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WordPress Review (2023)

A reliable website builder with thousands of themes and plugins
By Richard SutherlandBy Richard Sutherland -
Last Updated: May 19, 2023
109 reviews
very good
8.9
very good
8.9
logo-WORDPRESS.COM
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Price
From $7/month
Number of Templates
90
SEO Features
Yes

Our Verdict

Is WordPress Worth Signing Up For?

WordPress.com is great for quickly getting a blogging site off the ground, and you can extend your website with WordPress add-ons that cover just about everything you could imagine. But for sites where blogging isn’t the focus, you’ll need to spend a lot of time bending the system to your will. And even if you love the WordPress software, you can easily get WordPress hosting for cheaper elsewhere.

Price
From $7/month
Number of Templates
90
SEO Features
Yes

WordPress.com Pros & Cons

PROS

Great blogging features
Massive list of plugins
Free plan

CONS

Designs favor blog sites
A bit difficult to learn
Expensive for e-commerce

Top WordPress.com Reviews

Pa
Pandora
, IL
My site is now hosted in WordPress. I find the company good. My webmaster is well versed in running a WordPress site. I am still learning the fine points.
Gr
Greg
, WA
I just love how easy this makes website programming because it leaves me time to do other things. It is a great platform for anybody.
Jo
Jon
, VA
WordPress is the industry standard and helps streamline website building and makes it very easy.
See all WordPress.com reviews

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WordPress Video Review

Overview

WordPress.com is a website builder based on the popular WordPress.com content management system (available at WordPress.org). With WordPress.com, you can get a fully functioning WordPress.com website up and running in minutes by using its drag-and-drop editing tools. It’s best for websites centered around a blog because of its excellent blogging features.

How WordPress Works

If you already plan to use WordPress.com to power your website, WordPress.com makes for an easy way to go about it. Instead of worrying about getting a hosting plan and domain name and building a WordPress website from scratch, WordPress.com bundles this all into a monthly payment and includes a drag-and-drop editor for rapid website deployment.

WordPress.com Features and tools

Website hosting

All WordPress.com plans include website hosting as part of the monthly or annual payment. Free accounts start with 3GB of storage space, while the cheapest paid plan includes 6GB of storage space, and the most expensive plans include 200GB.

SSL certificate

All sites hosted at WordPress.com include an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt that ensures the privacy of all traffic sent to and from your site. Competitors like Web.com charge hefty fees for an SSL certificate.

The WordPress.com ecosystem

The WordPress.com content management system has long been the most dominant blogging platform used on the web. Because of this, tens of thousands of themes and plugins have been developed for WordPress.com, and almost all of them are available to use on a website hosted at WordPress.com.

Creating a website with WordPress.com

How to Create, Design, & Edit Your WordPress.com website

WordPress.com takes you through a short website-building wizard where you choose your site’s name and template. Then you’re taken to the drag-and-drop website visual editor.

Compared to most website editors we’ve reviewed, the WordPress.com visual editor feels somewhat old-school, often requiring more steps to perform an action than required. It uses a block system, where you can drag and drop elements onto each page and move them around on a virtual grid.

WordPress.com’s hundreds of built-in themes are responsive, so they'll work well on mobile devices. With an E-commerce plan you can install any WordPress.com CMS theme you find. As there are tens of thousands of these, you’re spoilt for choice. 

WordPress.com’s website editor isn’t immediately intuitive to use. If you haven’t used the WordPress system before, the onboarding wizard doesn’t help much. Instead, you’ll likely need to spend some time at learn.wordpress.com reading the tutorials on how everything works.

But once you get the hang of it, WordPress.com’s editor is actually very powerful and offers you more options than most other website builders on the market.

Adding Multimedia to Your WordPress.com website

You can upload your own images to WordPress.com via the browser wizard. Videos and audio files can be uploaded on all paid plans. Documents like PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and Word documents can be uploaded to the media library to be shared on your pages as well.

WordPress.com also offers a free photo library with over 40,000 copyright-free photos. You can connect your Google Photos account with WordPress.com and import photos from there. Overall, WordPress.com makes working with media easy.

Marketing Functionality with WordPress.com Websites

WordPress.com only has a few built-in marketing tools. You can advertise your brand on Facebook and Instagram (Business and Ecommerce plans only), connect social media accounts, and track user engagement with Google Analytics. This feels like the bare minimum.

Instead, WordPress.com directs you to third-party tools for marketing your website and building user engagement. Support documentation suggests the use of MailerLite for email marketing, for example.

