How To Start A Wordpress Template

Our Verdict

WordPress.com offers an easy way to go a WordPress website, and the functioning is first-class, but it has a steeper learning bend than other website builders.

For

Massive list of potential themes
Good performance
Top blogging features

Against

Expensive for ecommerce
Complex editor

Tom's Guide Verdict

WordPress.com offers an easy manner to become a WordPress website, and the performance is excellent, but information technology has a steeper learning bend than other website builders.

Pros

+
Massive list of potential themes
+
Good performance
+
Top blogging features

Cons

-
Expensive for ecommerce
-
Complex editor

WordPress (opens in new tab) is the globe's almost pop content direction organization (CMS), powering around 42% (opens in new tab) of all websites online today. One of the simplest ways to get-go a WordPress website of your own is to get WordPress hosting (opens in new tab) at WordPress.com, and it rivals the best website builders (opens in new tab) while also able to exist hosted past the all-time web hosting (opens in new tab) services.

You lot tin use WordPress.com to get a website, and rarely accept to worry about things like setting upward software, system upgrades, security patches, and ongoing maintenance. In our WordPress review, we evaluate WordPress.com against the available today, so that yous tin can decide whether information technology'south the all-time place to build your website.

WordPress review: Snapshot

WordPress.com's offerings become from generous entry-level plans correct up to powerful, expensive ecommerce plans. It has fast response times and 24/7 live chat support, making it a solid choice for hosting a WordPress website. There's a massive list of themes and plugins to choose from, so it's possible to make just well-nigh whatsoever kind of website with WordPress.com.

This high level of control unfortunately means WordPress.com is relatively cumbersome to utilize, and at that place's little paw-holding for those who haven't used WordPress earlier. Wix (opens in new tab) is a amend choice for tech beginners, as it has the nigh intuitive interface, and Squarespace (opens in new tab) has better designs out of the box.

Score: 3.5/5

Read the full review below.

How does WordPress.com compare to its main competitors?
	WordPress.com	Wix	Squarespace
Score	3.5/5	four.5/5	four/5
Pros	Thousands of templates - Fast site speeds - Easily swap themes	Intuitive website editor - Large listing of template designs - Top customer support	Slick templates - Responsive designs - Neat blogging tools
Cons	Expensive ecommerce plans - Steeper learning curve	Sites often require tweaking for mobile - Limited navigation menu options	No free programme - Tin can't switch templates
Verdict	All-time option for blog-focused websites	Best website architect if y'all take a particular design in heed	Best option for image-heavy websites
View deals	Visit site	Visit site (opens in new tab)	Visit site (opens in new tab)

WordPress: Key features

There's an of import difference between WordPress.com (opens in new tab) and WordPress.org (opens in new tab). WordPress.org is where you'll detect the open-source CMS software WordPress that can be installed on your choice of web hosting.

WordPress.com has more in common with website builders like Wix and Squarespace. Information technology doesn't offer every WordPress CMS feature, but makes it piece of cake to quickly build a WordPress site. You don't have to worry almost installation and ongoing maintenance, every bit that's all taken care of.

You get started on WordPress.com by going through a short site setup wizard, where you choose a site proper noun, homepage design, and navigation menu. The 2nd step introduces you to the WordPress visual editor.

There'southward non much mitt-property here—yous're dropped into the relatively complex editor interface, and expected to work it out on your own. The default text of your new website compels y'all to visit learn.wordpress.com (opens in new tab), but that site feels more like an overview of WordPress.com every bit a whole rather than a pace-by-footstep guide to using the visual editor.

The WordPress.com editor uses a "block system". Everything from headings and paragraphs to image galleries and videos are blocks y'all can elevate onto the page and edit. To rearrange blocks, yous simply drag them around the page, though you're limited in exactly where you can place blocks.

Once you get a handle on it, the WordPress.com visual editor is powerful and has a long listing of cool blocks yous can add to pages. But information technology has a bigger learning curve than competitor website builders similar Wix, Weebly (opens in new tab), and Squarespace.

