Last Updated | August 2022

WordPress Review – User & Expert Reviews

WordPress is one of the most used website builders that powers 43.3% of all websites on the Internet. More than 80 million websites were built using WordPress. WordPress is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) with flexible features that allow users to build dynamic websites and blogs. It is the most popular blogging system on the web and allows updating, customizing, and managing the website from its back-end CMS and components.

Overview Of WordPress

WordPress is a free and open-source Content Management System (CMS). It is an online site based on PHP and MySQL. The Content Management System is constantly updated with new versions that improve Security, adding new features and overall performance. Since WordPress is free and an open-source project, it allows anyone to improve and edit its code according to their liking. WordPress is an open-source community, which means that thousands of people worldwide work on it.

You are free to download the software, install, modify and use it. It also features thousands of free plugins, themes, widgets, and other tools. It is considered the most accessible and most popular CMS tool due to its features. The main feature of WordPress is its versatility and feasibility to use. There is no use of coding and designing skills for creating a website on this.

Who Should Use WordPress?

WordPress has evolved into a versatile CMS. You can use it to create a simple blog and a fully functional website, mobile applications, and online stores. The flexibility of WordPress lets you turn your content, images, video, and more into a functional website. It is excellent for small agencies, freelancers, and online store owners who know a bit about web design but perhaps lack the skills to create a design from scratch.

Because it started as a blogging platform, WordPress is at an advantage. With WordPress Website Builder, you can create a beautiful eCommerce site and know that the blog is integral to the development process.

With WordPress, you can easily make :

• Blogs
• Business websites
• Portfolios
• Forums
• News
• eCommerce websites
• Government websites
• eLearning modules

WordPress isn’t the best option if you don’t have a lot of time and resources for creating the website or if you’re looking for customization abilities on your website but don’t want to deal with the more “technical” aspects of managing a website.

To share my first experience with WordPress, I must say that I was pretty impressed, and one of the best parts about WordPress is that it’s easy to use and flexible enough to make different types of websites, which is why it has grown so much in popularity.

With this WordPress brand review, we will go over the features and the performance of the website builder, and with that information, you can conclude if WordPress is the most suitable host for you.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Cons:

Rating: Breakdown

Deciding the rating of the builders takes time and a lot of thorough research. We conduct the necessary research and put each website builder through continuous tests to properly rank them in its expert review. That is how we created our ranking system. We use specific parameters that provide the most accurate results to specify the best builders present. Here are the factors we used for the WordPress review.

Ease Of Use (Is It Easy To Use WordPress)?

Despite being the most flexible and powerful platform, WordPress Website Builder is relatively easy for beginners. After creating your account, the first thing you need to do is choose a domain. Your domain name is your site’s permanent address on the web — every website needs one so people can access it.

After choosing your domain name, you can choose your hosting plan.

The next thing you need to do is find a theme for your site. A WordPress theme is a pre-designed and pre-coded interface template for WordPress. It saves you the trouble (and money) of designing your website from scratch or paying someone else to do it for you.

It comes with a simple dashboard with different menu options listed in the sidebar. You can easily create posts and pages, customize your website design, add navigation menus, etc. The WordPress Dashboard is the first screen that will be seen when you log into your blog’s administration area, which will display the overview of the website. It is a collection of gadgets that provide information and an overview of what’s happening with your blog.

However, compared to other open-source CMS platforms, WordPress is very user-friendly. There are excellent WordPress backup plugins (many of them are free). They allow you to set up automatic backups and store them on a remote location like Google Drive or Dropbox. As a beginner, you may find it a bit overwhelming at first. However, as the largest WordPress resource site for beginners, I can confidently assure you that you’ll soon find your way around.

WordPress Value For Money – Pricing & Plans

WordPress Website Builder offers just two plans: a free one and the $15/month WordPress Pro plan. The previous four paid plans were removed and massively simplified the options to make pricing clearer. The free WordPress plan won’t cost you a cent. Its features are limited, though. Let’s analyze both plans so you can get all the information needed to make a choice.

The options have been simplified down to two choices: free or $15 per month. If you choose the Free plan, you’ll have limited access to what’s offered. However, you don’t need to pick between plans depending on the features you need because they’re all included. The only difference is if you choose the WordPress Pro plan, you’ll have access to all of WordPress’s premium features.

The main drawback of the new plans is that storage sizes have been reduced. The Free plan previously offered 3GB and now only offers 1GB of storage, while the Pro offers 50GB, which is a massive downgrade from the 200GB provided on the previous Business plan. The Pro plan opens up the feature range to include 50GB of storage, access to premium themes, plugins, advanced SEO tools, and the ability to sell products via the WooCommerce plugin.

