WordPress.com Review – The Best Known Website Builder, but Is it Also the Best One?

There are website builders all over the internet. If you want to create a website or a blog site, this can lead to overwhelming confusion  as to which one will you choose. You will have to think about what it is that you want to achieve with your site, how capable you are of building websites, and how much you can spend. One option that you may want to choose is WordPress, one of the best known site builders around.

What you have to understand firstly, however, is that there is WordPress.org and WordPress.com. WordPress.org is a posting service that is completely free to use. WordPress.com is the hosting site. This does include a free posting option, but it is likely that you will want to pay for a premium theme or upgrade to a better account in order to really use all the features it has to offer.

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If you choose WordPress.com, you will have the opportunity to easily share your message with the world. Every feature you could possibly think about is included, from spell check to traffic tracking. It is the best known site of its kind, and for good reason.

What I Liked About WordPress

What I Didn’t Like About WordPress

WordPress Features

With all these features, it is quite clear to see why WordPress has such a huge competitive edge over other websites. You can own your own website if you want as well, although you do then have to pay for your own host. That said, you can choose your own, or you can follow the WordPress recommendations, which is great for those who may not have much experience with building websites.

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WordPress Templates

The number of templates that are available is so large, it seems unreal. There are currently around 220 free ones to choose from, and 180 premium ones, with new ones being added regularly. The themes look modern, sophisticated, and generally nice. Within each theme, the look and feel of the site, including its design, typeface, and color, has been preset. You can generally choose an overall color theme within each design, and you can also change the individual elements as you see fit. The paid for themes usually range between $45 and $100.

If you have one, uploading your own CSS theme is also possible. However, to do so, you will need to pay $30 a year.

You can generally change the headline colors as you want. It also gives you the opportunity to change your background image. The rest, however, is pretty much set.

App Market

The WordPress app market is fantastic. WordPress Apps, as it is known, is filled with widgets, tools, add-ons, and more. Because it is an open source platform, people can continuously develop new widgets and add-ons that you can choose to download. Some of these are free, while others need to be paid for. They cover a huge range of different issues and really allow you to fully customize your site. The only issue is that there are so many available that you run the risk of duplicating things, and some do seem to make the site run a bit slower as well.

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eCommerce

There are a lot of plugins available to enable you to use WordPress as an ecommerce site. That said, it was built mainly as a blogging site, so the add-ons usually are third party options, generally fully supported by WordPress itself. Through these, you can sell physical products, digital downloads, memberships, subscriptions, and anything else you could come up with. Essentially, you could be just minutes away from finally making that all important sale. To achieve this, a number of options are available to you:

WordPress Pricing

WordPress offers a number of different plans. These include:

  1. The free for life option, which gives you an unlimited number of blog posts and pages. You also get a custom address, with the WordPress.com domain. You can choose from hundreds of free themes and you will receive 3GB of space for your media and files. Furthermore, you can access the full community support. Essentially, you can sign up within a few minutes and start to publish your own content to your website.
  2. The Premium option costs $8.25 per month and is billed once per year. This gives you everything the free package offers, but adds your own domain, 13GB of space for your media and files, advanced design customization options, and live chat and email support. Furthermore, all ads are removed on this plan. This really allows you to go beyond the basic, supercharging your website. Yet, you continue to receive access to the easy to use interface, but you get a whole lot more features and the option to customize a whole lot more.
  3. The Business option costs $24.92 per month and is billed once per year. This gives you everything the Premium plan offers, but also adds more than 50 premium templates, unlimited space for your media and files, and full Google Analytics. This is designed for those who feel having a presence online goes beyond a fun hobby. The resulting website creates a high impact and really is the best WordPress has to offer.

WordPress Support

Customer support is quite good with WordPress. That said, a lot of people find the system so easy to use that they don’t ever need the support anyway. Furthermore, there are some really good resources available on the WordPress website and in other locations that give you a whole lot of information. The help section is excellent, giving you access to a huge knowledge base where you are almost guaranteed to find the answer to the problem you may have. Furthermore, the community forums are really vibrant and offer a place for people to ask questions and share knowledge. It is likely that any problem you may have has already been encountered by someone before, and that the resolution is out there. Finally, there are good FAQs and troubleshooting tips as well.

If you sign up for one of the paid packages, you can also receive email support. Unfortunately, there is no telephone support.

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The Final Verdict

WordPress is probably the best known website builder out there, and for good reason. They offer advanced features and functionalities, but in a way that is easy to understand even for absolute beginners. Whether you want to create a personal or professional website, you really can’t go wrong with WordPress. The only thing you will have to decide for yourself is whether you want to sign up for the free option, or whether you want to choose one of their two paid for options. Overall, however, this one is highly recommended.

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