WordPress.com: Cardinal features and highlights

Prototype ane of 4

WordPress's website editor in use — There's a massive list of different blocks y'all can drag onto your pages (Image credit: WordPress)

Image two of iv

WordPress's themes — Unlike themes are available depending on your subscription level (Image credit: WordPress)

Paradigm 3 of 4

WordPress's editor in use — Y'all tin can further customize your theme, such as choosing specific colors and backgrounds (Image credit: WordPress)

Image 4 of 4

Heggerty's homepage — Heggerty is an example of an ecommerce website that uses WooCommerce for WordPress (Image credit: Heggerty.org)

You can apace change the look of your website past choosing an culling theme. Free accounts have 114 themes from which to choose, or you tin buy one of 83 premium themes for $49 to $125. Premium and Business users get all premium themes unlocked as part of their plans.

If you want to use any other theme, you lot'll need either the Business or Ecommerce plans. With either of these, you have the option to upload and install your ain theme. There are tens of thousands of set up-made WordPress CMS themes out there, many more than are available for any other website editor.

Yous tin further customize your theme by choosing your own colors and backgrounds, carte du jour options, and fonts. It's possible to change the CSS of your site, but you'll need a Premium plan to practise so.

Selling through WordPress.com is available to different degrees depending on your payment plan. With a Premium plan, you can add a Pay with PayPal push button to accept credit carte payments through the payment processor. Even if you just take a Complimentary or Personal plan, you can add a PayPal button manually past creating a custom HTML cake, and pasting in some code from PayPal.

Business plans get the pick of installing the WooCommerce (opens in new tab) platform. It's included automatically on the Ecommerce plan. WooCommerce is an extremely powerful and versatile ecommerce platform that fits right in on a WordPress website. You can embed products on your pages and include product ratings and reviews.

Products can have categories, tags, and attributes to make them easier for customers to discover. You can gear up unlimited variations of products (like size and color). You accept the pick of selling concrete or digital goods, selling chapter products, and setting up circuitous shipping options. Various additional plugins allow you to build most any kind of online store.

This power comes with a downside, and that's complexity. It takes time and attempt to get a WooCommerce store working exactly how you desire it to. And considering WordPress wasn't initially designed to be an ecommerce platform, there are quirks to how it all works together that accept some getting used to. You'll need to spend more time getting to grips with it than you would with, say, Squarespace or Wix.

WordPress: What's new in 2022?

Updates to the WordPress CMS are quickly reflected on WordPress.com. This year, the changes to the organisation are focused on the block editor and the mobile apps.

In April 2021, the cake editor gained a page layout picker and improved spacing options. Folio layouts are pre-designed templates for building pages. This is all part of WordPress's ongoing attempts to become a improve website architect that works for a wider range of applications.

WordPress mobile apps have been given new features, too. You tin can now check the stats of your site'south pages from the app, and set push notifications to remind yous to blog on specific days.

Pricing

You tin get a WordPress.com site for costless, but site customization is express and ads will exist served on your site. WordPress.com has 4 paid plans (opens in new tab). You can pay monthly or annually. Annual plans include a disbelieve of up to 43% over monthly plans.

You go a gratuitous domain for the outset year through WordPress.com if you choose an annual plan. The renewal pricing for following years is relatively loftier (a .com domain costs $18 a twelvemonth when bought through WordPress.com, for example). Withal, you have the choice to employ your ain domain proper noun, purchased at another domain name registrar, on your WordPress.com site.

WordPress's pricing plans
	Free	Personal	Premium	Business	Ecommerce
Toll per month	Complimentary	$vii	$14	$33	$5
Price per year	Free	$48	$96	$300	$540
No ads	✖	✔	✔	✔	✔
Unlimited premium themes	✖	✖	✔	✔	✔
Install plugins	✖	✖	✖	✔	✔
Sell unlimited products	✖	✖	✖	✖	✔

Testing WordPress

In social club to comprehensively compare WordPress to the contest, we analyzed a serial of its features and tools to see how it performed. This included its uptime and response time, equally these factors are key when taking website building into account.