SEO Functionality & Add-Ons with WordPress.com Websites

WordPress.com websites are very well optimized for search engines by default. URLs, site maps, and page code are all automatically created in a way that should help raise your site’s search engine rankings. Pages include all the basics to make your site search engine optimized. There are also many SEO plugins for WordPress.com, including the popular Yoast SEO.

WordPress.com’s plugin system is one of its biggest strengths. You’ll need a Business or Ecommerce plan to use them, but there are over 50,000 free and premium plugins for WordPress.com that can extend and even transform the functionality of your website.

Ecommerce 

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that enables users to create a fully functional and customizable Ecommerce store on WordPress. With its extensive range of features and flexibility, WooCommerce has become one of the most popular Ecommerce solutions on the market. 

Payment Processing

With WooCommerce, you can easily integrate various payment gateways to your online store. It supports all major payment options such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square, among others. This means that your customers can choose from a wide range of payment options that they are familiar with and trust.

WooCommerce also offers a seamless checkout process that is optimized for high conversion rates. The plugin ensures that the payment process is secure, so your customers can feel confident in their transactions. Additionally, you can offer different payment options to your customers such as one-time payments, subscription-based payments, and even pre-orders.

Scalability

As your Ecommerce store grows, you need to ensure that your website can handle the increased traffic and transactions. WooCommerce is built to scale with your business, allowing you to add an unlimited number of products, categories, and attributes.

With WooCommerce, you can also integrate with various plugins to enhance your Ecommerce store's functionality. This includes integrating with shipping carriers, inventory management tools, and accounting software.

Another advantage of WooCommerce is its flexibility. You can customize the appearance of your Ecommerce store using various themes and plugins. Whether you want to add new features, improve the user experience, or optimize your website for search engines, WooCommerce offers endless possibilities.

WordPress App

WordPress Customer Support

WordPress.com has a fantastic list of support articles, online tutorials, video content, and email courses to teach you every facet of the WordPress system.

Human support depends on your plan. Personal plans include unlimited email support, and Premium plans add basic live chat. If you have a Business plan, you’ll get 24/7 live chat, and Ecommerce plans include some one-on-one personalized help sessions.

WordPress Pricing

Pricing & Special Offers

You can get started with an ad-supported free WordPress.com website, but you won’t be able to customize your site much. There are four paid plans that are a little pricier than most of the competition. You can pay monthly or annually, and get up to a 43% discount for paying annually.

Plan type / Feature
Free
Personal
Premium
Business
Ecommerce 
Cost per month
Free
$7
$14
$33
$59
No ads
X
Video content
X
Install plugins
X
X
X
Accept payments in 60+ countries
X
X
X
X

WordPress Alternatives

How WordPress Compares to Other Website Builders

WordPress.com
Wix
Jimdo
Squarespace

Pricing
$7 to $59 per month
$14 to $49 per month
$9 to $40 per month
$16 to $54 per month
Hosting included?
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Number of templates
31,000+
950+
100+
60+
Blogging functionality
Advanced
Good
Limited
Advanced
E-commerce functionality
Advanced
Advanced
Good
Good
Email marketing functionality
Limited
Advanced
Limited
Good
Responsive design
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Analytics & Reporting
Basic
Limited
Good
Good

WordPress.com vs Wix

Wix offers a much more intuitive editor than WordPress.com. It’s also more flexible, allowing you to drag and drop elements anywhere you like on the page. Wix has a strong add-on library, too, and nearly 1,000 themes, but it still can’t compete with WordPress.com in terms of how far you can take your website with third-party add-ons.

WordPress.com vs Jimdo

Jimdo is extremely easy to use, but it’s also very limited. WordPress.com sits at the other end of the market, offering the most flexibility and complexity. If you’re not particularly technical and only need to create a small, simple website, Jimdo may be a better option.

WordPress.com vs Squarespace

Squarespace offers a more streamlined set of features than WordPress.com. In particular, there are far fewer add-ons and themes from which to choose, limiting your options somewhat. But the Squarespace editor is much easier to use and the workflow is more intuitive.

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Bottom Line

WordPress.com is a good place to create a WordPress website, such as a site with a focus on blogging. E-commerce is also handled well if you’re willing to pay for it, thanks to the powerful WooCommerce plugin.

Competitors like Wix and Squarespace have more user-friendly website-building tools and are overall easier to get started with, particularly if your site is not blog-focused. But the thousands of templates, massive plugin library, responsive designs, and great E-commerce tools make WordPress.com a good alternative option.

Frequently Asked Questions
What are the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?+-

WordPress.org is where you can download the WordPress content management software (CMS) used by over 42% of all websites today. The WordPress CMS is free and open-source, and you can install it on your own web hosting. WordPress.com is a website-building tool from the original creators of the WordPress CMS. WordPress.com is based on WordPress, so it will be familiar to the many users of WordPress, and it adds a drag-and-drop editor for your pages. Your website will be hosted on WordPress.com’s servers.

