WordPress Review, Pricing & Features

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a website building solution that supports over 75 million websites. It’s an open sourced software that can support websites, blogs, and ecommerce businesses. It offers features like a robust website builder, a WYSIWYG blog editor, ecommerce tools, an extensive library of plugins, SEO tools, and an analytics dashboard. All of these features let you create a powerful website without any coding.

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Table of Contents

• What is WordPress?
• WordPress Review Summary
• WordPress Pricing & Cost
• WordPress Features
  • Website Builder
  • Blogging
  • Ecommerce
  • Plugins
  • Marketing & Driving Traffic
  • Analytics
  • Mobile
  • Legal & Security
• WordPress Customer Support
• WordPress vs. Competitors
• Is WordPress Right For You?

WordPress Review Summary

WordPress was founded in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg. WordPress believes that great software should work with minimum set up, giving you the ability to fully focus on sharing your story, product, or services freely. Today, WordPress has over a thousand employees and is based in San Francisco, California.

WordPress is a website building solution that helps people build a high-quality website without the need for a developer. It includes a robust website builder, a WYSIWYG blog editor, ecommerce tools, an extensive library of plugins, SEO tools, and an analytics dashboard. Overall, WordPress itself is an effective platform, but not as user-friendly – especially for beginner website builders and ecommerce store owners.

WordPress is overall an affordable solution – its most popular plan is $14 per month. However, when it comes to specialized plans WordPress is more expensive. For example, WordPress’s only ecommerce plan costs $59 per month, whereas other solutions like Wix and Squarespace offer ecommerce plans that cost $20 to $30.

Several customers we’ve spoken to recommend taking advantage of WordPress’s plugins to expand WordPress’s functionality. Kendall Horn, Online Marketing Director at Fleet Lending Solutions, uses Divi, a drag & drop content website editor plugin. This is because Divi is better for website page design customizations, offers a large template library, and offers features not available in WordPress such as A/B testing. Other popular plugins include Yoast SEO and WooCommerce for ecommerce.

Overall, WordPress is one of the least user-friendly solutions that we tested. We recommend WordPress for intermediate website builders who want more control over their website design. Also, if you do decide to use WordPress, we recommend spending time researching different website building plugins rather than just using WordPress’s own functionality.

WordPress Pricing & Cost

WordPress’s pricing ranges from $7 to $59 per month. It offers both website and ecommerce plans. You can also save ~40% if you pay for the annual subscription upfront.

You can currently use WordPress for free. However, if you want features like your own custom domain, the ability to receive payments, and customer support channels, you would need to upgrade to a paid plan. WordPress does not offer a free trial of any of its paid plans.

WordPress Features

In our review, we will walk through the features offered by WordPress. We’ll discuss WordPress’s usability, customer support, and describe the major benefits and drawbacks of the software. We’ll also show real images of the software to give you an idea of what it’s like to use the tool.

Website Builder

WordPress offers a builder that lets you customize your website and its pages. Overall, WordPress’s website builder is robust and advanced, but not as user-friendly as other solutions like Wix. However, WordPress is better if you want more control over your website’s design.

Many WordPress users also install themes and visual page builders to enhance the customizability of their website, such as Divi and Elementor. In this review though, we will only be discussing WordPress’s own page builder.

WordPress does offer a drag & drop builder, but it is not that flexible. However, depending on your plan, you can add over 50 kinds of site elements from images, buttons, and social links, to a search bar, navigation panel, and polls.

WordPress also lets you include custom HTML and markdown language. For HTML, it is very easy to use, but best for simple coding changes. For example, the HTML feature is very useful for changing the color and font of certain text.

Unlike other solutions, WordPress also lets you view your website and its sections in a “list” format. This tool helps you view the structure of your website and access certain sections without having to scroll all the way down.

Creating & Managing a Blog

Blogs are a collection of articles that are written to demonstrate expertise or share an opinion on specific topics. There are several reasons why blogging is beneficial for your site. This includes:

WordPress’s platform comes with three features that make it easier to build a comprehensive blog. This includes a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor, commenting, and the ability to organize your posts by date.

