WordPress for a pizzeria: the real cost
WordPress runs a large share of the web and it will certainly run a pizzeria site. The cost is not the licence — that is free — it is that you have taken on a software estate: hosting, a theme, five or six plugins, and the ongoing job of updating all of it before something breaks or gets exploited. For a single pizzeria that is a lot of ownership for a menu and some opening hours.
What it actually costs to run
| Item | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | £40 | £300 |
| Domain | £8 | £15 |
| Premium theme | £0 | £70 |
| Restaurant / menu plugin | £0 | £120 |
| Ordering or booking plugin | £0 | £200 |
| Security / backup plugin | £0 | £80 |
| Someone to set it up | £0 | £800 |
| First-year total | £48 | £1,585 |
Indicative UK ranges, September 2026. The bottom row is the realistic spread between a capable owner doing it themselves and paying someone to assemble it.
The plugin problem, specifically
A pizzeria needs a menu, options that change prices, allergens, opening hours with two services, and ordering. WordPress does none of those itself, so each becomes a plugin — often from a different author, with a different update cycle, a different renewal date and a different idea of what a restaurant is.
When they conflict, and eventually they will, you are the systems integrator. That is the real cost and it never appears in a comparison table.
When WordPress is genuinely the right answer
- You publish seriously. If you are writing regularly — recipes, a real blog, an events programme — WordPress is still excellent at that and most restaurant tools are not.
- You already have it, and it works. A maintained WordPress site is not a problem to be solved.
- You need something unusual. Multi-site, a membership scheme, a shop selling flour and merchandise, an integration nobody else offers.
- You have a developer. With someone competent on call it is flexible in a way hosted tools are not.
The honest comparison
WordPress is a platform for building websites. A pizzeria does not want to build a website; it wants a menu that is correct, hours that are right, and to be found on a phone at 7pm. Those are not the same project, and the gap between them is where the plugins, the updates and the Sunday evenings go.
If you keep it
- Turn on automatic updates for core and security releases, and check monthly.
- Run backups off the same server, and restore one once so you know it works.
- Delete every plugin and theme you are not using — inactive ones are still attack surface.
- Add restaurant structured data explicitly; most themes do not.
- Test the menu page on a phone on mobile data. Plugin-heavy WordPress is often slow there.