If you are starting and want to see if WordPress Website Builder is the right choice for you, you should go with the Free Plan, but if you need more control over settings and templates, I would suggest choosing the Pro Plan. Because the storage sizes have been reduced, the value for money rating is 9.5.

Templates (Design Flexibility)

WordPress Website Builder offers over 250 themes (which other builders call “templates”). It offers a good selection of themes, some of which are premium and cost extra. With the help of a WordPress theme, you can design the layout and appearance of your website. The free themes are far from worthless. You can choose a good-looking free theme. You get a preview showing tablet, phone, and desktop previews when clicking a theme entry. Press the Activate Theme button to get started with the Customize options. Payment, multimedia, and other content widgets let you create a site that fits your vision.

When WordPress is installed, it has a pre-installed theme which is very simple and unattractive. To make it more enchanting, one can install and apply different themes from WordPress. Themes are one-click solutions that completely overhaul the look of your site. They are also customizable, meaning you can personalize your chosen theme to separate it from the hordes of other users who liked the same design.

There are numerous free themes, and a fresh WordPress install comes with a few basic choices.

Themes provide a style (including font styling), colors, page layouts, widget positions, etc. You can change the theme of your site without changing the content of the site. Themes provide a unique look to your site. Have a look at a few of the templates that Wix offers.

One of the newest and most popular themes is Archeo. Archeo is a theme inspired by Mayan history and culture. The theme is bold when it needs to be while making enough use of whitespace not to overwhelm readers.

Byrne is a minimalist, image-centric WordPress theme. It is a blogging theme ideal for showcasing your passion for food. The design is refined and sophisticated that can be further customized.

For the design flexibility, the rating is 9.7.

Features and Tools

WordPress powers more than 43% of the web. Everything from simple websites, blogs, complex portals, enterprise websites, and even applications is built with WordPress.

WordPress combines simplicity for users and publishers with complexity for developers. So this makes it flexible while still being easy to use. The following is a list of some of the features that come as standard with WordPress; however, thousands of plugins extend what WordPress does, so the functionality is limitless.

1. Domain Names

A domain name will serve as the URL inside your visitors’ address bar when visiting your WordPress website. It tells the web browser where to look for your website. A domain is how people visit your website online to make it concise.

With the free plan, you can create a website and host it on a predefined domain, but it’s best to get a custom domain if you’re looking for something professional. A custom domain name helps give your site a professional look. With the purchase of a WordPress annual or two-year plan, you can register a new domain for free for one year. If you are not ready to add a custom domain or don’t know what your domain name should be, you can create your website and add a domain later. There are four ways to add a custom domain to your website:

1. Register a new domain name.
2. Transfer an existing domain that you already own.
3. Connect an existing domain that you already own to your website.
4. Connect a subdomain for a domain with an existing website to your website.

2. Mobile App

WordPress offers a native mobile app for iOS and Android. It lets you create and edit your website right from your smartphone or tablet. You can enter statistics, manage posts and upload media files too. I found it an easy-to-handle and intuitive mobile app with a straightforward design when I tested the mobile app. You can publish blog updates from any corner of the globe or draft posts from the palm of your hand. Catch up with your favorite sites and join the conversation anywhere; look at your visitors and views on your morning commute. You can track your most popular day stories during your lunch break. Discover where your readers come from, all around the world. Keep up with your site’s activity, even when away from your desk. Check your notifications to keep conversations flowing with your followers. Engage with the community you’ve built.

3. Social Media Integration

Better social media engagement means your customers have a stronger relationship with your brand. It provides you with more opportunities to build brand loyalty, increase word-of-mouth referrals and increase sales. People spend countless hours scrolling through social media apps each day, and if you are not capturing their attention in their newsfeed, you might be missing out on a lot. Social media is crucial for gaining customers, but it can also help you improve your services by learning from its feedback. You could improve your customer support by following up with complaints. You can analyze the suggestions and feedback of your customers for your products and think about launching new products.

When you are active on your social media handles, you are focused on producing quality content and giving your customers valuable services. Seeing such posts can build the trust of your visitors and turn them into potential customers. People will start looking for your brand when they need to buy a product relevant to yours.

Integrating your social media with your WordPress website has never been easier. There are many options and tools available at no additional cost. Whether you want to auto-share your website posts to a social media platform, display your social media posts on your website, provide links to your various accounts, or encourage your website visitors to share your content. Both plans include Publicize, which lets you automate posting to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr.

WordPress also offers to display your social media platforms on your website. You can add widgets, blocks, or feeds to your website to display posts from your social media accounts in real-time.

