers — shared hosting at £5–10/month — cannot handle a real traffic spike without going down. A modest viral moment on a product page will bring a shared server to its knees. Managed WordPress hosting (WP Engine, Kinsta) is £25–200/month for anything production-worthy. Astro on Cloudflare Pages is free up to 500 deployments and unlimited traffic.

Plugins

A typical business site needs security (£80/year), caching (£60/year), SEO (£80/year), backup (£60/year), forms (£50/year), and performance optimisation (£40/year). That's over £370/year in plugin licenses — and none of these concerns exist in the Astro stack, which handles each in code or via free infrastructure.

Security maintenance

WordPress core, themes, and every plugin need to be kept up to date. A missed update is an open door for automated bots that scan for known vulnerabilities. Malware infections, brute-force login attempts, and database injection attacks are constant threats. Astro produces static HTML — there is no server, no admin panel, no database, and no login endpoint to attack.

Developer time

The hidden cost that never appears on the WordPress price page is developer time. Updating a plugin breaks a page builder widget. A theme update conflicts with a customisation. A security patch must be tested on staging before production. Each incident costs an hour or more of developer time. On the modern stack, infrastructure is managed in code and deployed through CI — changes are reviewed and tested before they reach production.

The honest comparison

A WordPress site costs roughly £1,500–3,000 per year in hosting, plugins, and routine maintenance — before any actual development work. An equivalent Astro + Sanity + Cloudflare site runs for under £100/year in infrastructure costs. The upfront build cost is higher, but the payback period is typically under eighteen months.