WordPress — A Free Blog Site
Most people want to start their blog and look for a free website. WordPress is a gift for them. It is a free, self-run tool for creating and managing blogs, e-commerce, or personal sites.
Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg released WordPress on May 27, 2003. The primary reason for WordPress was personal blogs, which advanced to an e-commerce store, media galleries, forums, mailing lists, learning management systems, and membership sites. WordPress is a content management system for creating a website or generating web pages. WordPress is written in PHP and uses the MySQL database.
WordPress Site
The site that is created using the WordPress CMS is called the WordPress site. WordPress has a dual nature as it provides both front-end and back-end services. Users can create a beautiful front end using available themes and plugins. It can manage the back-end, scheduling, traffic, and all related stuff.
Why should one choose WordPress?
Free: WordPress software for developing a website is free of cost. You only need to pay for web hosting and domain. WordPress is under a GNU license; that is why anyone can contribute to it and make it better.
Features and flexibility: WordPress is very flexible. You can customize it accordingly. It can be extended using thousands of themes and Plugins. Not only plugins/themes, But WordPress sites can handle almost any media. It provides many features, including:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) Friendly
- Backup Management
- Speed
- Mobile Interface friendly
- WordPress Editor
- Custom navigation menus
Easy: Creating a post, adding pictures. and formatting text is very simple.
Security: WordPress keeps your website safe. If someone wants safety, it can protect the website by allowing you to have a strong password, limited privileges, and roles, or you can install a WordPress backup solution.
No code geek: It allows no-code development. Coding knowledge is not required for WordPress.
Varieties: Many types of websites can be built through WordPress. Some types of websites you can develop with WordPress are:
- Blog
- E-commerce and Business Website
- Portfolio
- Event/Wedding Website
- Forum / E-learning Website
WordPress Usage and Comparison Statistic:
WordPress has gained much popularity as CMS more than a blog; it is still growing. We can see the total live downloads on the WordPress download counter, and this figure keeps changing every second.
As mentioned above, WordPress was initially developed for blogging, but later it was advanced as a CMS. According to W3techs, the usage of WordPress as a blog site is decreased. The percentages are 70% for a content management system, blog, and CMS, collectively 20%, and 6% only for the blog.
As compared to other CMSs, WordPress is the most used CMS for websites. WordPress has secured its position first among others with 48% popularity.
Are WordPress.com and WordPress.org the same?
The significant difference is that WordPress.org allows you to host your website yourself while WordPress.com itself hosts the site. WordPress.com makes it easy to host but has fewer features than WordPress.org. The self-hosted sites have themes that can be customized, while the other one doesn’t. The Plugins are pre-installed with the plan in WordPress.com, while in WordPress.org, one needs to install it. The sites hosted on WordPress.com always have an extension of “WordPress.com,” but it’s the right choice when you want to focus on content rather than managing the site, as WordPress.com will do it for you. In WordPress.org, select a plan and domain name; all other things are up to you.
