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Is WordPress Free? Yes and No — Here’s Why

WordPress itself is free and open source, but getting a site online always involves costs like a domain and hosting.
In this guide, you’ll learn what WordPress includes for free and what you should realistically expect to pay for when running a full website.
Is WordPress really free? Yes, but with a caveat
WordPress core software is free and open source under the General Public License (GPL). You don’t pay to download it, install it, or build with it.
What does cost money is putting your website online. To publish a full site, you’ll need at least:
A domain: your site’s address Hosting: the service that keeps your site running and available to visitors Everything else — premium themes, plugins, or advanced features — is optional depending on what you want your site to do.
Want to test the waters first? Start free on WordPress.com today.
WordPress.org vs WordPress.com: How the cost differs
Both options let you start a WordPress site for free — the difference is how hosting, maintenance, and site setup are handled. With WordPress.org, hosting and technical setup are your responsibility; with WordPress.com, they’re covered at the platform level.
Here’s a quick summary:
WordPress.com provides free access to WordPress software. You can then upgrade to paid plans to benefit from managed WordPress hosting that handles security, updates, backups, and performance for you. WordPress.org also offers the free WordPress software, but you’re responsible for finding a hosting provider and buying a domain, as well as setting up any additional tools or services you want to use. What you get for free with WordPress — and why
The WordPress software is free because it’s open source, and the GPL license ensures it will always be available to use, study, and modify at no cost.
Anyone can publish, build improvements, or add new extensions — continuing the project’s mission of open, community-driven web publishing.
Overall, you can access:
The WordPress website builder; there is no license fee to download or use it Hundreds of free themes and plugins available in the WordPress ecosystem The ability to export, move, and reuse your site’s files wherever you choose WordPress Studio, a free local development app for building and testing sites on your computer What costs extra when you use WordPress
Running a fully functional website always incurs costs regardless of the web builder or host you use.
Here’s what you need to budget for.
Domain name
A domain name usually costs under $30 annually. Most web hosts, including WordPress.com, offer free domains in the first year on any paid annual plan.
On WordPress.com, popular domain extensions like .com, .org, and .net average $13 per year.
Web hosting
Web hosting can cost anywhere from a few dollars per month to hundreds for higher-traffic or enterprise sites.
The price depends on the type of hosting you choose, the resources included, and how much traffic your site receives.
As your traffic grows and you exceed your plan’s limits, you may also need to upgrade — e.g., going from 35,000 to 105,000 monthly visits can raise costs from about $35 to $90 per month, adding roughly $660 per year.
WordPress.com takes a different approach. Every paid plan includes unlimited bandwidth and visits for a predictable monthly price (from $4 to $45 with annual billing), along with security protections, backups, updates, and expert support.
Premium plugins and themes
Premium WordPress plugins and themes come with annual license fees — these are optional upgrades offering advanced functionality or more professional designs.
Prices vary widely, with most plugins falling in the $20–$200/year range and premium themes costing $20–$100+, depending on the provider and features.
For example, the Sensei Pro plugin ($9/month) lets you create, manage, and sell online courses — a useful upgrade for creators growing their knowledge businesses online.
Development and maintenance costs
Hiring third-party professionals for custom development or ongoing maintenance can range anywhere from $15 to over $200 per hour, depending on their experience and the complexity of the work.
This is common in WordPress setups where hosting, updates, backups, security, and performance are not handled at the platform level, and responsibility ultimately sits with the site owner.
On WordPress.com, advanced security, performance optimization, and automatic updates and backups are included in your plan — saving you the effort of paying separate services.
You get SSL certificates, DDoS protection, encryption, brute force prevention, advanced firewalls, and more.
Tip: If you prefer a hands-on workflow, WordPress Studio is a free tool that lets you build and test WordPress sites locally before publishing them anywhere. It’s useful for developers and creators who want full control during the building phase.
Other considerations (email, ecommerce, monetization, etc.)
Hosting covers the basics, but many site features — especially for email, marketing, monetization, and ecommerce — typically add $5–$60+ per month.
These can include:
Business email, SMTP, and newsletter tools Payment processing and subscription features Ecommerce add-ons like shipping tools or advanced WooCommerce extensions Performance and marketing upgrades, such as CDNs, analytics tools, or SEO assistants On WordPress.com, many of these extras are already included, so you get built-in tools for ecommerce, newsletters, social sharing, memberships, performance, and AI content generation — without stacking add-on fees.
