In addition to the internal WordPress admin panel, a hosting admin panel (usually via a service such as CPanel) is provided by the hosting service, allowing you to manage the hosting and installation of WordPress itself. Here you have access to all of the WordPress website’s root folders and directories, images and related thumbnails, and website/server configuration settings. It’s more complex and usually requires a developer to make changes, customize, and configure.

With its extensive collection of plugins, WordPress can provides a wide array of extensible functionality to a website, e.g., caching, image optimization, SEO optimization, minifying CSS and JavaScript, and much more.

Finally, a vast collection of themes provide pre-templated website designs, layouts, and even page types to aid in getting started. While these themes can be customized with custom code, they’re typically built around “no-code” drag-and-drop buildability. WordPress offers loads of free themes, along with a large collection of paid themes and paid support plans.

There is often confusion surrounding the difference between the different WordPress offerings; namely between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. To better understand these differences, we need to understand how WordPress websites are hosted – which is typically done in one of three ways:

For self-hosted and 3rd party-hosted WordPress sites, one needs to download the WordPress Core files for free from wordpress.org. Usually, WordPress-dedicated hosting providers have a 1-click install for WordPress. Below, we’ll clarify the main differences between wordpress.org and wordpress.com.

WordPress.com offers convenience and simplicity by handling the hosting and technical aspects, making it suitable for beginners or those who prefer a hands-off approach. However, it comes with limitations on customization options and additional features, which may not meet the needs of advanced users. WordPress.org, on the other hand, requires users to manage their own hosting and domain, but it provides complete control over the website’s design, functionality, and monetization.

WordPress VIP for enterprises is an agile CMS providing tools for publishing, collaboration, and workflow management for teams and content creators, typically on a larger scale than standard WordPress hosting supports – and at a higher price point. This suite of tools and functions allows enterprises to work more effectively and efficiently while streamlining collaboration throughout their structure.

With WordPress VIP, enterprises can more easily optimize their content at scale, and study trends and opportunities with extensive analytics, all with robust security, to boost sales through eCommerce channels and better reach business objectives. Enterprises can reliably scale high-performance enterprise websites and manage them accordingly.

WordPress VIP for enterprises integrates with Salesforce and Google Apps for analytics supports importing media from Google Photos and other external sources, and offers headless delivery for enhanced performance and access to a vast collection of plugins, impacting SEO efforts and UI/UX. Enterprises can also leverage WordPress’ world-class teams of experts to help with integrating, troubleshooting, scaling, and more.

WordPress is a powerful tool with which businesses and individuals build websites and basic web platforms. WordPress offers many features to help developers and non-technical individuals create and manage their websites without coding or extensive technical know-how. In this section, we dive into key WordPress features, how they work, and how they impact real-world use cases.

WordPress has a feature-rich website builder that offers a range of customizable options, offering 60 unique styles for different types of content and functionalities. WordPress’s block editor lets designers and developers effortlessly customize pages without coding or styling skills. The WordPress platform supports many plugin builders such as Elementor and WP Bakery, enhancing its default drag-and-drop page builder and its customizable features.

With WordPress, managing pages is quick and non-technical, including the ability to build responsive websites and pages, test this responsiveness for different types of devices – and more – all within the editor itself. Scheduling content publishing and managing user access for teams of admin/creators is easy to manage and access, making WordPress as user-friendly and as non-technical as possible.

WordPress is a wildly popular platform for eCommerce websites, with over 20% of WordPress sites reportedly using WooCommerce. Business owners and organizations can monetize websites and sell products online quite easily through debit/credit card blocks, non-technical website builders, and online payment platform integration. WordPress supports this extended functionality through using 3rd party plugins, with many free and paid themes offering default eCommerce features.

Hundreds of eCommerce themes are available for a wide range of industries and product types. Many of these themes are paid and come with recommended plugins that have well-established and documented support, providing an easy and simplified way for companies and brands to get started cost-effectively and reduce the chance of technical errors.

WordPress is a great platform for SEO and is designed to guide search engine crawlers through posts, pages, and categories with minimal setup required. WordPress comes with many built-in SEO tools such as custom permalinks (more readable URLs), blog-rolling, and more – using the .htaccess file.

Hundreds of third-party plugins such as Yoast provide SEO tools and features such as easily adding titles and meta descriptions to posts, SEO analytics and best-practices, XML sitemaps, and much more. Plugins are used to enhance your website’s SEO efforts by providing functionality and features for caching, CSS and JS minification, image compression, lazy loading, CDNs, and more.

WordPress makes publishing, scheduling, and managing content straightforward, encouraging content marketing, which can be a direct driver of good search engine performance. WordPress seamlessly integrates with popular analytics tools like Google Analytics, Tags Manager, Search Console, and more, letting business owners monitor key website metrics, traffic data, speed and performance reports, search engine performance, and more.

WordPress provides intuitive media and user management, letting website owners easily upload, organize, and manage all of their image, video, and audio files from a single place. A built-in media library makes finding and using media files across multiple pages and posts intuitive and significantly faster – especially for large-scale content production and management.

Website owners can create and manage user accounts (particularly important for subscriber and login-restricted access for niche sites such as real estate portals and paywall content), set user roles and permissions, control who has access to different areas of the website (e.g., admin panel, theme settings, etc.). It’s ideal for collaborative efforts within teams and projects, managing user access to sensitive information and controls.

WordPress is popular because it’s straightforward, free to use (for wordpress.org and 3rd party hosting), versatile, and scalable through plugins, themes, and more. WordPress provides a user-friendly interface, built-in features, and thousands of themes and plugins, making it easy to create and customize websites without coding, getting them up and running with minimal time and resource cost.

As WordPress is open-source, it’s free to use and has a large community of users and developers around the world, along with extensive supporting documentation, paid support, and a wealth of useful guides and information online. In terms of usage, WordPress has increased by an average of 12% per year since 2011; powering over 65% of websites that use a CMS.

As a versatile and extensible CMS, WordPress is used to create a host of website types, from broad industries such as eCommerce websites and online stores, or niche websites such as forums and job boards. Here are some of the most common types of websites that WordPress is used to build and manage:

These are just a few examples of common types of WordPress websites. It’s an incredibly versatile and cost-effective solution for small to medium-scale enterprises and organizations to get accessible and performant websites up and running. Custom-made web platforms can cost a lot more and require hiring several full-time staff. The trade-off is that customizability is limited and there is only so far website owners can go without technical expertise.