WordPress Review 2021
Today, many individuals have their own website — it might be a personal blog, an online store, a portfolio, or video tutorials, to name a few. Even if website development has become so popular, not everyone has the programming skills needed to design one from the ground up. Website builders are useful in this circumstance because they allow you to simply choose a theme from a library of templates and modify your website by dragging and dropping components. Theses builders will also handle web hosting and domain names for you, freeing you from having to concern yourself with technicalities.
In this article, we’ll introduce you to WordPress.com, a popular website builder and content management system. Let’s look at the software’s features, advantages and disadvantages, pricing options, and additional product information.
What’s on This Page
WordPress
4.25/5
- Templates built specifically for blog posts
- Taxes from online stores are automatically calculated
- Free integration with Mailchimp
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a well-known content management system that lets you create, host, and publish your website. If you want to have a website up and running in minutes, WordPress is the way to go! Its website construction service includes e-commerce capabilities, social connections, and mobile presentation.
Why use WordPress?
WordPress is the most popular and widely used blogging platform. WordPress.com is a great alternative if you want to create your own website. This is especially true for bloggers, since WordPress.com has a lot of pre-installed features that make it easy to publish content on the internet. Analytics access, archiving, comments, social bookmarking, search feature, and RSS feed are just a few examples of the functionality available to you through WordPress.
There are many simple options for you to choose from. You can simply pick whether you want to include text, photos, or videos in a new paragraph, for example. To enhance the visual appeal of your blog, consider including an attention-grabbing cover image and subtitle.
Finally, there are extra tools that you may use to enhance the functionality of your website. Social media sharing buttons, contact forms, and maps are a couple of examples.
WordPress and Cons
Pros
- Beautifully designed themes
- Free version available
- Sites are transferrable
- Many blogging options
- Useful video tutorials
Cons
- No drag-and-drop website editor
- Not very beginner-friendly
- Templates are slightly blogging-focused
- Lack of photo editing tools
How to use WordPress?
You’ll need an account with WordPress.com to utilize it. After you’ve created your account, pick a domain name, and established up a hosting account. Then, choose a WordPress theme and modify the site’s theme and design using the editor. There will be a real-time mock-up next to the editor so don’t worry about making any mistakes.
You can create more pages through your Dashboard and use plugins and widgets to personalize your site.
Our Rating Process
To help you with your decision-making process, we’ve identified four important criteria when choosing a website builder. We will go through how WordPress.com does in each of them and score each criterion out of five points so you can see where WordPress.com excels.
Web design – 3.5/5
While WordPress.com gives you access to hundreds of beautiful templates, most of these templates are designed for blogging. WordPress.com doesn’t offer any drag and drop or WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor like many of its competitors do. Instead, you can add or remove content blocks for text, images, business hours, carousels, contact forms, and other site elements.
When you’re choosing a theme, you get to preview how it looks on a tablet, phone, and desktop. Rest assured that your site will be mobile responsive with WordPress.com.
Performance – 3/5
Blogging – 5/5
If we haven’t made that clear already, WordPress.com is the king of blog builders. The fact that WordPress started as a blogging platform definitely helps. You can easily find your way to the big “Write” button on the top of your dashboard and start formatting your piece. Changing fonts and adding media is extremely easy to do.
You have the option to save your piece as a draft and come back to it later, preview it on different devices, or publish it right away. To help readers find your blog, WordPress also lets you assign categories and tags to posts, as well as share your post to social media platforms.
E-commerce – 5/5
If you’re planning to open an online store, know that WordPress has the tools to support your e-commerce needs. This is applicable for users located in the US or Canada, with WordPress’ Business Plan or higher.
To set up a store, all you need to do is add the products you’re selling and set up shipping and payment methods. You can accept payments via PayPal, Stripe, check, or cash-on-delivery. Worried about taxes? Don’t be — WordPress automatically calculates your taxes for you. It is also possible to add coupons and product reviews to your store.
Marketing and analytics tools – 4/5
You need a way to know how your content is working. With WordPress, you get robust site statistics. Not only will you see generous data on views, visitors, likes, and comments, but you’ll also see top search keywords and a map of where your visitors are located geographically. You can also use the Insights tab to see the most popular days and times, as well as top posts and products.
WordPress is also a great SEO tool. You can tweak things like meta descriptions and titles, and even submit your site to search engines. When your website is popular enough, consider taking advantage of the free integration with Mailchimp. Your readers can sign up for your newsletter directly from your website with this integration!
Package Comparison
Product Details
Personal
Premium
Business
Price per month
$4
$8
$25
Free domain for one year
Yes
Yes
Yes
Payment capture
Yes
Yes
Yes
Google analytics integration
No
Yes
Yes
Advanced SEO tools
No
No
Yes
Premium online store design
No
No
Yes
Technical / Product Details
Product Details
Specs
Supported languages
Most common languages
Compatibility
Unix-based systems, Windows, Linux
Restricted countries
None. You can block countries for your site separately though.
Customer support
Unlimited email support. Paid plan users also have access to 24/7 live chat support.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to transfer a site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org?
When you transfer a site from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, you are also transferring to a standalone installation on your own hosting account. To do so, go to your WordPress blog and click Export to export all your content. Then, download all your data and extract the archive to your computer. Once that’s done, import the information from the archive into your standalone WordPress installation and that is the end of your site transfer. Note: You can transfer file attachments too!
What can you create with a WordPress.com site?
You can create any type of website! Start a blog to write about your passions, build a portfolio to showcase your professional skills, or create an online store to sell products. Anyhow, you can add images into posts and pages, as well as embed audio, video, and documents to your site.
What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?
When you dig deep enough into the topic, there are many differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. However, the main difference is that WordPress.com takes care of web hosting for you, whereas you host your own site and have more flexibility with WordPress.org.
With WordPress.com, you can set up a website for free and in minutes, but your site will not have a custom domain name, and you won’t be able to remove WordPress.com’s ads and branding from your site. Monetization is also not available.
With WordPress.org, however, you can pick a web host and launch a completely functional website that suits your needs at $35 for the first year and then $50 every year after that. WordPress.com charges upwards of $100 per year.