I didn’t know a whole lot about WordPress until I researched for this product review. I have been using WordPress for four months now through Wealthy Affiliate, so I wanted to know WHY the Wealthy Affiliate owners decided to use WordPress as their platform foundation. Is WordPress good for building a website? I was about to find out, and I wanted to share my findings with you all. So, here is my WordPress review. Let me know what you think!
WordPress Review
Name: WordPress
Website: https://wordpress.org/
Price: Free!
Owners: The WordPress trademark and the WordPress.org domain is owned by the WordPress foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, whose sole purpose is to ensure that WordPress is freely available, maintained, and developed.
Overall Rank: 95 out of 100
WordPress Product Overview
WordPress is an open-source content management system licensed under GPL, which means that anyone can use or modify the WordPress software for free. This content management system allows you to create and post your articles in a pleasing format without you having to know technically how to do so in a computer language, such as HTML or JavaScript.
WordPress provides hundreds of free “themes” that help you organize your website and make it visually appealing. A theme is basically a template you plug your content into, and it displays what you have typed in a particular form that is easy for the reader to interact with and read easily.
WordPress allows you to use “plug-ins” to perform tasks in your website. This includes what type of text editor you want to use, add-ons like header-footer organization, SEO management, social media sharing, and many many more aspects of managing a website .
The Good & the Bad
The Good:
- WordPress is completely free.
- WordPress gives you complete ownership of your content.
- WordPress gives you access to thousands of extensions, add-ons, and plug-ins to enhance your website, your posts, and your data.
- WordPress allows anyone to build a website regardless of your knowledge or ability with computer skills and programming expertise.
- WordPress provides endless customization, so you can make your website entirely unique to your style, your niche, and your audience’s needs.
- Due to its popularity, almost all popular third-party tools already have integrations available for WordPress. So your email, SEO tools, CRM software, and payment gateways will all work with WordPress.
The Bad:
- You are in charge of your security, making backups, and installing updates, unless you use WordPress within a hosting platform that provides you with these.
- WordPress does not have a built in “drag and drop” feature that we are all used to with our Microsoft or Apple computers. This is one of the things that aggravates me the most. It takes some time to get used to that issue for those of us that have been mousing clicking all our lives. However, there are plugins available that allow you to “drag and drop”.
- Even though you don’t really need to learn a computer language, it is best to have a little knowledge of HTML or other language. There are some aspects of WordPress, such as adding affiliate marketing banners, where knowing a little HTML is helpful.
Who is WordPress For?
Basically, WordPress is for anyone who wants to build a website. Here is a short list of who WordPress is an ideal fit for:
- Businesses that want a website that is inexpensive to create and maintain.
- Bloggers
- People who want a personal website to log their everyday lives, or their religious journey, or perhaps their challenges with person tragedies through sickness or a death in the family.
- People who what to document their hobbies such as keeping a travel diary, or displaying photos or videos of their adventures.
- Anyone that wants to do affiliate marketing or create an online side business to augment their income.
WordPress Tools, Training, and Support
Just go to the WordPress Support page at https://wordpress.org/support/ and see the support and training available. Here are the support headings available:
- Getting started
- Installing WordPress
- Basic Usage
- Basic Administration
- Customizing
- Maintenance
- Advanced Topics
- Security
- Troubleshooting
Plus you will find support forums where people like yourself discuss issues and how to deal with them. I clicked on the support forums, and found a dozen or so topics that were specific to issues you might run into while creating a website.
Another source for support is Google. There are literally millions of WordPress users, so you will find thousands of sources discussing WordPress issues. If you are having a problem or need training on a WordPress subject, chances are, there are several articles that will pop up on Google where you can find help.
There are literally thousands of themes and plugins available for free that you can add to your site through WordPress, which allow you to customize your site and make it unique. Even though there are millions of WordPress users, the chance that you will choose the same combination of these tools as another user is highly improbable.
WordPress Pricing
You should make sure you are WordPress.org, rather than WordPress.com. They are two very different platforms. People often confuse the two of them, and quite frankly, I didn’t know there were a .com and a .org until I researched this article. WordPress.org is completely free. WordPress.com, however, is a paid platform.
