The comparison people run is “static site generator vs. WordPress” and they score it on setup cost. That’s the wrong axis. The real cost shows up eighteen months later, in who has to touch the site to change anything.

The real question: who edits content

If it’s you, a developer, editing markdown in git — a static site generator (Hugo, Astro, whatever) wins outright. Fast, cheap to host, nothing to patch.

If it’s a non-technical founder, a marketing hire, or a client who needs to change copy without opening a pull request — a CMS with a real editing UI wins, even though it costs more to run.

Everything else is secondary to that one fact.

What static sites actually cost you

Not money — hosting a static site is close to free. The cost is: every content change goes through you, or through someone who’s willing to learn git and markdown. For a solo dev’s blog, that’s not a cost, that’s the workflow you wanted. For a business site where the owner wants to update the homepage headline on a Tuesday afternoon, it’s a support ticket to you every time.

What a CMS actually costs you

WordPress specifically: patching. A WordPress site is a target the moment it’s public, and the attack surface isn’t your code — it’s the 30 plugins someone installed over three years, half of which are abandoned. Nobody accounts for this until a site gets compromised and serves malware redirects for two weeks before anyone notices.

	Static site	WordPress/CMS
Hosting	Near-free (Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, S3)	$5-30/mo minimum for decent performance
Security patching	None — no server-side app to exploit	Ongoing, plugins are the real risk
Non-technical editing	Poor — needs git/markdown or a headless CMS bolted on	Built in
Page speed out of the box	Excellent	Depends entirely on plugin bloat
Plugin/theme risk	None	Every plugin is a dependency you don’t control
Backup/restore complexity	Trivial — it’s git	Needs a real backup plugin and a tested restore process

The middle ground

If you need non-technical editing but don’t want CMS security overhead, pair a static generator with a headless CMS — Decap CMS, Sanity, or a Git-backed editor UI that writes markdown files for you. The site still builds and deploys as static output; the editor just gets a form instead of a text editor. It’s more setup than either extreme, but for a small business site edited by one non-technical person a few times a month, it’s often the actual right answer.

The recommendation

Solo developer, technical founder, or anyone comfortable in a terminal: static, no contest. Business with a non-technical owner who’ll actually use an editor regularly: WordPress or a hosted CMS, and budget real time for keeping plugins updated — not “install and forget.”

Don’t pick static because it’s trendy among developers, and don’t pick WordPress out of habit. Pick based on who’s going to open the editor six months from now, when you’re not the one doing it anymore.

---