4. Security

The Security of your website and your data is always a priority. WordPress core is safe when kept updated to the latest version. WordPress has strong encryption, which is critical to help ensure your privacy and Security. All WordPress websites are encrypted with SSL encryption, including custom domains hosted on WordPress.com. Strong encryption is considered vital that they do not offer the option to disable it. Web traffic is continuously monitored so that suspicious activity can be avoided. Also, there are security measures to help protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Some other things that are done regularly are security testing and data backup and recovery. It is essential to mention that WordPress has a dedicated security team that helps address potential security risks. From the aspect of Security, there are also a few ways that you can do to help protect your data. It would help if you chose a strong password that is hard to guess, always log out of your account, and enable two-step authentication.

5. Email

You can build and grow your online presence with a custom domain and personalized email address from WordPress. WordPress offers the option to try it out free for three months. The few simple steps needed to create a professional email are:

1. Create a WordPress account.
2. Choose a domain address that will also be used for your email address.
3. Lastly, add a professional email, and you can start your three-month free trial.

With Professional Email, you can bring your emails and contacts from other platforms. Also, with Professional Email Calendar and Contacts, you will stay on top of your schedule and never miss important events. Keep things organized and keep in touch with people.

6. Business Features

The WordPress website builder provides various specific features specifically for businesses to create a website for your small business that meets your needs. So, It is not surprising to see a lineup of business features as small businesses are one of WordPress’s targets.

7. SEO Tools

WordPress is very search-engine-friendly by default. However, you may decide to perform additional optimization for your site or blog to control how your visitors find you through search engines.

• Page Mapping is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl, and index all of your website’s content. It also tells search engines which pages on your site are most important. Setting the Parent page produces different “levels” in your pages’ URLs. Page Mapping can help with SEO in that search engines expect deeper pages to provide more specific information and would try to rank those more specific pages for related searches. Another practical reason to build out your page mapping is so that you’ll be able to visualize how you might set up your site’s menu and navigation.
• Page Titles and Title Tags – Title tags are important because they let readers know what information will be present when a user clicks on a page. They are essential for the search engines for the same reason, except they also function to determine the web page’s relevancy due to a search query. The titles should be unique and contain action words because they can help entice users to click through.

• Meta Descriptions – A meta description is an attribute within your meta tags that help describe your page. This snippet of text may appear in the search engine results under your headline, though sometimes, search engines will pull a snippet of text from the primary body copy of the page instead. Meta descriptions can be a great way to entice searchers to click, even if the description isn’t directly utilized in search ranking calculations.

• Image Optimization creates and delivers high-quality images in the ideal format, size, and resolution to increase user engagement. It also involves accurately labeling images so search engine crawlers can read them and understand page context.

The alt text should describe the image. It helps the search engine understand what the image shows, but it also can assist people that use screen-reader software to understand your site better. Improved user experience and interactions with your site positively impact search engine rankings, improving customer engagement, conversions, and customer retention.

• Internal Linking is any link from one page on your website to another page. Your users and search engines use links to find content on your website. Your users use links to navigate your site and find the content they want to find. Search engines also use links to navigate your site. They won’t see a page if there are no links to it. Linking inside the content of your page or post can be essential to help direct users (and search engine crawlers) to important related content from that page or post.
• Redirects - Redirection is a term to describe forwarding one URL to a different URL. Redirecting a page usually means you give the page a brand new URL. WordPress covers 301, 302, and 307 Redirects.
• 301 redirects are considered permanent redirects. They are the best choice in most cases since they can pass roughly 90% of a link’s “equity” that a search engine sees for that link.
• 302 redirects should be used when you eventually plan to use the original URL again as a separate page but temporarily want to redirect it to a second page.
• 307 Redirect is when the resource requested has been temporarily moved to the URL given by the Location headers.

• Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps your site perform better in search engines with various features. It takes care of the technical aspects of SEO. That leaves you free to perfect your posts and pages with the help of our SEO and readability analyses.

8. Selling Online

WordPress offers several different options for selling items online through your site. WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce solution on WordPress.

You can create a robust online store and install more plugins to help you customize products, attract customers, and increase your sales. WooCommerce is an eCommerce solution that allows you to add a cart and checkout process, take payment, monitor inventory, and everything else you need for an online store. The WooCommerce plugin turns any WordPress site into an e-commerce site, seamlessly integrating content with e-commerce elements. You can sell anything in unlimited amounts on a WooCommerce-powered site, from physical to digital products, including subscriptions and appointments. However, one helpful feature included is WooCommerce Payments, WooCommerce’s payment processing solution. It allows customers to purchase directly on your website without being taken to an external payment processor.  WooCommerce is popular because it is free, versatile, and customizable. Since it is an open-source plugin, many of its extensions and compatible plugins are also free. It is versatile because you can sell anything on your site to any country with the right plugins.