Since WordPress is licensed as it is, anyone can take the platform and use it within their own hosting tool. That’s what the people at WordPress.com did, They added a few templates and themes for bloggers, and business, added a few security and organizing plug-ins, and put it on the internet as a paid web hosting platform, which is perfectly fine. It takes bloggers like us to explain the difference so newbies can choose the platform that’s right for themselves.
Here is a price comparison for those who are interested:
Interesting statistics
- WordPress took 112 person-years to build. In other words, if you have one person working 40 hours per week, for 52 weeks per year, you would have 2080 person-hours per year. Multiply that by 112, and you get 232,960 hours. Since the WordPress concept began in 2001 and it became operational in 2003, that gives us 2 years of development, which means they had roughly 50 people working to create WordPress.
- It took approximately $6 million to fund the WordPress.org project.
- WordPress has been downloaded over 19 million times.
- 27% of the Internet is powered by WordPress.
- 75 Million websites use WordPress as their hosting platform.
- WordPress is available in over 50 languages and hosts content in over 120 languages.
- WordPress Gets 175 Million Page Views Per Month
- In 2016, WordPress Published 117,939,148,357 Words
More fun WordPress stats are available at https://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/wordpress/stats/
My Final Opinion of WordPress
37.5 million websites are hosted by WordPress. Of course people have multiple websites, so it’s hard to tell how many actual users there are. But my point is, how can the millions of people who have produced these websites be wrong? That statistic alone tells you that WordPress is a comprehensive, and well-supported place to have your website produced. I myself found it little complicated for a beginner, but having used it for four months on a daily basis, have learned the basics of using it. I imagine that years of use will make me into an expert!
I like WordPress. It allows me to customize and organize my articles and reach my intended audience in a way that is easily accessible and unique, yet in a format that the reader can navigate and understand.
The Best Way to Use WordPress
Wealthy Affiliate is a web hosting platform that uses WordPress. They take the best parts of WordPress and have added a bunch of great features that make it the absolute best place to create maintain your websites. Added in, are the SiteRubix tools that help you track your content, the SEO search tool Jaaxy, thousands of free down-loadable images to enhance your website’s visual appeal, World Class training, and perhaps THE BEST community forum to help you every step of the way, from beginning to expert users. Check out my Wealthy Affiliate review here.
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WordPress at a Glance…
Name: WordPressWebsite: https://wordpress.org
Price: Free!
Owners: The WordPress trademark and the WordPress.org domain is owned by the WordPress foundation, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, whose sole purpose is to ensure that WordPress is freely available, maintained, and developed.
Overall Rank: 95 out of 100
VERDICT:
Please enter your questions and comments below, and thank you so much for reading!
Reference sites:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/who-owns-wordpress-and-how-does-wordpress-make-money/
Hello Rhonda, this article is very helpful and informative. WordPress is truly one of the most popular website builders. I am using it for years and I primarily like it because it has so many helpful plugins I can use to improve my website in general. Thank you for sharing such great info about this builder, people will definitely find it helpful.
Hi Daniel, thank you so much for reading and commenting. Ya I didn’t know how huge it was until I researched for this article. I agree, the plugins make your website into whatever you want it to be. Whatever task you can think of on a website, there’s a plugin for it. Just think, every time you get on a website, and see the pop ups, the email sign up, and widgets, and all the bells and whistles, that’s WordPress plugins at work! Thanks again for your comments! Rhonda
I didn’t realize there was a way to build websites for free! I thought you had to purchase a domain. Glad to know there are resources like this out there for people who aren’t great with technology or wanting to build websites with ease! I wonder how are they able to let people use it for free when it cost so much to fund it? Your website states it was 6 million to fund? Thanks for the info!
Hi Kara, I’m glad you asked about why WordPress,org is free. Here is what I came up with:
“WordPress is an open source community project where tens of thousands of talented people have made contributions to make it into a great software that it is today.
There is a core team of developers that lead the project development, but anyone can contribute patches, fix bugs, make features, suggest features, etc.
Furthermore, project leaders change from one version to another. If you get deeply involved in the community, then you can become a core contributor to WordPress as well.”
This is according to https://www.wpbeginner.com, where I got a lot of my information. Because so many people are involved, and because of it’s collective licensing and open sourcing, it’s a free platform. Gotta love the internet!
Thanks for your question, and thanks for reading and commenting. Rhonda