WYSIWYG Blog Editor

A WYSIWYG editor lets you edit your content as it will appear when published. The biggest advantage of this editor is that you don’t need any programming knowledge to design your blog. Overall, WordPress’s blog editor is intuitive to use and effective. However, it lacks the SEO optimizations that other website building tools, like Wix, offer.

WordPress’s blog editor lets you add the same multimedia elements that you can add to your website pages. WordPress also lets you create categories and tags for your blog posts. These help your readers search for specific and related content, and also indicate to search engines what your content is about.

Enabling Comments on Blog Pages

There are many benefits that come with enabling comments on your blog posts. These include:

This feature is basic in WordPress. Commenters can only like and reply to other comments. Admins can moderate comments, and enable threaded comments, but cannot order comments based on popularity, for example.

Displaying Your Most Recent Posts on Your Website

Displaying your recent posts on the front page of your website introduces new content to your readers as they browse through your website. This can help increase your blog traffic and overall page views.

WordPress offers a site element called “Recent Posts” that specifically displays your most recent blog posts. This feature also lets you change the color of the text, choose specific posts to feature, and choose how many are displayed per row and column.

Ecommerce

In addition to building a website, you can use WordPress to run your ecommerce business. WordPress offers key ecommerce features including inventory management, order management, payments, tax calculations, shipping rate calculations, and coupons.

Inventory Management

WordPress lets you add physical, and digital products to your online store and track your inventory. Overall, these features are comparable with other solutions, but not user-friendly.

WordPress lets you customize the name, description, and attributes of your products. You can also place your products in specific categories, and add tags to further differentiate them from one another.

WordPress also lets you track your products by stock amount. You can send yourself “low stock” email notifications if a product’s stock hits a certain inventory count.

Order Management

WordPress lets you manage your completed, pending payment, processing, on hold, and cancelled orders. Overall, this feature in WordPress is effective, and can be used to manage orders in high volumes.

As you can see above, WordPress displays the customer’s name, and order number, date, status, and total. You can also filter orders by month and customer, and search for specific orders.

Payments

Being able to accept a variety of payments typically increases your online business’ conversion rate and revenue. Below are the payment options that WordPress lets you accept from customers. It should be noted that certain payment options also come with processing fees.

Tax Calculations

WordPress lets you calculate taxes based on a customer’s shipping, billing, or shop’s address. You can also choose whether tax is included in your prices or not. An advantage of WordPress's tax calculation feature is that you can perform automatic tax calculations for the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Overall, this feature in WordPress is effective, but not the easiest to navigate.

Shipping Rates

In WordPress, you have to either add free shipping, or manually calculate shipping rates. The platform does not automatically calculate shipping rates, which many alternative platforms do. The feature is not the most intuitive in terms of use, and would intimidate beginner ecommerce store owners.

WordPress lets you choose whether you want to calculate shipping rates based on a customer’s inputted shipping address or their billing address. WordPress also lets you print shipping labels through WooCommerce and add custom package sizes.

Coupons

You can create coupons in WordPress, which can be applied towards your products. These help promote your products, and increase your sales.

WordPress lets you choose whether a coupon is a percentage discount, a fixed cart discount, or a fixed product discount. You can also customize:

Plugins

WordPress offers plugins that you can install to extend the functionality and design of your website. Plugins save you web development time and money. However, if you install too many plugins, it could slow down your website.

WordPress offers over 54,000 free plugins that you can choose from, the most of any website building software. As you can see below, WordPress offers plugins in every major category.

Marketing & Driving Traffic to Your Website

After you’ve created your website, you want to make sure that your content actually reaches an audience. WordPress offers marketing features that help build relationships readers and will drive traffic to your website. This includes SEO optimizations, social media marketing, testimonials, and contact forms.

Online Search & SEO Optimizations

SEO is one of the most important factors to consider when creating your website. The search channel is the largest traffic driver for most websites. WordPress lets you customize and preview how your website and its pages appear in search results.