You also get access to the AI website builder that lets you generate and set up your entire website using simple text prompts.
Here’s what it looks like:
Benefits of using WordPress
After breaking down what different parts of a WordPress site may cost, let’s look at what you get in return.
Here are the key benefits of using WordPress:
Scalability and performance: WordPress is a great choice for any website, and WordPress.com’s full-stack performance infrastructure keeps your site fast even during traffic spikes. SEO friendliness: WordPress uses clean, crawlable code, and WordPress.com automates essential SEO tasks, including generating sitemaps. Themes and plugins: You can choose from 100,000+ themes and plugins to add features — like crowdfunding, quizzes, memberships, etc. — without hiring developers. Customization and ownership: As open-source software, WordPress gives you full control over design, functionality, and long-term ownership — which is also true for WordPress.com. Support and community: WordPress has a huge global community, and WordPress.com paid plans include 24/7 expert support from our Happiness Engineers. Tip: WordPress.com also includes essentials like Jetpack for security, backups, and analytics, so you don’t need multiple add-ons and extensive experience to successfully grow your website.
Start your website journey with WordPress.com
The WordPress software itself is free, but running a fully functional website always involves costs — hosting, a custom domain, and the premium features you need to operate your site reliably.
If you want everything handled in one place, WordPress.com simplifies the entire setup.
You get managed WordPress hosting with automatic updates and backups, built-in security monitoring, unmetered bandwidth and visits, a free domain for the first year, expert support, and tools like the AI Website Builder.
Launch your site on WordPress.com View the full article

By Drewfus · December 23, 2025Dec 23
What Is WordPress Hosting? A Simple Breakdown

WordPress hosting helps you get a WordPress site online faster and keep it running smoothly by reducing setup and configuration work.
This guide explains what WordPress hosting is, how it differs from other hosting options, and what to look for in a provider.
What is WordPress hosting?
WordPress hosting is a specialized type of web hosting built and optimized for running WordPress. It gives you the right environment and features to keep your site fast, secure, and low-maintenance.
WordPress hosting becomes relevant as soon as you create a WordPress site, since it’s prepared for how WordPress works.
Such hosting plans typically include:
WordPress pre-installed or one-click installation A domain name (often bundled in the plan) Built-in security features like backups or malware scanning Performance optimizations for WordPress (PHP versions, caching, database tuning) Support teams familiar with WordPress Tip: WordPress.com offers a fully managed WordPress environment with automatic updates, built-in performance tools, and a secure infrastructure designed to scale with your site.
How does hosting actually work?
Hosting stores your website on a server and shows it to people when they visit your domain.
When someone types yourblogsname.com into their browser, their device requests your website’s information from your hosting provider’s server — a computer that is always online.
The server then locates your site’s files and sends them to the visitor’s browser so the page can load.
In turn, the page’s loading time depends on your hosting plan and provider.
The bottom line: every host follows the same basic flow, but not all of them optimize it for WordPress.
Tip: If you’re curious to know what powers that speed, this behind-the-scenes tour of WordPress.com’s data centers explains it really well.
WordPress hosting vs. regular web hosting
Regular web hosting gives you a standard server where you set up WordPress yourself, while WordPress hosting provides an environment already optimized for it.
This usually means WordPress is faster to install, performance settings are already tuned for it, and getting started takes less work.
Tip: Web hosting comes in different types (e.g., VPS, dedicated, cloud), which describe how server resources are allocated. WordPress hosting works on top of these by optimizing the environment specifically for WordPress.
Here’s how regular web hosting and WordPress hosting compare across key areas:
FeatureRegular web hostingWordPress hostingBuilt forAny type of websiteOptimized specifically for WordPress sitesSetupYou install and configure WordPress yourselfWordPress is pre-installed, or ready in one clickMaintenanceYou manage updates, backups, security tools, caching, and troubleshootingThe hosting environment is pre-tuned for WordPress, reducing initial setup and configuration workSpeedDepends on the server setup and how well you configure WordPressServer settings (PHP, caching, database tuning) are optimized for WordPress out of the boxSecurityHost defaults + whatever WordPress protections you add manuallyComes with WordPress-friendly security defaults (firewall rules, malware scanning, HTTPS)Ease of useMore manual setup and configurationEasier onboarding thanks to WordPress-ready defaults and helpful built-in toolsSupportGeneral hosting support; WordPress knowledge variesSupport teams familiar with WordPress, themes, plugins, and common issues These differences explain how WordPress hosting compares to general hosting, but there’s another important layer to consider: how much of the ongoing work the host handles for you.
