WordPress Review

Monday, June 5th

2023 Website Builder Reviews

WordPress

• Cost: From $0 to $45 per month (depending on hosting)

WordPress has been around for a long time. Since its first version was launched in 2003 to now, thirty five percent of websites (455 million websites!) are built using WordPress. WordPress sites make up 14.7% of the top 100 websites in the world.

Tens Of Thousands Of Themes And Plugins

WordPress began as a simple blogging tool that evolved into the most popular Content Management System (CMS). Through its tens of thousands of themes and plugins, it can be extended to become anything you want your website to be.

Open Source Software

WordPress has the added benefit of being built as "open source" software. That means that anyone can use it and change it to anything they want, free of charge, as long as they also license it as open source. Almost no one needs to modify "core" WordPress itself because open source flexibility is the key to its popularity. But, should the need arise to change it in any way, you can hire someone who can do it for you. There are tens of thousands of WordPress-specific designers and developers and about 5 million PHP developers. PHP is the language that WordPress runs on.

5 Plans To Choose From

Wordpress offers you five different plans to choose from when signing up for their service:

Your host Wordpress on your own server.

For $4/month, you receive:

• Free domain for 1 year
• Collect payments
• Unlimited email support

For $8/month, you receive everything in the Personal Plan, plus:

• Live chat support
• Ability to earn ad revenue
• Premium themes
• Ability to upload videos
• Google analytics integration

For $25/month, you receive everything in the Premium Plan, plus:

• Ability to install plugins, which will extend the functionality of your site
• Advanced SEO tools, to help your site rank well within Google
• Automated site backups
• SFTP file transfers and database access

For $45/month, you receive everything in the Business Plan, plus:

• Ability to accept paymentsin over 60 countries
• integrations with top shipping carriers
• Premium design options for online stores

Getting Started

After signing up for an account at WordPress and logging in, you choose your desired theme from the Design > Themes menu, and then create a page or post to act as your site's homepage. If given the choice between using the old text editor and using the new WordPress drag-and-drop Block Editor, we recommend the Block Editor. It is replacing the "Classic Editor" as the future of editing in WordPress. The Block Editor is intuitive, but if you get stuck there are lots of tutorials online and at WordPress on how to use the Block Editor.

More Of What You Need

When you upgrade from free to a business plan or higher, WordPress provides much more of what you need to run a successful website, including email and live chat support, removal of WordPress ads, custom domains, hosting, JetPack optimization tools, analytics, marketing integrations, payment collection, and making money through display advertising on your site. You can forward emails sent to your custom domain to G Suite, Outlook, or other email services as needed.

One-click Install

If you decide to self-host your website using the open source software, your host will likely have it already set up for you. If not, they will provide a one-click install option to add WordPress to your hosting account. Most hosting providers have a "managed WordPress" option so that you don't have to worry about special configuration, backups, restores, or other maintenance issues. You can also purchase WordPress maintenance plans from dozens of dedicated maintenance providers.

Total Freedom

Self-hosted WordPress has a slightly different user interface than the primary WordPress service, but the concepts are the same. You can choose a Block Editor-enabled theme, or a full-fledged page-builder or theme-builder theme for drag-and-drop page design and blog post content creation. Unlike with WordPress hosting, with self-hosted WordPress you have total freedom to add plugins to extend your site's capabilities, as well as various plugins to add more controls to the Block Editor.

Pay For Advanced Features

Many plugins and themes are free, so it's possible to run a whole WordPress site without paying anything beyond your basic hosting package. Other plugins and themes include advanced features which you can enable by paying for a license and inserting a license key in the plugin settings. It's totally up to you how you design, structure, and run your site.

Great Community Support

If you need to import or export content, WordPress has a simple and free plugin that will do this for you. Need to change your site appearance with a new theme? No problem, WordPress allows you to switch themes. Want to enable eCommerce on your WordPress site? That's covered as well, with numerous eCommerce plugins like the free WooCommerce plugin (and its numerous helper extensions), BigCommerce for WordPress, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, Ecwid, and more.

Engineered To Perform Well On Google

One of the best things about WordPress, because of its long history, is that it "grew up" around how search engines discover new sites and new or updated content. Everything about how WordPress pages and posts are structured is engineered to make your content as visible as possible to search engine "bots". If you do your part to write good content, WordPress does the rest for you. Other site builder services struggle to measure up to WordPress in this regard.

A Little Higher Learning Curve

Because of its flexibility, WordPress does require a little bit more user education than the typical quick-start site builder. But this is actually a benefit rather than a hindrance in that you're trading a modest time investment to save both money and even more time as you add new features and content to your site and as your site rises in the search engine results. Many basic to advanced tutorials are free online and there's a huge community of WordPress developers and enthusiasts to help you in case you get stuck.

Highest Rating

WordPress earned our highest rating because of its longevity, extensibility, search engine visibility, and popularity. We really like the freedom that comes with both WordPress options. There's nothing standing in the way of creating a top-notch, high-traffic site when using WordPress.