Is Wordpress.com free?+-

WordPress.com has a free plan, but it’s quite limited. You only get 3GB of storage space, and you can only choose from a small set of free themes. You don’t get a domain name, technical support, or the ability to take payments, and ads will be displayed on all your website’s pages. You can use the free plan indefinitely before upgrading to one of the four paid plans.

Is WordPress.com good for a small business?+-

WordPress.com can be good for a small business. For corporate websites not looking to sell products online, the Personal and Premium plans work fine. Most of WordPress.com’s best features are found in the Business and eCommerce tiers, though. This is where you can leverage the power of plugins, themes, and WooCommerce. We’d suggest WordPress.com to small businesses over other website builders mainly for the extra functionality you get from WordPress plugins. No other website builder has such a rich collection of add-ons. Otherwise, it’s just simpler to make a small business website with competitors like Wix or Squarespace that offer more intuitive editors.

Is WordPress good to use for Ecommerce?+-

Today, WordPress is recognized as a solid ecommerce service. It provides many of the features that contribute to ecommerce success, including a reliable payment processing system, a number of SEO tools, and safe and secure hosting options.

What are the pros and cons of WordPress?+-

WordPress is accessible, familiar, and relatively simple to use. However, its features and capabilities may seem limited to larger businesses or those with more advanced technological demands. Ultimately it's a solid platform but its limitations are most apparent when it comes to enterprise operations.

Richard Sutherland writes for Top10.com. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Heriot-Watt University, Scotland, and has worked in the tech sector for over 20 years. Highly skilled in website development, SEO, and marketing, Richard has worked with and developed software for huge brands like Samsung, ASDA, and Prudential Insurance. He has written for an array of popular tech websites, covering topics that include web hosting, consumer and business technology, and SaaS platforms.

WordPress.com customer reviews

Based on 109 reviews

Ease of use

Brand satisfaction

Value for money

Service quality

Top Reviews

Ease of use

Brand satisfaction

Value for money

Service quality

a year ago

My site is now hosted in WordPress. I find the company good. My webmaster is well versed in running a WordPress site. I am still learning the fine points.

a year ago

I just love how easy this makes website programming because it leaves me time to do other things. It is a great platform for anybody.

a year ago

WordPress is the industry standard and helps streamline website building and makes it very easy.

a year ago

I have used Wordpress for years and love this free platform. It is always being updated and has a plugin for almost everything.

a year ago

I have been using Wordpress for a long time. I am used to the ins and outs of Wordpress and It's easy to use.

a year ago

It was easy to use and you can save, progress and come back if need be. Also the free version has a lot of features and you can easily upgrade to the paid.

a year ago

Everything about WordPress is official. I love using their platform for my online business I have all the neccesary tools to be successful.

a year ago

It is less the platform itself as much as it is the plugins that the platform allows. WooCommerce is a fantastic e commerce plugin that plays well the strength of WordPress to sell in an online business.

a year ago

They are brilliant and open-source have so many options that are free and/or cheap. It's the best out there.

a year ago

Wordpress is very secure and trusted. It handles my day to day business needs and I can set my schedule with this software. It is very good and I enjoy it and will continue to use it in the future.

a year ago

Woocommerce on WordPress is an amazing app with tons of additional support. There are endless amounts of tutorials online. The price is very convenient as well.

a year ago

I enjoy using Wordpress. It is typically what I recommend to my clients, but at the same time I experience issues when adding plugins to a Wordpress site.

1 years ago

Wordpress is one of those staple sites. It's very easy to use and accessible to anyone.

1 years ago

This is an easy platform to use. It is extremely intuitive and straightforward, and you can easily test your work before using it live.

1 years ago

The simplicity of Wordpress is the best feature! There are many plans and options to fit any website need.

1 years ago

It is easy to use and gives me absolute control on my site. Also, it allows me to customize the design of my site according to my preference and needs. Above all, the quality of the service rendered is unquestionably good and is a great value for money.

1 years ago

It was easy to use. I was able to create my website quickly to my satisfaction. The help offered enabled me to create the site without too much hassle.

1 years ago

It has been very easy to use. I like the way it looks online. Very user friendly.

1 years ago

I love Wordpress. I recommend it to all my clients, it is very easy to install, set up and maintain. This allows me and my client to keep their website up to date with the latest information on the company.

1 years ago

It is very easy to use and create my own website. I have the cheapest one and it still has a enough options to do what I need to do.

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