Moving WordPress to EmDash: the costs

Your WordPress website is up and running, and invoices for hosting and plugins keep coming in. Then there is the time for updates. At some point the question comes up whether a move would be cheaper. In this article I compare the running server costs of WordPress with those of EmDash and show when the one-time migration pays for itself.

What EmDash is

Cloudflare® introduced EmDash in April 2026. The CMS is built on Astro and is released under the MIT license. Since version 1.0 in September 2026, the project has called the core stable and ready for production. Its own plugins haven’t yet reached version 1.0 and may change.

On Cloudflare, EmDash runs on Workers, the D1 database and R2 storage, as the guide to running it on Cloudflare describes. You don’t need your own server with PHP and MySQL for it. I described how EmDash differs from Storyblok in the comparison of Storyblok and EmDash.

What WordPress costs to run

WordPress itself is free; you pay for the server. A basic plan at ALL-INKL (in German) starts at €4.95 a month. STRATO (in German) charges a regular price of €5 to €15 a month for WordPress hosting on a twelve-month term. Both prices include VAT. Managed hosting costs more; Raidboxes lists €18 to €35 a month plus VAT for small websites.

Plugin licenses often come on top. Elementor Pro costs €60 a year for one website. Yoast SEO Premium costs €118.80 a year plus VAT. For the Basic plan of WPForms, the vendor lists a regular price of $99 a year plus VAT. Your invoices from the last twelve months show which of these items apply to you.

The third item is working time. WordPress, plugins, the theme and PHP need updates, and WordPress recommends backing up the database before every upgrade. You do this work yourself, or you pay someone to do it.

What EmDash with Astro costs

EmDash has no license fee. Running it on Cloudflare is billed according to the Workers price list. The free plan allows 100,000 requests a day. The paid plan costs at least $5 a month and includes 10 million requests a month. Taxes are added.

For a business website, I budget for the paid plan, because the free one can reach its limit on a day with many visitors. For the D1 database, 5 GB of storage is included, and R2 stores 10 GB of media at no extra charge. By my calculation, a website with a few hundred pages stays within these allowances. Extra costs can arise when a very large number of images is delivered in many sizes.

EmDash comes with SEO fields, redirects and a forms plugin built in. On the other hand, the choice of extensions is much smaller than with WordPress, as the project says in its own announcement.

When the one-time investment pays for itself

A move costs money once, and after that the running costs are often lower. For the migration, we quote you a fixed price once the proposal is ready. The calculation is simple.

An example within the price ranges above: managed hosting at €24 a month comes to €288 a year. Elementor Pro and Yoast SEO Premium add €178.80. In total, that is €466.80 a year or about €39 a month. Compare that with $5 a month for Workers Paid. In this example, you save just over €30 a month.

Divide the fixed price by your monthly savings. The result is the number of months after which the migration has paid for itself. After that, you keep the savings every month.

With a basic plan at €5 and no paid plugins, you save almost nothing on the server. Then the move doesn’t pay for itself through server costs. In that case the deciding factor is the working time for updates, backups and troubleshooting. If you pay a service provider for that today, that amount belongs in the calculation.

EmDash needs upkeep too. Updates arrive as a new release of the website, and media is backed up separately. On request we take on this work as part of operations.

What comes along in the move

EmDash has an import for WordPress. It imports posts, pages and custom content types. Categories and tags come along too, and so does the media. Menus, comments and the SEO fields from Yoast or Rank Math come over only with version 1.2.0 or later of the EmDash Exporter plugin.

The import doesn’t bring over themes or plugins. We rebuild the layout as templates in Astro. According to the documentation, pages from a page builder need a deliberate conversion or a new template. We set up redirects for changed addresses before the switch, so that visitors from search engines still land on the right page.

Because the import brings your content over, a simple move is sometimes much cheaper than a rebuild. This applies to websites with posts and pages that get by without an online store and with few plugins.

When I advise against the move

I wouldn’t move a WooCommerce store this way. The EmDash documentation treats store functionality as a separate project. If your website depends on many specialized plugins, WordPress can also remain the better choice.

If your website runs reliably for €5 a month and someone is committed to maintaining it, I see no reason to move. The migration is worthwhile when the running costs or the upkeep bother you today.

If you’d like to know what moving your website costs, send us its address and your running costs. You’ll find the process on the migration to Cloudflare page.