The honest range is £0 to several thousand pounds, which isn’t a useful answer on its own, so here’s what actually drives that number, with real prices rather than vague reassurance.
The baseline: what’s genuinely free
A meaningful amount of real security costs nothing. HTTPS is free through most hosts now (Let’s Encrypt certificates, auto-renewing, no separate purchase needed). Keeping WordPress core, plugins, and themes updated costs nothing but time, and it’s consistently the single highest-impact thing on any security checklist, most successful attacks exploit a known, already-patched vulnerability on a site that simply hadn’t updated yet, not some sophisticated novel exploit. A password manager has a genuinely usable free tier for personal use. Two-factor authentication is free in most security plugins, including SecondGate’s, passkeys, standard TOTP, and brute-force lockout are all free forever, no card required. Cloudflare’s free tier adds basic WAF rules and unmetered DDoS protection in front of your site at zero cost.
Put together, that’s a genuinely solid baseline for free: encrypted connections, disciplined updates, strong unique credentials, 2FA, basic edge filtering. Most of what actually prevents the most common WordPress compromises is available without spending anything. Worth saying plainly, since it’s easy to assume “free” means “incomplete”: for a large share of real-world sites, this baseline alone closes off the overwhelming majority of how sites actually get compromised, and everything past it is genuine improvement rather than the line between safe and unsafe.
Where the free tier of a security plugin stops
Every plugin draws its free/paid line differently, and it’s worth knowing where before assuming “free” means “everything.” Wordfence’s free tier includes a working firewall, malware scanner, and login security, but new firewall rules and malware signatures arrive 30 days after Premium users get them, real time delay during an active exploit window. Wordfence Premium runs $99-149/year, with the Care and Response tiers (roughly $590 and $1,250/year respectively) adding actual incident response help on top.
SecondGate’s split works differently: passkeys, standard 2FA, brute-force lockout, and country blocking are free forever with no delay, but the deeper detection layer, canary traps, file integrity scanning with auto-restore, threat scoring, a tamper-evident audit log, sits in a Pro tier at £39.99/year. Neither model is dishonest, but they gate different things, timing on one, feature depth on the other, so the actual question isn’t “is free good enough” in the abstract, it’s “which specific thing am I giving up by staying free, and does that thing matter for my site.”
Sucuri’s cost, and what it actually buys
Sucuri’s free WordPress plugin covers monitoring and basic hardening but not active blocking. Full firewall protection, the part that actually stops traffic rather than just watching it, requires the paid Sucuri platform at around $199/year, which proxies your traffic through their network as a genuine cloud WAF. That’s a materially different product shape than an application-level plugin, worth understanding before comparing the number directly against something like Wordfence Premium or SecondGate Pro, you’re not just paying for more features, you’re paying for a different architecture, edge-level filtering rather than in-WordPress detection.
Cloudflare Pro: is the upgrade worth it
Free Cloudflare already includes basic WAF rules and unmetered DDoS protection, genuinely useful at zero cost. The Pro tier, roughly $20/month, adds a more advanced managed ruleset specifically covering the OWASP Top 10 risk categories, plus more granular control over rules. For most small to mid-sized sites, free Cloudflare plus a decent application-level plugin covers the realistic threat model. The upgrade earns its cost once you’re handling real transaction volume, sensitive customer data, or have already been targeted specifically, at that point $20/month is a genuinely small number against the actual stakes.
What it costs to fix a site that’s already been hacked
This is where the numbers get real, and where prevention’s cost stops looking expensive by comparison. Pricing varies enormously because severity varies enormously, a single-file infection is a different job than backdoors buried across the database, theme files, and server configuration, and a provider quoting a flat number without first checking how deep the infection actually goes is usually guessing rather than pricing the real job.
Realistic ranges from actual cleanup services: budget freelance or productized cleanup services run roughly $95 to $300 for a straightforward single-infection case, often completed same-day. Mid-tier professional services, covering a fuller root-cause investigation (how did they actually get in, not just what got removed, and closing that specific door so it doesn’t happen again next month) run $300 to $1,800. Full agency-level incident response, especially on e-commerce sites with backdoors spread across multiple systems, runs $1,800 to $6,500 or more. Blacklist removal, if the site was flagged by Google Safe Browsing or a similar service, adds its own delay on top, sometimes several days, regardless of how fast the technical cleanup itself goes, since that part depends on an external review process outside anyone’s direct control.