Managed vs. unmanaged WordPress hosting
Managed WordPress hosting handles updates, security, backups, and performance for you.
With unmanaged WordPress hosting, the host provides the server, but you handle WordPress setup, updates, and maintenance yourself.
The key is choosing a level of management based on how much time and responsibility you want to take on for updates, security, and performance.
How does managed WordPress hosting make things easier?
Managed WordPress hosting gives you a smoother, more predictable experience because you’re not dealing with the technical issues that usually slow site owners down.
Instead of troubleshooting errors, comparing plugins, or fixing problems after updates, the hosting environment prevents most of those issues before they happen.
What this means in practice:
Fewer surprises: Updates and changes don’t break your site unexpectedly. No plugin juggling: You don’t need extra tools for speed, backups, or security. No firefighting: Errors, threats, and performance drops are handled before you ever see them. Consistent stability: Your site behaves the same day-to-day without tuning settings. More time on real work: You spend your effort building pages, writing content, and improving the site experience — not managing the technical side. Tip: Plenty of hosts label their plans as “managed WordPress,” but many are just shared hosting with a few extras. WordPress.com delivers true managed hosting with expert support, built-in security, a global infrastructure, and a 99.999% uptime guarantee.
How to choose the best WordPress hosting provider
The right WordPress host gives you speed, reliable uptime, strong security, and support so you can run your site without extra work.
Here’s what to look for when comparing WordPress hosting providers:
Fast loading speed: Built-in caching, CDN, and servers optimized for WordPress. Reliable uptime: Consistent availability with fast recovery and alerts if issues occur. Built-in security: SSL certificates, malware scanning, and automatic backups at no extra cost. Ease of use: Simple UI and automatic updates, without touching code. Expert WordPress support: Access to support teams trained specifically in WordPress. Room to grow and transparent pricing: Plans that can handle spikes and long-term traffic. WordPress.com, for example, includes unmetered traffic on every plan, so your costs don’t rise as your audience grows. How much work you avoid: Check how much setup, maintenance, performance tuning, and security the host handles for you versus what you’re expected to manage yourself. Go with WordPress.com’s managed hosting
Choosing between hosting options ultimately comes down to your priorities and how much work you’re willing to handle yourself.
The differences we outlined are straightforward:
General web hosting: You get a standard server and install/configure WordPress yourself. WordPress hosting: The server is pre-tuned for WordPress, so setup is quicker and fewer settings need manual adjustment. Managed WordPress hosting: Ongoing updates, security, performance, and backups are also handled for you. If you don’t want to deal with technical upkeep, WordPress.com gives you a fast, fully managed WordPress environment backed by automatic updates and expert support.
Get started with WordPress.com
View the full article

By Drewfus · December 22, 2025Dec 22
How to Build Faster, Safer Local WordPress Dev Workflows for Your Agency

Agencies move quickly. With constant new client builds, redesigns, plugin audits, and last-minute fixes, everything relies on a workflow that’s stable, fast, and consistent across the team.
For many WordPress agencies, the challenge isn’t shipping great work; it’s getting every team member working the same way, on the same stack, without losing time to process.
WordPress Studio was created to remove those slowdowns so agencies can spend more time building and less time wrestling with overhead — giving every developer a consistent workflow and helping agencies deliver higher-quality work in less time.
Watch the complete walkthrough of these agency workflows below, and keep reading to see how each fits into modern agency development with Studio:
Spin up identical development environments for all
Every agency knows the pain of onboarding a new developer, configuring a stack from scratch, or replicating a teammate’s environment.
You can start a clean local site, restore from a backup, or use a Blueprint, a reusable site recipe that defines specs such as which themes and plugins to install, which PHP version to use, and which content or settings to apply.
Using Blueprints means every project starts from the same proven foundation, not from a blank slate, which, for agencies, results in faster onboarding and better handoffs between team members, turning hours of setup work into seconds of standardized automation.
Once you start a Studio site with a Blueprint, you and your team can build from your desired specs rather than a blank slate. This alone compresses hours of administrative work into seconds.
