What is WordPress?

Let's Learn 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 WordPress.org 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 hosting service). We recommend WordPress.org 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 WordPress.org 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.