WordPress review
Our Verdict
WordPress.com offers an easy way to get a WordPress website, and the operation is excellent, but it has a steeper learning curve than other website builders.
For
- Massive list of potential themes
- Good performance
- Tiptop blogging features
Confronting
- Expensive for ecommerce
- Complex editor
Tom's Guide Verdict
WordPress.com offers an easy fashion to become a WordPress website, and the performance is excellent, but information technology has a steeper learning bend than other website builders.
Pros
- +
Massive list of potential themes
- +
Good performance
- +
Tiptop blogging features
Cons
- -
Expensive for ecommerce
- -
Complex editor
WordPress is the world's most popular content management system (CMS), powering effectually 42% of all websites online today. One of the simplest ways to start a WordPress website of your own is to go WordPress hosting at WordPress.com, and information technology rivals the best website builders while also able to be hosted by the best web hosting services.
You tin use WordPress.com to go a website, and rarely have to worry virtually things similar setting upwards software, organisation upgrades, security patches, and ongoing maintenance. In our WordPress review, we evaluate WordPress.com against the available today, so that you can determine whether it'south the best place to build your website.
WordPress review: Snapshot
WordPress.com's offerings become from generous entry-level plans right upwardly to powerful, expensive ecommerce plans. Information technology has fast response times and 24/7 live chat support, making information technology a solid option for hosting a WordPress website. At that place'southward a massive list of themes and plugins to choose from, so it's possible to make just about any kind of website with WordPress.com.
This high level of control unfortunately ways WordPress.com is relatively cumbersome to apply, and there's fiddling paw-property for those who haven't used WordPress before. Wix is a better choice for tech beginners, as it has the near intuitive interface, and Squarespace has better designs out of the box.
Score: 3.v/5
Read the full review below.
| WordPress.com | Wix | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Score | 3.v/5 | four.5/5 | 4/5 |
| Pros | Thousands of templates - Fast site speeds - Easily bandy themes | Intuitive website editor - Big list of template designs - Elevation customer back up | Slick templates - Responsive designs - Great blogging tools |
| Cons | Expensive ecommerce plans - Steeper learning bend | Sites often require tweaking for mobile - Express navigation carte options | No complimentary programme - Can't switch templates |
| Verdict | Best pick for blog-focused websites | Best website architect if you have a detail pattern in mind | Best option for epitome-heavy websites |
| View deals | Visit site | Visit site | Visit site |
WordPress: Primal features
There'southward an important departure betwixt WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.org is where you'll find the open up-source CMS software WordPress that tin be installed on your choice of web hosting.
WordPress.com has more than in common with website builders like Wix and Squarespace. It doesn't offer every WordPress CMS feature, but makes it piece of cake to quickly build a WordPress site. You don't have to worry about installation and ongoing maintenance, as that's all taken care of.
You get started on WordPress.com by going through a short site setup sorcerer, where you lot choose a site name, homepage blueprint, and navigation menu. The second step introduces you to the WordPress visual editor.
There's non much hand-holding here—yous're dropped into the relatively circuitous editor interface, and expected to work it out on your own. The default text of your new website compels you lot to visit learn.wordpress.com, but that site feels more like an overview of WordPress.com every bit a whole rather than a step-by-step guide to using the visual editor.
The WordPress.com editor uses a "block system". Everything from headings and paragraphs to image galleries and videos are blocks you can drag onto the page and edit. To rearrange blocks, y'all only drag them around the folio, though y'all're limited in exactly where you can place blocks.
Once you get a handle on it, the WordPress.com visual editor is powerful and has a long listing of cool blocks you can add together to pages. Merely it has a bigger learning curve than competitor website builders like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace.
WordPress.com: Key features and highlights
You can quickly change the expect of your website by choosing an alternative theme. Free accounts have 114 themes from which to choose, or you can buy one of 83 premium themes for $49 to $125. Premium and Business users get all premium themes unlocked as part of their plans.
If you want to utilize any other theme, you'll demand either the Business or Ecommerce plans. With either of these, yous have the pick to upload and install your own theme. There are tens of thousands of ready-made WordPress CMS themes out there, many more are available for any other website editor.
Y'all can farther customize your theme by choosing your own colors and backgrounds, carte du jour options, and fonts. It's possible to change the CSS of your site, but you'll demand a Premium plan to do so.
Selling through WordPress.com is available to dissimilar degrees depending on your payment plan. With a Premium plan, y'all can add together a Pay with PayPal button to accept credit card payments through the payment processor. Even if yous just have a Free or Personal plan, y'all tin add a PayPal push manually by creating a custom HTML block, and pasting in some code from PayPal.
Business plans get the selection of installing the WooCommerce platform. It'south included automatically on the Ecommerce plan. WooCommerce is an extremely powerful and versatile ecommerce platform that fits correct in on a WordPress website. You can embed products on your pages and include product ratings and reviews.
Products can accept categories, tags, and attributes to make them easier for customers to find. Y'all can set unlimited variations of products (like size and color). You accept the pick of selling physical or digital appurtenances, selling affiliate products, and setting up complex shipping options. Diverse additional plugins permit yous to build most whatsoever kind of online store.
This power comes with a downside, and that'southward complexity. Information technology takes fourth dimension and effort to get a WooCommerce shop working exactly how yous desire information technology to. And considering WordPress wasn't initially designed to be an ecommerce platform, in that location are quirks to how it all works together that accept some getting used to. You'll need to spend more time getting to grips with it than you would with, say, Squarespace or Wix.
WordPress: What's new in 2022?
Updates to the WordPress CMS are rapidly reflected on WordPress.com. This twelvemonth, the changes to the system are focused on the cake editor and the mobile apps.