Performance

As we know, performance is crucial to a website’s success! Even the slightest improvements in page load time will help you slash bounce rates, boost conversion rates, and climb the search engine rankings.

With that in mind, to include the performance in this WordPress Review, we put a few websites through GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insight to give final scores.

Speed Page

B score and “82%” on performance sound excellent. The website takes only 2.2 seconds to load fully, which is not a lot. It only takes around 922 milliseconds to fully interact and load the most visible elements, which is a great result. I can assure you this is concise as I visited the page a few times to see it in action.

To be sure of the results, we ran a few more tests. For one of the tests, we used PageSpeed Insight.

The results were quite similar.

Uptime and Response Time

Website uptime monitoring is such a tedious process. While there are many reasons for a website to go down, monitoring uptime and timely alerts will minimize the potential costly downtime.

WordPress performed excellently in regards to uptime. At no point in the whole week while I ran an automated check was the website unavailable. The response time and the average speed were also great. However, the average speed of your website will also depend on your theme.

Based on the tests and the results, the overall ranking for performance is 9.8.

Help and Customer Support

The free WordPress plan offers only community support, while paid accounts get email and chat support from Monday to Friday, 24 hours a day. For the users who use the free plan, blogs, forums, online courses, seminars, webinars, and books outline different aspects of the WordPress platform. The WordPress forum is there to help when you need a little extra assistance or to troubleshoot with another person. Anyone can post a question, which will be answered by a WordPress staff member or an experienced WordPress community expert. Support documentation is the best place to start to get your simple questions answered. You’ll find a library of documents and video tutorials to assist you, whether you’re starting a website, writing content, or searching for customization options. However, there is no regular phone support.

Because with the Free plan, you don’t have any access to the company’s support team.

Although WordPress offers 24/7 support through their support documentation and support forums, sometimes it might be best to work through your questions in real-time. Live Chat support connects you to an engineer when you can’t find an answer to your question in support documentation or on the support forum.

WordPress Example Sites

WordPress has been used by many of the world’s top designers and developers who use it to build highly engaging websites. To get a more concise picture of WordPress, look at some of the example websites below.

Academy Self Defense ( Training Program Website)

Academy Self Defense is a website dedicated to helping men and women acquire self-defense awareness and buy self-defense, fitness, and fighting training. This website gives its readers the exact schedule and details about their courses.

Awesome Motive ( Company Website)

Awesome Motive is the parent company behind loads of huge brands like WPBeginner and OptinMonster. Their website is simple and elegant, featuring a subtle animation in the header with the company’s mission as the welcome message. It shows vital stats, their products, job opportunities, and more.

The Cool Club (Online Store)

The Cool Club is one of the best sample WordPress websites. It features beautifully designed card games and wall art. They draw from pop cultures, such as Star Wars and deceased celebrities. The Cool Club sells beautifully designed wall art and card games. Their website features wall art and card games, which uplifts the design. Their online store is fun to browse and is powered by WooCommerce.

WordPress Review: Summary

WordPress started as a fairly standard blogging platform (WordPress.com) but quickly morphed into a sophisticated website builder (WordPress.org) that lets you create any website you can think of – including membership, forum, eCommerce, business websites, and more. For that reason, WordPress is suitable for those who don’t plan to have a tremendous website or online store. Compared to other established Website Builders, it lacks some capabilities, like storage, pricing, and ease of use. Still, it does compete well on support, theme availability, design, technical aspects, and content publishing. A moderately-sized blog, portfolio, business site, or online store may be fine, but it’s not built to support sites that need to host a considerable amount of content. WordPress is a good fit for anyone looking for a solid website builder with more advanced functionality and theme options and wanting to find their hosting and additional services. It is not beginner-friendly, and you will feel limited if you’re creating anything other than a blog. If you want to expand or develop your website, you need to use basic coding.

WordPress User Reviews

Many users have reviewed WordPress. The customer reviews are generally positive. According to the users, It is the most effective tool for configuring your websites. They have several free themes and plugins that will meet your needs and allow you to create a fully functional website with all of the necessary features with a single click. It is simple to use and has a user-friendly interface. It is straightforward to configure everything; it is also a free platform, a great advantage. The knowledge and learning of the user are easy and fast, and it has a large number of plugins; the edition is delightful for the user. The user can manage aspects such as creating and managing designs or the page’s functionality.  There are so many plugins available that sometimes it takes homework to find the right one. Another significant con is that it is not the most suitable for beginners.