Beautiful designs, powerful features, and the freedom to build anything you want. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time..
—Wordpress, WordPress.org
WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, American developer Matt Mullenweg and English developer Mike Little. The software is released under the GPL license. Currently
it have reached version 5.7 that was released in the year 2021.
The Post Editor of First version,2003
WordPress is the most widely used content management system written in the PHP and uses the MySQL database, but there is no need to learn to code for building your website using this CMS. It is a beginner-friendly website development platform having great
and powerful built-in blogging features. WordPress is an open-source solution that allows the developers to study the CMS code and develop their own plugins and templates (WordPress themes) for it.
It’s important to not confuse WordPress.org with WordPress.com. WordPress.com is a free open source CMS originally designed for blogging, but now it’s used by all sorts of websites / online stores. WordPress.com is a blog hosting platform.
WordPress.org vs WordPress.com
The key difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org is who’s actually hosting your website.
With WordPress.org, you host your own site (recommended). With WordPress.com, on the other hand, it’s WordPress.com that takes care of all of this for you (easier to start, less freedom). And that’s the major difference.
Cost : WordPress.com does allow you to set up a website entirely for free, but there are some downsides to this:
You can only place your site under a subdomain
You cannot remove WordPress.com’s own ads and branding from your site
You get limited disk space of 3GB
You can’t monetize your blog or website
You can’t install plugins or any themes that aren’t available on the platform by default
If you do want to use your site for a commercial purpose, you will have to pay at least $8 / month on your WordPress.com plan + the cost of a custom domain name usually in the range of $15 / year. In total, this means at least $111 annually to run a site
on WordPress.com.
WHEN TO USE WORDPRESS
WordPress should be the default choice for anyone looking to create a self-hosted website. That certainly doesn’t mean everyone should use WordPress. It just means that, if you want to use Drupal or Joomla, you should be able to articulate the specific
reason(s) why you’re choosing those platforms over WordPress. If you can’t, you should stick with WordPress.
WordPress is the best choice for most situations. For example, you should use WordPress for:
Blogs
Portfolio sites
Brochure sites
eCommerce stores (WordPress is also the most popular way to create an eCommerce store)
You can also use WordPress to create custom content sites, such as real estate directories, forums, job boards, and so on.