WordPress lets you customize the page titles for different sections of your website, including your front page, posts, and other pages. After your changes have been made, you can preview how your SEO optimizations appear on Google, Facebook, and Twitter. WordPress also lets you edit your front page’s meta description.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is one of the best methods to connect with your audience and increase brand awareness. While this feature is simple in WordPress, it does let you add over 40 types of social media widgets anywhere on your website pages. This includes widgets for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Etsy.

Testimonials

Testimonials are a form of social proof that build credibility and trust for your website and its content. They humanize your brand and provide an objective point of view. Overall, the WordPress testimonial feature is very customizable, but has a lower ease of use. This is because in order to insert testimonials on your front page, you have to use a theme that includes testimonials, or insert a shortcode.

Testimonials in WordPress are very customizable. You can use the same type of multimedia in testimonials as the rest of your website. You can also edit a testimonial’s URL slug.

Contact Forms

Contact forms are one of the easiest and most effective ways to win new subscribers and capture detailed customer information. Forms in WordPress are very easy to integrate into your webpages. They are also very customizable, but not user-friendly to edit.

WordPress lets you add over 30 types of content to your contact form – including tables, code, phone numbers, and websites. All form notifications are sent via email.

Analytics

Once you’ve created and marketed your website, it’s important to understand how your website is performing. Your website’s data can help you make informed decisions on website improvements that increase engagement. WordPress offers dashboards for your website’s traffic, sales, and ads.

Traffic Dashboard

WordPress offers a dashboard that you can use to evaluate the traffic of your website. We found this dashboard to be more informative than those found in other website building tools.

As you can see above, WordPress lets you graphically see how many views, visitors, likes, and comments your pages receive. You can also view your referrers, those who link to your website, how many times your videos have been played, most popular search terms, and which pages get the most clicks.

Sales Dashboard

If you open an ecommerce store with WordPress, you can view your sales information in a dashboard. This feature in WordPress is more advanced than those found in other tools like Wix.

As you can see above, you can graphically view your sales, orders, and average order value, along with their percent change from previous days. You can also view trends for the number of products that have been purchased, coupons used, refunds given, shipping charged, and tax charged.

Ads Dashboard

Unlike other solutions, WordPress offers a dashboard that displays key information about your ads. This feature is not as informative as the other dashboards offered by WordPress, but is still sufficient.

As you can see above, you can graphically view how many ads you have served, cost per thousand impressions, and your total revenue. You can also view your total earnings and how much has and has not been paid out yet.

Mobile

WordPress offers an Android and IOS mobile application that you can use to manage and edit your website. Overall, WordPress’s mobile app operates as a simplified version of its website. Unfortunately, you cannot manage your ecommerce store from the mobile app.

WordPress lets you create pages and posts through its mobile app. However, the mobile app limits the types of site elements you can include in your pages and posts. Therefore, we recommend only writing and editing simple pages and posts with the mobile app. You can also manage your website’s traffic statistics, media used in pages and posts, and comments.

Legal & Security

Having proper website and data security is essential in protecting your site from DDoS attacks, which make a network resource unavailable by disrupting the services of a host connected to the Internet. It also protects against malware and prevents perpetrators from gaining access to your and your visitors’ confidential information.

Therefore, it’s important that your website building software complies with certain legal and security standards.

WordPress Customer Support

Overall, we found WordPress’s customer support to be average. This is mainly because WordPress prioritizes customer support for paying customers only.

However, WordPress’s help articles are very comprehensive and provide a lot of detailed information. WordPress also enhances the readability of its articles by bolding certain terms, including videos and gifs, and highlighting specific parts of an image with boxes and arrows.

WordPress vs. Competitors

Compared to the other solutions, WordPress is less user-friendly. We recommend installing WordPress's plugins to increase the level of advancement and effectiveness of the solution.

Is WordPress Right For You?

Overall, WordPress is one of the least user-friendly solutions that we tested. We recommend WordPress for intermediate website builders who want more control over their website design. Also, if you do decide to use WordPress, we recommend spending time researching different website building plugins rather than just using WordPress’s own functionality.

The top WordPress competitors are:

If you are interested in trying WordPress, try their free plan or a 30-day free trial of any of their paid plans.