The real cost of keeping an old WooCommerce store alive.

Nobody sends you a bill for keeping an old store running, which is exactly why it feels cheaper than replacing it. The costs are real. They are just spread across the year, split between different people, and easy to file as ordinary running expenses.

This post is a checklist rather than an argument. We are not going to tell you what the average store spends, because we do not know your store and neither does any average. Price each line for yourself and you will end up with a number worth comparing.

Hosting, and what it does not include.

Start with the hosting invoice, then note what it does not cover: backups you could actually restore from, a staging copy to test on, and someone responsible when the server is the problem. On many self-hosted stores those are separate services, or they simply do not exist.

The test is a short one. If the server went down this afternoon, do you know who fixes it and roughly how long they would take? If the honest answer is that you would start looking, then what you have is a hosting bill rather than a hosting arrangement, and the difference is only visible on the day it matters.

Plugin licences.

List every paid plugin and its annual renewal. Include the ones you renew without thinking about, and the ones you keep paying for because you are not certain what removing them would break. That second category is usually larger than owners expect.

While you are in the list, mark the ones that have stopped receiving updates. An abandoned plugin is a cost you have already taken on and not yet been billed for, and it tends to come due at the same moment as everything else.

Security patching.

Someone has to apply core, theme and plugin updates, and someone has to check the store still works afterwards. Whether that person is you, an agency on retainer, or nobody, it has a cost. If the answer is nobody, the cost has not disappeared. It has been converted into risk.

Write down the interval as well as the money. A store updated whenever somebody remembers is carrying considerably more risk than the same store updated on a schedule, for exactly the same cash outlay.

Developer call-outs.

Go back through last year and count the times something broke and you paid to have it fixed, in money or in your own evening. An update that took the checkout down, a payment method that stopped, a theme change that fell apart on mobile. Individually these feel like one-offs. Annually they look like a pattern.

Count the waiting as well as the invoice. An hour of developer time is cheap. Three days of a broken checkout while you wait for somebody to have that hour free is not, and it is the part that never appears on the bill.

Speed decay.

Old stores get slower. Products accumulate, images get uploaded at whatever size they arrived in, each plugin brings its own scripts, and the theme carries years of small additions nobody removed. You cannot invoice speed decay, but you can measure it, and it is worth noticing that the slowdown never reverses on its own.

Measure it now so you have a baseline, then measure it again in six months. The reading itself matters less than the direction it is moving, and the direction is the thing owners are least able to judge from memory.

Update risk.

The last line does not fit on a spreadsheet. Any store running on old versions is one required update away from a problem, and the longer that update is deferred, the larger it gets. Owners manage this by not touching anything, which works right up until the day it does not.

The way to price it is not to guess at a probability. It is to work out what a week without the store would cost you, and then decide how much of that you are comfortable leaving to chance each year.

How to use the list.

Add up the year: hosting, licences, patching time, call-outs, and whatever you would honestly charge for the hours you spent on the store rather than on the business. Then put that number next to the cost of a store that asks for none of it.

Sometimes the honest answer is that the old store is fine and the money is better spent elsewhere. We would rather you reached that conclusion with the numbers in front of you than by default.

If the total surprised you, the other side of the comparison is a fixed price. See what a migration costs.