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Is WordPress free? What a WordPress site costs per year

The WordPress software is free; a site on your own domain isn't. Expect about $35 to $50 for year one on a budget host or WordPress.com Personal, more after.

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ProviderFromStarting planFree tierOur rating
DreamHostChecked
$2.89/moWeb Hosting Launch25 GB NVMe SSDNo (30-day money-back guarantee)Not ratedVisit
BluehostChecked
$3.99/moStarter (shared)10 GB NVMe SSDNo (30-day money-back guarantee)Not ratedVisit
HostingerChecked
$2.49/moPremium (web hosting)20 GB SSDNo (30-day money-back guarantee)Not ratedVisit
SiteGroundChecked
$3.99/moStartUp10 GBNo (30-day money-back guarantee)Not ratedVisit

Yes, the WordPress software is free: it’s open source under the GPL, and you can download it from WordPress.org at no cost. A WordPress site on your own domain is not free, though. You pay for hosting and a domain, either separately (from $34.68 for the first year at DreamHost, as of October 2026) or bundled in a WordPress.com plan (from $48 for the first year on Personal, billed yearly). The only $0 option is WordPress.com’s Free plan, which runs on a wordpress.com address and shows ads.

How this guide was put together: WordPress.org’s license, requirements, download, plugin and theme pages, and WordPress.com’s pricing, plugin and refund pages were read on October 30, 2026. Hosting prices for DreamHost, Bluehost, Hostinger and SiteGround come from AskGPU’s price data (checked October 17-25, 2026), and the domain price from our registrar data (October 18, 2026). We haven’t built sites on these plans ourselves; the totals are arithmetic on published prices.

Is WordPress really free?

There are two things called WordPress, and only one is free in full.

WordPress.org is the open-source software. Its license page says it’s released under “the GPLv2 (or later) from the Free Software Foundation.” You can download the current version (7.1.4 on October 30, 2026), install it on as many sites as you like and change the code. WordPress.org’s plugin directory lists “over 77,000 free plugins,” and its theme directory is free too. What WordPress.org doesn’t give you is a server to run it on or a domain name.

WordPress.com is a hosting service run by Automattic that runs the same software for you. Its pricing page FAQ describes it as “a fully hosted platform — hosting, security, backups, and updates are all managed for you,” and contrasts WordPress.org as software “you download and install on your own hosting server, which you pay for and manage separately.” WordPress.com has a free plan and paid plans.

So the question “is WordPress free” has three honest answers:

What you want Free? What you pay
The WordPress software Yes Nothing
A site on yoursite.wordpress.com Yes Nothing, with ads and limits
A site on your own domain No Hosting and domain, or a WordPress.com paid plan

What does WordPress.com’s free plan include?

From WordPress.com’s pricing page FAQ: “The free plan gives you a WordPress.com subdomain, 1 GB of storage, unlimited pages and posts, and access to basic stats for the last 7 days. It does not include a custom domain, plugin installation, or ad-free browsing for visitors.” It has no expiration date and needs no card.

In practice that means:

  • Your address is yoursite.wordpress.com. The free plan doesn’t include a custom domain.
  • Visitors see WordPress.com ads. The pricing page says upgrading to Personal turns them off.
  • No plugins. WordPress.com’s plugin support page says installing plugins “is available on all WordPress.com paid plans.”
  • 1 GB of storage, enough for text and a modest number of images.
  • Subscriber imports are capped. You can email posts to unlimited subscribers, but on Free you can import only up to 100 subscribers from another platform.

For a hobby blog or a test site, that’s workable. For a business, the subdomain and the ads are the usual reasons to pay.

How much do WordPress.com’s paid plans cost?

WordPress.com prices its plans by billing term, as of October 30, 2026:

Plan Monthly billing Yearly Every 2 years Every 3 years Storage
Personal $9/mo $4/mo $3.25/mo $2.75/mo 6 GB
Premium $18/mo $8/mo $6.50/mo $5.50/mo 13 GB
Business $40/mo $25/mo $20/mo $17.50/mo 50 GB
Commerce $70/mo $45/mo $36/mo $31.50/mo 50 GB

Prices exclude taxes, and longer terms are paid up front: Personal on the yearly plan is 12 × $4 = $48; on the three-year plan it’s 36 × $2.75 = $99. Every paid plan on yearly or longer billing includes a domain free for the first year.

What each step up adds, per the pricing page:

  • Personal: your own domain, no ads, plugins and premium themes, and support.
  • Premium: premium stats, payment buttons through PayPal and Stripe, and video uploads.
  • Business: priority 24/7 support, real-time backups, SFTP/SSH, WP-CLI and GitHub deployments, and a business email account free for a year.
  • Commerce: built for running an online store.

One thing we couldn’t confirm: the pricing page says each plan “auto-renews at” a price that it fills in when you choose a plan, and that figure wasn’t in the page text we could read. Check the renewal price at checkout before you choose a long term.

What does self-hosted WordPress cost?

