Posted by WordPress.org which powers around 35% of all websites on the internet is one of the most favorite CMS platforms. It’s important to not confuse WordPress.org with WordPress.com. While WordPress.com is a blog hosting platform, WordPress.org is a free open source CMS which was originally designed for blogging, but now it is used by all sorts of websites or online stores.
If you are not sure about the difference between the two, check out the detailed comparison of WordPress.org and WordPress.com below.
Note: We normally mean WordPress.org when talking about WordPress on WPBeginner and we specify WordPress.com where appropriate.
Pros
- WordPress offers users the flexibility and freedom to build any kind of websites, such as online stores, membership sites, auction sites, and more.
- It does not require any coding knowledge or technical skill. The WordPress block editor helps users be able to create great-looking pages on their sites easily.
- You have complete freedom to earn money online from your site in any way you want.
- There are thousands of WordPress themes and plugins, both paid and free, which lets you add all sorts of useful extras to your sites, such as contact forms, photo galleries, and much more.
- WordPress is really well designed for SEO and easy to create SEO-friendly URLs, categories, and tags for your posts. You can also choose from tons of SEO plugins to help you do more.
- There is a huge and supportive community around WordPress since it’s an open-source CMS. You can join groups such as the WPBeginner Engage Facebook group that helps with any problems you run into.
- WordPress offers a lot of extensibility which makes it an ideal CMS platform for both beginners and developers.
- WordPress lets you download all your content in XML format, which makes it easy to move to a different system in the future if you want.
Cons
- You will need to set up your hosting and domain name, and you will be responsible for managing things such as security and backups.
- Since WordPress offers so many options and so much flexibility, you may sometimes feel a little daunting when getting started. This is the reason why many beginners use drag and drop page builder plugins for WordPress.
Pricing
WordPress doesn’t cost anything but you’ll need a domain name (around $9 – $15 each year) and a hosting account with a web host that can run WordPress (normally from $7.99 each month).