WordPress – The Best Free CMS → Overview
WordPress is one of the easiest CMS to understand for beginners. In terms of complexity, it is almost the same as a website builder, only it works on a separate hosting and has a much larger range of plugins and templates than any other system, including the same CMS. Suitable for creating any type of sites: business cards, forums, landing pages, shops, news portals, bulletin boards and, of course, high-quality blogs. The main part of the functionality is assigned to the capabilities of plugins, the library of which is located directly in the control panel. There are several thousand of them, various, paid and free. The same applies to templates - there are tens of thousands of them, 5 thousand are available for installation from the control panel. For every taste and color, format and task.
See also: How to create a site on WordPress - step by step instructions.
The most important thing when working with this engine is to choose the right set of plugins, without depriving the site of functionality and without installing unnecessary ones that will reduce the overall performance of the site without additional optimization or obviously powerful hosting. Let's say WooCommerce is usually taken for stores, for those who want to work with a WYSIWYG editor while compiling pages, Elementor will be a good choice. They are basically free. For SEO, Yoast or something similar is useful. Well, and so on: choose a theme, look at the rating, reviews and install the ones you need. For WP, hosting is important, it must be stable and powerful enough, especially for large sites. You can choose any, but the engine developers officially recommend using Bluehost - a high-quality, fast, reliable option. Using his example, we will calculate the cost of a site on WP.
Pros:
Ease of development, a huge amount of reference materials: after watching a couple of videos, you can build an average site in 1-2 days without any preparation;
A rich assortment of plugins and templates, which makes WP a universal engine;
You can change template design settings without interfering with the code;
Own hosting, full access to the code;
Good SEO potential of sites, especially after optimization by appropriate plugins;
Good level of project scalability;
All content is in the database, so even if the template or structure changes, it will not go anywhere;
The engine is free, open source, the whole world works for its prosperity - the ecosystem is wider than that of any other CMS.
Minuses:
WP does not have a centralized technical support, but there is an extensive community and tons of training materials in which you can solve any issue;
The source code is open not only for developers, but also for dirty tricks who come up with options for hacking sites on WP;
The engine is demanding on resources, for normal operation you need a good hosting, which usually costs a little more than a pass-through;
Modest basic functionality without plugins;
Sometimes engine updates conflict with installed plugins, which can lead to website crashes.
Bluehost rates optimized for WordPress:
Basic ($2.95/mo) - 50 GB SSD storage, 1 site with 1 domain (given as a gift with an SSL certificate) and unlimited subdomains, custom templates, CDN technology, automatic installation and updating of WP, 24/7 technical support.
Plus ($5.45/mo) - unlimited sites, disk storage, free 1 domain and SSL certificate, CDN, custom templates, 30-day free Office 365 subscription, 24/7 technical support.
Choice Plus ($5.45/mo) - same as above, plus free automatic backups for 1 year and hiding private information about the owner, which can be obtained from the domain name.