WordPress review
7.9The most capable and least convenient option. Right when you want to own everything and have the time to run it.
| Ease of use | 5.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Design | 7.8 | |
| Flexibility | 9.8 | |
| Value | 9.2 | |
| Support | 6.4 |
What's good
- Powers a large share of the web, so every problem has been solved by someone already
- Tens of thousands of themes and plugins
- You own the site outright and can move it to any host
What's not
- You are responsible for hosting, updates and security
- The gap between a working site and a good one is large
WordPress is the software behind a large share of the web, and it comes in two forms that people constantly confuse. WordPress.org is the free, open-source software you install on hosting you pay for yourself. WordPress.com is a hosted service run by Automattic that does the installing, updating and securing for you, on a monthly or yearly plan.
Both give you the most capable content platform in this comparison: tens of thousands of themes and plugins, any structure you can imagine, and a site you own outright. What they ask in return is attention. WordPress rewards people who are willing to look after it, and punishes people who are not.
WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
If you want WordPress without becoming a system administrator, WordPress.com is the answer. It handles hosting, updates, security and backups, and on paid plans you can now install any of more than 60,000 plugins or upload your own, which removes the old reason to leave it. If you want full control over the server, want to choose your own host, or are running something unusual, self-hosted WordPress.org is still the more flexible route.
Self-hosting is not automatically cheaper. The software is free, but you pay for hosting, and a decent managed WordPress host costs about what a WordPress.com plan does. The saving only holds if you are comfortable doing the maintenance yourself.
Which plan does what
Personal removes ads, connects a domain and allows plugins, which is enough for a blog or a simple site. Premium adds every premium theme, payment buttons through Stripe and PayPal, video uploads and fuller statistics. Business is the plan for anyone who wants developer access: SFTP and SSH, WP-CLI, deployments from GitHub, real-time backups with one-click restore, and priority support. Commerce adds WooCommerce's store features for selling at scale.
The cost of owning everything
WordPress's flexibility is also its maintenance burden. Plugins come from thousands of different developers, and each one is another thing to update, another possible conflict and another possible security hole. On WordPress.com much of that is managed for you; on self-hosted WordPress it is your job. Either way, a WordPress site that is left alone for a year is a site with problems.
Why people choose it anyway
Because nothing else scales as far. A WordPress site can be a one-page portfolio or a publication with a hundred thousand articles, and it can move between hosts without being rebuilt. Your content is exportable in a standard format, the ecosystem of developers is enormous, and whatever you want to do, someone has already written a plugin for it.
Pricing
From $0/mo · WordPress pricing
Who it's for
Content-heavy sites, anyone who wants to own the stack outright, and projects where a specific plugin solves a problem no hosted builder addresses. If the site will live for years and change often, the ownership pays for itself.
Who it isn't for
Someone who wants to be online this afternoon and never think about the site again. Every hosted builder here beats it on time-to-live and on not having to care about updates.
Limits worth knowing
- You are responsible for hosting, updates, backups and security
- Plugin conflicts are a real and recurring maintenance cost
- Performance depends entirely on your hosting and plugin choices
- The gap between a working site and a good one is large
Questions people ask
WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
WordPress.org is the free software you install on your own hosting. WordPress.com is a hosted service built on it that handles updates, security and backups for you, and every paid plan now allows plugins. Choose .com to avoid maintenance, .org for full control of the server.
Is WordPress really free?
The software is. A working site is not: budget for hosting or a WordPress.com plan, likely a premium theme, some plugins and your own time. Count the maintenance too, and the total is often comparable to a hosted builder.
How much maintenance does WordPress need?
On self-hosted WordPress, core, theme and plugin updates at least monthly, plus backups and security monitoring. WordPress.com or managed hosting absorbs most of that for roughly the price of a hosted builder.
Is WordPress secure?
The core is actively maintained. Most breaches come from outdated plugins, weak passwords and abandoned themes. Kept current on decent hosting it is fine; neglected, it is the most attacked platform on the web because it is the largest.
The bottom line
Choose WordPress when you want to own your site outright and expect it to grow into something other builders cannot contain. For most people, WordPress.com's Personal or Premium plan is the sensible way in; developers and content-heavy businesses should look at Business or self-hosting.
If you want something that looks after itself, a hosted builder such as Squarespace or Wix will cost you less time.
Sources
Read next
Compare
All reviews
Some links on PlatformZoo are affiliate links, so we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. That never affects a score: every tool is scored on the same rubric before any link is added.