With WordPress.org software you pay a host and a registrar. Entry shared-hosting plans that run WordPress, from AskGPU’s price data:

Host and plan Intro price Term the intro needs Renews at Storage
DreamHost Launch $2.89/mo 1 year $10.99/mo 25 GB
DreamHost Launch $1.99/mo 4 years $7.99/mo 25 GB
Bluehost Starter $3.99/mo 36 months $9.99/mo 10 GB
Hostinger Premium $2.49/mo 48 months ($119.52 up front) $10.99/mo Not in our data
SiteGround StartUp $3.99/mo 12 months $17.99/mo 10 GB

DreamHost and Bluehost checked October 17-18, Hostinger October 25 (Hostinger labels its current intro price a Black Friday offer), SiteGround October 18, 2026. DreamHost, Hostinger and SiteGround include a domain free for the first year, per our data.

WordPress.org’s requirements page recommends a host with PHP 8.3 or greater, MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.11 or greater, and HTTPS support, and adds “That’s really it.” Any of these hosts’ plans are sold for WordPress. For how intro and renewal prices add up over three years at more hosts, see the cheapest web hosting by three-year cost.

The domain. If your host doesn’t include one, or after the free first year, a .com renews at $9.98 to $22.99 a year at the registrars we track; Porkbun charges $11.08 a year to register and renew. More in how much a domain costs.

Do you have to pay for themes and plugins?

No. Everything in the WordPress.org theme and plugin directories is free, including WooCommerce, which its plugin page calls “the open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress” with a free core. Many businesses still pay for one of three things:

  • A premium theme or theme bundle. WordPress.org keeps a list of “commercially supported GPL themes” and explains that “the GPL doesn’t say that everything must be zero-cost.” As one example from that list, GeneratePress One costs $99 a year for 1 site, $149 for 10 sites or $199 for 100, with a 30-day refund, per its pricing page.
  • Premium plugin add-ons. WooCommerce’s page says subscriptions, bookings and memberships come through “developer-vetted extensions,” which are sold separately.
  • Services around the software: managed hosting, backups or support.

On WordPress.com, Personal and above include all premium themes in the WordPress.com marketplace, per the pricing page.

Worked example: three years of WordPress for a small business

A five-page business site with a contact form, on its own .com. Here are three ways to run it, with the arithmetic:

1. WordPress.com Personal, three-year plan 36 × $2.75 = $99 up front. Domain free for the first year; years two and three are renewed at WordPress.com’s domain price, which isn’t on the pricing page we read.

2. Self-hosted on Bluehost Starter, domain at Porkbun, free theme Hosting: 36 × $3.99 = $143.64. Domain: 3 × $11.08 = $33.24. Total: $143.64 + $33.24 = $176.88 for three years, or about $58.96 a year. After month 36, hosting renews at $9.99 a month, which is $119.88 a year.

3. The same, plus a premium theme Add GeneratePress One for one site: 3 × $99 = $297. Total: $176.88 + $297 = $473.88 for three years.

A premium theme can cost more than the hosting. If a free theme from the directory does the job, it’s the biggest single saving in this example.

Year one only, the cheapest routes: WordPress.com Free at $0 (subdomain, ads); DreamHost Launch on a 1-year term at 12 × $2.89 = $34.68 with a free first-year domain; or WordPress.com Personal yearly at $48 with a free first-year domain. In year two, the DreamHost plan renews at 12 × $10.99 = $131.88 for hosting alone.

What to watch for

  • Renewal prices. Every shared-host intro price above rises at renewal, by 2.5 to 4.5 times. SiteGround StartUp goes from $3.99 to $17.99 a month.
  • Long prepaid terms. The lowest intro prices need 36 or 48 months paid up front. Bluehost’s $3.99 means $143.64 on day one.
  • Free domains expire after year one. Both WordPress.com and the hosts include a domain for the first year only, and only on yearly or longer billing.
  • WordPress.com refund windows are short. Its refund page says annual, two-year and three-year plans are refundable “within 14 days of purchase or renewal,” monthly plans within 7 days, and domains within 96 hours. If you cancel a plan after 96 hours and keep a domain you got free with it, the refund is reduced by the domain’s cost.
  • Cancelling isn’t refunding. WordPress.com says canceling stops renewals but “does not issue a refund on its own”; you have to remove the purchase to get money back.
  • Self-hosting means self-maintaining. WordPress.com’s FAQ notes that on a self-hosted site “you are responsible for your own hosting, security, and maintenance.” Keep WordPress, themes and plugins updated; see our note on WordPress 7.1 and PHP versions.
  • Plugin creep. Each paid plugin is usually a yearly license. Add them up before you commit to a design that needs several.

Which WordPress should you choose?

  • A personal blog or a test site: WordPress.com Free. It costs nothing, as long as a wordpress.com address and ads are acceptable.
  • A small business that wants no server work: WordPress.com Personal. It’s $48 for the first year billed yearly, or $99 for three years, and includes the domain for year one and plugin installation.
  • A small business comfortable with a hosting control panel: self-hosted WordPress on a budget host. Year one starts at $34.68 at DreamHost; check the renewal price and the prepaid term before you buy. Compare hosts on the web hosting hub.
  • A store: WooCommerce on a host, or WordPress.com Commerce from $45 a month billed yearly. Price the extensions you need first.
  • A busy site that needs staging and daily backups handled for you: compare managed WordPress hosting plans.

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