In April 2021, the block editor gained a folio layout picker and improved spacing options. Page layouts are pre-designed templates for building pages. This is all part of WordPress'due south ongoing attempts to become a meliorate website builder that works for a wider range of applications.
WordPress mobile apps have been given new features, too. You can at present cheque the stats of your site'due south pages from the app, and gear up push notifications to remind you lot to weblog on specific days.
Pricing
You can become a WordPress.com site for free, but site customization is limited and ads volition be served on your site. WordPress.com has four paid plans. You tin pay monthly or annually. Annual plans include a discount of upward to 43% over monthly plans.
You get a gratuitous domain for the first twelvemonth through WordPress.com if you choose an almanac plan. The renewal pricing for following years is relatively high (a .com domain costs $xviii a year when bought through WordPress.com, for instance). Nonetheless, you have the choice to use your own domain name, purchased at another domain name registrar, on your WordPress.com site.
| Free | Personal | Premium | Business | Ecommerce | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per month | Free | $7 | $14 | $33 | $5 |
| Cost per year | Free | $48 | $96 | $300 | $540 |
| No ads | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Unlimited premium themes | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Install plugins | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sell unlimited products | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✖ | ✔ |
Testing WordPress
In order to comprehensively compare WordPress to the competition, we analyzed a series of its features and tools to see how it performed. This included its uptime and response time, as these factors are key when taking website building into account.
How reliable is WordPress.com?
A website that'due south regularly unavailable to your visitors makes for a poor customer experience. Every bit office of our testing, nosotros performed two weeks of uptime testing using uptime.com on a site we gear up up on WordPress.com. For the two weeks, the website was checked for availability every 5 minutes.
WordPress performed well in this test, recording 100% uptime. A longer test would be required to highlight systemic bug with website availability, but WordPress certainly gets a passing form in this circular.
How responsive is WordPress.com?
The speed a website loads at has a significant effect on customer satisfaction, and search engines often place better-performing websites higher in their rankings. Many factors affect how fast a website feels, and its initial response time is important.
Nosotros performed two weeks of response-time testing on our WordPress.com website from servers in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas to go an idea of the average response speed for US visitors.
On boilerplate, our WordPress.com site responded within 123ms. Nearly of the time, speeds were consistent. Only once during the testing did the site response time peak to 2000ms. It took effectually two hours for typical speeds to return in this instance.
Overall, these response speeds are excellent, and so visitors to a WordPress.com website should experience the service is snappy. In comparison, competitor Wix had a like average response fourth dimension at 120ms, whereas Squarespace came in at a sluggish 423ms.
Alternatives to WordPress
Website builders, compared
WordPress.com has a lot of competition. Even if you're dead set on WordPress every bit your CMS, there are many other website builders out there, equally well equally the best WordPress hosting providers. If you're browsing for a website architect, arguably better choices exist in Wix and Squarespace.
WordPress.com is at centre a blogging platform with website builder features, whereas Wix and Squarespace were created with website building in mind. While WordPress is a more versatile solution thanks to its huge plugin library, the focused nature of Wix and Squarespace make them easier to utilise, faster to pick upward, and less decumbent to fault.
Wix has a better website editor that allows you to drag and driblet elements anywhere on the page. Squarespace's editor is closer to WordPress's block-based editing, but is still significantly more than streamlined and easier to use.
| WordPress.com | Wix | Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design banana | No | Yes | Yes |
| Responsive themes | Yes | No | Aye |
| Support | 24/7 alive chat on paid plans just* | 24/vii ticket back up and phone callbacks | Email; live chat Mon–Friday |
| Basic programme | $four a month | $14 a month | $12 a month |
* Premium plans get alive conversation support Mon to Friday. Business organisation and Ecommerce customers also go weekend live chat back up.
WordPress: The verdict
Building a site at WordPress.com gives you the peace of mind that your managed WordPress hosting is being handled past the company most responsible for the CMS's success. The free plan, while limited and supported by ads, is a swell manner to become a personal site off the ground, and with plans starting at $4 a month, information technology's an excellent pick for smaller, blog-based sites.
We were impressed at the operation of our site hosted at WordPress. Information technology suggests that if you build your site there, it'll load speedily for your visitors and rarely feel sluggish. WordPress's blogging features are also exceptional, while ecommerce features offered by WooCommerce are the best in the business organisation, with only dedicated ecommerce platforms like Shopify worthy competitors. They come at quite a steep price, though.
Equally a website architect, WordPress.com is quite clunky to apply, and getting things done has more steps than with dedicated website builders like Squarespace and Weebly. While it's definitely possible to make a gorgeous WordPress website that breaks the mold, it oftentimes feels like you lot're fighting against WordPress's deep-seated roots as a blogging platform.
WordPress.com'due south practise-it-all versatility is a double-edged sword, as many things feel needlessly complex. The extensive ecommerce features, for example, are great for huge stores, simply make for a steep learning curve for SMEs.
WordPress.com tin can therefore be recommended for a wide range site types, particularly if yous value versatility, with the caveat that it has a steeper learning bend than nearly of the other website builders on the market today.
Further reading on WordPress, website builders, and web hosting
Discover which website builders for WordPress nosotros found to be the top plugins, and establish and learn from the most common WordPress mistakes. If yous go with WordPress, brand sure to follow our guide on how to build a website with WordPress.
Read our feature highlighting 10 tips to follow when y'all build a website, and cheque out our ownership guides outlining the best ecommerce website builders and the all-time small business website builders.
Nosotros've besides got a range of buying guides covering various hosting types, including the all-time VPS hosting, the best cloud hosting, the best WordPress hosting, the all-time Windows hosting, the best Linux web hosting, and the best unlimited hosting.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/wordpress-review
Posted by: levinehiscam.blogspot.com
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