None of that includes the cost that’s genuinely hardest to put a number on: lost revenue while the site’s down, a Google Safe Browsing blacklist tanking your traffic even after cleanup, and customers who saw a security warning and simply never came back. A cheap cleanup that misses even one backdoor is also a false economy, the site gets reinfected within days and the whole cost repeats, which is the real argument for a thorough investigation over the fastest, cheapest option available.
Worth being blunt about the comparison: a year of SecondGate Pro (£39.99) or Wordfence Premium ($99-149) costs meaningfully less than even the cheapest realistic hack cleanup, before counting any of the downstream damage. Prevention isn’t just safer, it’s the objectively cheaper line item too.
Is a free security plugin actually good enough
Depends entirely on what you’re protecting and what “good enough” needs to mean for your specific site. For a low-stakes personal or hobby site, a free tier covering 2FA, brute-force lockout, and basic firewall rules genuinely closes off the overwhelming majority of real-world automated attack patterns, most compromises exploit basic, well-known weaknesses a free tier already addresses, not some sophisticated targeted exploit that would get through anyway. For anything handling real transactions, customer data, or business-critical uptime, the gap between free and paid, faster signature updates, deeper detection, file integrity monitoring, becomes a real, material risk difference, worth paying to close.
A useful test: imagine the specific worst-case scenario for your site, not a vague “getting hacked” but the actual concrete thing (customer payment details exposed, a client’s booking data leaked, days of downtime during your busiest season) and ask honestly whether the free tier’s gaps are things that specific scenario would exploit. For a lot of sites the honest answer is no, the free tier genuinely covers the realistic threat model. For sites where the answer is yes, that’s the actual signal to pay, not a general anxiety about security in the abstract.
Do you need to pay for an SSL certificate
No, not anymore, in the overwhelming majority of cases. Most hosts now include free, auto-renewing certificates through Let’s Encrypt as standard. Paid certificates still exist (Extended Validation certificates, for instance) but they buy marginal trust-signal benefits, not meaningfully stronger encryption, for a typical site there’s rarely a good reason to pay for something that’s included free.
Is managed hosting worth it for security alone
It depends on exactly what “managed” includes, which varies enormously between hosts and isn’t standardized by the term itself, “managed” is marketing language as much as a technical description. Ask specifically: is there a named server-level firewall (Imunify360, BitNinja, ModSecurity, by name, not just “we have security”)? Is edge protection already included? Are backups automatic, off-site, and actually restorable, not just theoretically available, have you or the host actually tested a restore? If the answer to all three is genuinely yes, the premium over basic shared hosting (often $20-50/month more) is buying real, substantial protection.
If “managed” just means a nicer dashboard and automatic core updates, that premium is buying convenience more than security specifically, and you’d be better served putting that same money toward a proper plugin tier and a real backup service instead. Worth actually asking your host these three questions directly rather than assuming “managed” implies a particular level of protection, the term covers a genuinely wide range of what’s actually included behind it.
What a professional security audit costs
A one-time professional audit, someone actually reviewing your configuration, permissions, and setup rather than ongoing ad-hoc alerts, typically runs somewhere between the cost of a single cleanup service and a full managed retainer, often in the low hundreds of dollars for a small business site, scaling up meaningfully for larger or more complex sites with more plugins, more user roles, and more integrations to review. This is a genuinely useful middle ground for a site that doesn’t need full managed monitoring but would benefit from an outside pair of eyes checking the actual setup once, rather than assuming default settings are sufficient, defaults are built to be reasonable for the average site, not necessarily optimal for yours specifically.
A good audit should produce something concrete you keep afterward, a written list of what was checked and what, if anything, needs fixing, not just a verbal “looks fine.” That written record is also genuinely useful evidence if compliance or insurance ever asks what due diligence was actually done.
