What WordPress maintenance really costs you in time

WordPress has a reputation: easy to start with, hard to keep watertight. That is true, and it isn't down to the software itself. It is down to the maintenance around it.

Why free and open source isn't the same as no maintenance

WordPress itself is free. The themes and plugins you need to build a real website usually aren't, and even the free ones need maintaining. Every plugin you install is a piece of code kept up to date by someone else, at their own pace, to their own standard.

On a WordPress site I once took over, I counted twenty-two plugins for a site that in the end did five things: show pages, a contact form, some SEO settings, a cache plugin to keep things fast, and a security plugin to protect the rest. Five functions, twenty-two separate pieces of code that all had to be maintained on their own.

The update dilemma

Every WordPress owner knows the screen full of updates waiting to be installed. Updating is necessary, because an outdated plugin is a known security hole. Not updating is also an option, with the same risk, only certain rather than likely.

The problem is that updating carries its own risk. A plugin update can break another plugin, or the theme, or both. That is why many WordPress owners put updates off until they can't any longer, and then do everything in one go, which increases the risk rather than reducing it.

Who does the maintenance in practice

At most of the smaller shops and businesses I talk to, nobody does this full-time. It is a task that gets squeezed in between other tasks, usually by the owner, sometimes by a freelancer who looks at it twice a year. That works until it goes wrong: a hack through an outdated plugin, a site that no longer loads after an update, or simply a slowly growing pile of technical debt that nobody can see the whole of any more.

What it really costs you

It isn't the licence cost that makes WordPress maintenance expensive. Most plugins are cheap or free. It is the time: time to test updates before you put them live, time to work out which plugin is causing a fault, time to restore a backup when things go wrong.

On a site without a maintenance plan, I see that time arrive irregularly but in concentrated bursts: months of nothing, then a week of firefighting because nothing was done for too long.

What I would consider

This is not an argument for leaving WordPress alone. For many purposes it is still a fine choice, especially if you know your way around site management yourself or have a regular partner who takes it seriously. But when you notice that nobody knows exactly which plugins are active and why, that is a sign the maintenance has grown bigger than the website itself. At that point it is worth looking at how much time a platform that includes that maintenance as standard would save you.