WordPress

WordPress is open-source software for building websites, blogs and online stores. It powers a very large share of all websites on the internet, from personal blogs and small business sites to major news publications and enterprise websites. It began in 2003 as blogging software and grew into a full content management system. Its success rests on openness and flexibility: the software is free, licensed under the GPL, and can be installed on almost any web host. A huge ecosystem of themes changes how sites look, and tens of thousands of plugins add features such as e-commerce through WooCommerce, search engine optimisation, forms, memberships, multilingual content, caching and security. Because so many developers, designers and agencies know WordPress, help is easy to find. The modern editor, often called Gutenberg, builds pages from blocks - paragraphs, images, galleries, columns, buttons and many more - and full site editing extends blocks to entire themes, including headers and footers, giving users more visual control without code. WordPress can also act as a headless CMS, serving content through its REST API to separate front ends. An important distinction is between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. WordPress.org hosts the free open-source software that you install on your own hosting, giving full control and responsibility. WordPress.com is a hosted commercial service from Automattic that runs WordPress for you, with free and paid plans. The project has seen public disputes in its community over governance and commercial use, which affected some hosting providers. The trade-offs of self-hosted WordPress are maintenance and security: sites need regular updates to core, themes and plugins, which are common targets for attackers, and performance depends on hosting and plugin choices. Plugin conflicts and bloat are frequent problems. Alternatives include Squarespace and Wix for hosted website building; Webflow for designers needing control and a CMS; Ghost for publishing and newsletters; Drupal for complex enterprise sites; Shopify for e-commerce; and headless CMSs such as Strapi, Sanity and Payload. Choose WordPress when you want flexibility, ownership and the largest ecosystem in website software.