How reliable is WordPress.com?

a graph showing WordPress's uptime — Our site hosted at WordPress.com was always bachelor during our ii-calendar week testing menstruum (Image credit: Uptime)

A website that's regularly unavailable to your visitors makes for a poor client feel. As part of our testing, we performed 2 weeks of uptime testing using uptime.com on a site we set up on WordPress.com. For the two weeks, the website was checked for availability every five minutes.

WordPress performed well in this test, recording 100% uptime. A longer test would be required to highlight systemic bug with website availability, but WordPress certainly gets a passing grade in this round.

How responsive is WordPress.com?

a graph showing WordPress.com's responsiveness — Our response fourth dimension testing showed that WordPress.com sites consistently respond speedily (Epitome credit: Uptime)

The speed a website loads at has a meaning effect on customer satisfaction, and search engines often place better-performing websites higher in their rankings. Many factors affect how fast a website feels, and its initial response time is important.

We performed two weeks of response-time testing on our WordPress.com website from servers in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas to get an thought of the average response speed for US visitors.

On average, our WordPress.com site responded within 123ms. Most of the time, speeds were consistent. Only once during the testing did the site response fourth dimension tiptop to 2000ms. It took around two hours for typical speeds to return in this instance.

Overall, these response speeds are excellent, so visitors to a WordPress.com website should experience the service is snappy. In comparison, competitor Wix had a similar average response time at 120ms, whereas Squarespace came in at a sluggish 423ms.

Alternatives to WordPress

Website builders, compared

WordPress.com has a lot of competition. Even if you're dead set on WordPress as your CMS, there are many other website builders out there, as well equally the best WordPress hosting (opens in new tab) providers. If yous're browsing for a website builder, arguably better choices exist in Wix and Squarespace.

WordPress.com is at heart a blogging platform with website builder features, whereas Wix and Squarespace were created with website edifice in mind. While WordPress is a more versatile solution thank you to its huge plugin library, the focused nature of Wix and Squarespace make them easier to use, faster to pick upwardly, and less prone to fault.

Wix has a better website editor that allows you lot to drag and drop elements anywhere on the page. Squarespace's editor is closer to WordPress's block-based editing, just is still significantly more than streamlined and easier to employ.

WordPress's features compared to the competition
	WordPress.com	Wix	Squarespace
Design assistant	No	Yes	Yes
Responsive themes	Yes	No	Yep
Support	24/7 alive chat on paid plans only*	24/seven ticket back up and phone callbacks	Email; live chat Mon–Fri
Basic plan	$4 a month	$xiv a calendar month	$12 a calendar month

* Premium plans become alive chat support Monday to Friday. Business and Ecommerce customers too get weekend alive chat support.

WordPress: The verdict

Building a site at WordPress.com gives you the peace of mind that your managed WordPress hosting (opens in new tab) is existence handled by the company almost responsible for the CMS's success. The free programme, while limited and supported by ads, is a great way to go a personal site off the basis, and with plans starting at $4 a month, information technology'southward an excellent choice for smaller, blog-based sites.

We were impressed at the functioning of our site hosted at WordPress (opens in new tab). It suggests that if you build your site at that place, it'll load quickly for your visitors and rarely feel sluggish. WordPress's blogging features are besides exceptional, while ecommerce features offered past WooCommerce are the all-time in the business, with only dedicated ecommerce platforms similar Shopify worthy competitors. They come at quite a steep cost, though.

As a website builder, WordPress.com is quite clunky to use, and getting things done has more steps than with dedicated website builders like Squarespace and Weebly. While it's definitely possible to make a gorgeous WordPress website that breaks the mold, it often feels like you're fighting against WordPress'southward deep-seated roots equally a blogging platform.

WordPress.com's do-it-all versatility is a double-edged sword, every bit many things feel needlessly complex. The extensive ecommerce features, for case, are not bad for huge stores, but make for a steep learning curve for SMEs.

WordPress.com can therefore exist recommended for a broad range site types, particularly if yous value versatility, with the caveat that it has a steeper learning curve than most of the other website builders on the market today.