RV Park Sites vs WordPress for an RV park website.

What WordPress is

Two things share the name. WordPress.org is free, open-source software you install on hosting you rent. WordPress.com is a hosted service from the same family, with plans from free to about $25 to $45 a month for business features. Most park sites that say "WordPress" mean the self-hosted kind, built by a local designer or an agency, on shared hosting from a company like Bluehost, SiteGround, or GoDaddy.

WordPress works with themes for the look and plugins for features. There are more than 60,000 plugins, including several campground booking plugins and the embed codes for every major reservation platform. Nothing about WordPress is a limit. Everything about it is a choice someone has to make and then keep making.

Where WordPress works for a park

• You have a web person. A family member, an employee, or a contractor who is comfortable in the WordPress dashboard and will log in monthly. This is the whole condition.
• You want total control. Any feature, any design, any host. Nothing is off the table, including moving the site anywhere.
• You write a lot. WordPress's blog and page tools are the best in the business for a park that publishes trail reports, events, or seasonal news.
• You already have one that works. A well-built WordPress site with someone maintaining it does not need to move.

Where WordPress falls short for a park

• The maintenance is real and it is monthly. WordPress core, the theme, and every plugin ship updates. Skip them and the site slows, breaks, or gets compromised. Outdated WordPress sites are the most common hacked small-business sites because there are so many and so few are updated.
• Hosting is a separate bill and a separate problem. Cheap shared hosting is slow, and slow on a phone at a rest area is what a camper experiences. Good managed hosting is $25 to $50 a month by itself.
• Backups are on you. A plugin, a hosting add-on, or nothing. Most parks have nothing until the day they need it.
• The build is a one-time invoice and then silence. Agencies charge $3,000 to $15,000 for a park site, hand it over, and the relationship ends. The site is current the day it launches. Many parks with a 2019 WordPress site still show 2019 rates because changing them means finding the person.
• Plugin bloat. The site that started with five plugins has twenty by year three, each adding weight and a security surface. Page speed decays.
• Booking plugins are a mixed bag. The campground booking plugins are small projects. Most parks are better served linking to a real reservation platform, which is what we do.

What the real cost looks like

Self-hosted WordPress, done properly, for a park: hosting $10 to $40 a month, a premium theme $60 once, a few paid plugins $50 to $200 a year, a maintenance plan from a contractor $50 to $150 a month, or your own time, and a build of $3,000 to $15,000 up front. A cheap version exists at $5 a month with a free theme and no maintenance, and that is the version that gets hacked.

Ours is $85 a month with no build fee. Hosting, security, backups, updates, speed, changes when you send them, the booking connection, and the search setup are included, and the site, domain, and content are yours. Twelve months minimum, then month to month.

What you get with us that WordPress cannot sell you

• Somebody whose job it is. The site does not depend on anyone at the park remembering to log in. You send a change; we make it.
• Built for your kind of park, not from a hotel or restaurant theme with the words swapped.
• Speed by design. No plugin stack, no theme framework. Pages built light and tested on cell data.
• Search done as part of the build, not an SEO plugin left at its defaults.
• Listings, reviews, and the park map in the Listings + Reviews band, which is work WordPress does not do at any price.
• Ownership without the burden. You own the site and can take it anywhere, the same as WordPress, minus the maintenance.

When to choose WordPress anyway

If you have a reliable web person and a site that already works, keep it, and let us handle listings and reviews if you want the map ranking without touching the site. If you are moving from WordPress to us, we rebuild from your content, keep every page address that has search history with redirects, and move the domain. WordPress exports cleanly, so nothing is lost.