What is WordPress?
WordPress is the world’s most popular site builder. It powers more than 33% of all websites on the internet, that’s millions of websites all over the world.
It’s important that you don’t confuse the Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS - WordPress content management system (CMS) with the WordPress.com blog hosting service.
Our WordPress review is for the popular self-hosted WordPress software that everyone loves and use (not the WordPress.com: Create a Free Website or Blog hosting service). We recommend Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS - WordPress because it gives you full access to all WordPress features out of the box. For more details, see our side by side comparison of WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.
From now onwards, when we say WordPress, we are talking about the free Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS - WordPress software.
WordPress started as a simple blogging platform back in 2003. Since then it has evolved to become a content management system and an application development framework. In simple words, you can easily build any type of website using WordPress. To see how WordPress changed over the years, please see our article on the evolution of WordPress user interface.
WordPress is an open source software which means it is free for everyone and anyone can download and install it. Now you may be thinking, why is WordPress free? What’s the catch?
It is free as an in freedom. You can use it for any purpose, and no one can suspend your website due to censorship or a terms of service violation. You also have the freedom to customize WordPress to your needs without any restriction.
But like all websites, you will need to register a domain name and web hosting.
Based on your needs, you may have to purchase premium WordPress themes or extensions that will have additional costs. For a complete cost breakdown, see our article on the real cost of making a WordPress site.
That being said, now let’s take a look at what you can do with WordPress and how does it actually work.
2. What Kind of Websites You Can Make With WordPress?
WordPress is extremely flexible which is the main reason why it is a popular choice to build a website. You can use WordPress to build almost any kind of website imaginable!
You can use it to start a blog, make a small business website, create an online store, build a membership site, sell online courses, run a marketplace, and more.
No matter what kind of website you want to build, chances are that there is probably an existing WordPress plugin (extension) for that. In case, you don’t find a plugin, you can easily hire from thousands of developer to make it for you.
Here’s a list of the most popular types of websites people are making with WordPress.
3. How Does WordPress Really Work?
Unlike other website builders, WordPress keeps design, content, and functionality separated from each other. This allows for data portability.
In other words, you can add content regardless of the design you are using, modify the design without changing your content, and add new features without affecting the other areas.
Let’s dig deeper into that.
1. Adding Content in WordPress
WordPress stores content in a database and media files like images in a separate folder. Mainly you will be adding content to your website using the post editor.
Post editor is a simple WYSIWYG editor with some basic formatting features. It comes in two forms.
First, you have the Visual editor, which is a WYSIWYG style editor, and then you have the Text editor which is a plain text editor where you can add formatting by writing HTML in your content.
By default, WordPress content editor does not have any fancy drag and drop features to customize your content design as you write it. However you can use one of the popular WordPress drag and drop page builders should you need it.
2. Managing Design and Appearance in WordPress
WordPress uses a powerful templating engine to manage the appearance of a website. This templating engine allows developers to create a set of templates called ‘Themes‘. There are thousands of pre-made WordPress themes available in the market.
Each WordPress theme comes with a stylesheet and basic template files to display different sections of a typical WordPress website.
Depending on which theme you are using, it will come with its own settings which you can use to customize the appearance of your website. Some themes may have a lot more theme customization options than others.
There are thousands of free and paid WordPress themes available that you can use to build a website. These themes allow you to use your own colors, layout combinations, and logos.
You can also hire someone to create a custom WordPress theme from scratch, but it would cost significantly higher than using a free or premium WordPress theme.
Alternatively, you can use a drag and drop page builder like BeaverBuilder or Divi to create a custom theme without hiring a developer.
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