The cheapest way to actually secure a WordPress site
In order of cost-effectiveness: update everything immediately and consistently (free, highest impact of anything on this list, most successful attacks target a known, already-patched vulnerability specifically because so many sites lag behind on updating), use a password manager with unique strong passwords (free), enable a free plugin’s 2FA and brute-force protection (free), turn on Cloudflare’s free tier (free), and take real, tested, off-site backups (often free through a host’s built-in tool, or a low-cost backup plugin, but the testing part is the step people skip, an untested backup is a hope, not a plan). That combination, entirely free or near-free, closes off the overwhelming majority of how WordPress sites actually get compromised.
Everything beyond that is genuine improvement, not the difference between safe and unsafe, and it’s worth being honest with yourself about which category you’re actually in before spending anything. A site that’s skipped the free basics above isn’t meaningfully safer for having also bought a premium plugin tier, the free steps are load-bearing, and no amount of paid tooling substitutes for them being done properly first.
How much downtime from a hack actually costs a business
Genuinely hard to pin to one number since it depends entirely on what the site does, but worth estimating roughly for your own situation: take your typical daily revenue or lead volume, multiply by however many days a real cleanup and blacklist-removal cycle realistically takes (often 3-7 days for a moderate infection, longer if Google’s review process is involved, since that specific step depends on an external timeline you don’t control), then add a meaningfully discounted estimate for customers who saw a security warning and didn’t come back at all, browser “deceptive site” warnings are genuinely effective at driving visitors away, and not all of them return once the warning’s gone.
For an e-commerce site specifically, it’s worth running this calculation with real numbers rather than leaving it abstract: average daily order value, times realistic downtime days, plus an estimate for the customers who won’t return. Seeing that actual figure written down is usually the moment “I should probably upgrade my security plugin” stops feeling like an abstract recommendation and starts feeling like an obvious decision. For almost any business doing real transaction volume, that number comfortably exceeds a year of even the more expensive security plugin tiers, which is the actual argument for paying for better protection rather than an abstract “better safe than sorry.”
Hidden costs that don’t show up on any pricing page
A few real costs worth planning for that rarely appear in the comparisons above:
Your own time. Configuring a security plugin properly, actually reading what it flags rather than ignoring notifications, and staying on top of updates all take real hours, even when the tooling itself is free. A “free” solution nobody actually maintains isn’t cheaper than a paid one that gets properly looked after, it’s just a cost that’s easy to miss because it’s your own time rather than a line item.
SEO recovery after a hack, separate from the cleanup itself. A period flagged by Google Safe Browsing, or a site that was quietly injecting spam links for search manipulation before discovery, can take real time to recover rankings for even after the technical infection is fully removed, sometimes weeks to months depending on how long the compromise went unnoticed.
Multi-site or agency overhead. If you’re managing several WordPress sites (a common situation for agencies and freelancers), per-site licensing adds up fast, and it’s worth specifically checking whether a plugin offers multi-site or agency pricing rather than paying full individual-site rates across every property, since that difference compounds quickly at scale.
What a sensible budget looks like by site size
A personal or hobby site: £0. The free baseline above genuinely covers this stakes level completely.
A small business site, one or two admins, taking leads or bookings: £0-50/year. A plugin’s paid tier if the free version has a real gap that matters (SecondGate Pro at £39.99/year, for instance), plus free Cloudflare.
A small e-commerce store: £100-300/year. A fuller plugin tier, Cloudflare Pro once volume justifies it, and genuinely tested off-site backups, ideally a paid backup service rather than relying solely on a host’s default.
A larger business or anything with real compliance obligations: budget for a managed service or retainer, genuinely open-ended depending on scale, but the framing that matters is comparing it against the realistic cost of a serious incident, not against doing nothing.
The actual takeaway
Free security isn’t a compromise, it’s a genuinely strong starting point covering most of what actually matters for most sites. Paid tiers, whichever plugin or service you’re looking at, buy specific, nameable things: faster updates, deeper detection, professional response capacity, not a vague general upgrade. The clearest way to decide what’s worth paying for is comparing its cost directly against the realistic cost of the thing it prevents, and by that measure, even the more expensive end of prevention is consistently cheaper than cleanup.
SecondGate‘s free tier (passkeys, 2FA, brute-force lockout, country blocking) covers a genuinely solid baseline at no cost, with Pro (£39.99/year) adding the deeper detection layer for sites where that gap matters.