To start a site with Blueprints in Studio:
Click the “Add site” button. Select “Start from a Blueprint,” and you will see a gallery of featured Blueprints and an option to choose your own custom Blueprint file. Select a featured Blueprint that fits your needs or “Choose Blueprint file” and select the JSON file from your computer. Click Continue. On the setup screen, give your site a name. You can open “Advanced settings” for more options. Click “Add site.“ Behind the scenes, Studio will build the site from whichever Blueprint you selected or added. To keep your team aligned across projects, check out our guide to creating custom Blueprints.
Share “always-online” snapshots for faster team and client approvals
Once you’ve created a site in Studio, you can keep your team and clients in the loop with reliable, shareable, and fully online preview sites.
Preview sites allow you to share snapshots of your local builds publicly. They’re built on a temporary domain powered by WordPress.com, and each Studio user can spin up 10 at a time.
The beauty of preview sites is that they’re fully hosted sites — they’re not tunnels that require you to be online for your team and clients to see them. Not only that, you can share login credentials with your team or clients so they can explore the backend as well.
Preview sites are temporary and automatically deleted after seven days. This feature ensures that preview environments are used for short-term feedback and review purposes.
To send a preview site to your team or clients:
Select the local site within the Studio. Click on the Previews tab. Log in to WordPress.com if you haven’t already. Click on the “Create preview site” button. Once the preview site is created, copy your preview site domain and share. You can provide login credentials to folks by clicking the Settings tab in the Studio and copying the username and password under WP Admin. While preview sites are intended for sharing with clients and gathering early feedback for up to seven days, a hosting plan is required to make your site permanently accessible. Use the Studio Sync or Import/Export features to connect your Studio site to a hosting plan.
Stay in sync with staging and prod
When it’s time to go live, Studio Sync helps you move updates with confidence, without wrestling with exports, plugins, or fragile workflows.
Studio Sync allows you to synchronize a WordPress.com or Pressable-hosted staging or production site with your Studio sites in either direction.
Not only that, sync functionality is selective, meaning you have precise control over what gets transferred between Studio and any connected production or staging sites. No more accidentally overwriting the plugins already running smoothly in production or having your local test content affect the live database.
To sync with staging or production:
Select the site you wish to synchronize from the Studio sidebar. Open the Sync tab. Locate the WordPress.com or Pressable-connected site or connect to another one. Making this connection won’t transfer any data; it simply tells Studio which hosted site you want to pull from or push to. Click Pull or Push to open the sync modal. Choose to sync “All files and folders” or “Specific files and folders.” Select the elements you want to synchronize from or to your production or staging environment. You can expand the plugins, themes, and uploads folders to select individual items. Decide whether to include the Database in the sync. Click the Pull or Push button. Sync is an excellent accompaniment to preview sites for agencies. You can pull a live site into Studio, use preview sites to demo your local work for others, and once you’re happy, you can push the changes to staging or production.
There are some requirements for Studio Sync, so be sure to check out the full documentation to get the most out of this feature.
Set your preferences to get into the work faster
A “small but big” feature in Studio is Preferences, allowing you to quickly work on Studio site files in the editor and terminal application you rely on every day.
Once you have a Studio site running, you’ll notice some buttons under the “Open in…” heading on the Overview tab.
You can specify which code editor and terminal app you use in your everyday workflows in the Studio preferences menu — click on the user icon in the top right corner to open “User Settings,” then click the Preference tab and make your selections.
Work on development sites locally
If you’re part of our free agency program, Automattic for Agencies, you have access to five free development sites.
These are fully-hosted WordPress.com websites that act as staging sites, and if you want to work on them locally in a safe, isolated environment, you can use Studio’s sync feature.
To spin up a development site and sync it to and from Studio:
Log into your Automattic for Agencies account. Click the Marketplace button from the sidebar, then click Hosting and Standard. Scroll down to find the Start building for free section, and click on the “Create a development site →” button. Specify your site address, PHP version, and primary data center, and click “Create site.” This will be a fully-hosted development site on WordPress.com. Once the site is created, it can be synced into Studio by following the syncing instructions above.
It’s a workflow that keeps everything aligned — your local builds, your development site, and your final production push — without the tool mismatch, manual migration steps, or “which version is this?” confusion agencies often battle.
This means fewer unknowns and faster turnaround times across your entire portfolio.
Streamline your agency’s workflows with Studio
When your team moves fast, every slowdown compounds. The tools you use can create friction or remove it — and Studio is built to remove it.
From spinning up consistent environments to sharing always-on previews and safely syncing with staging and production, it gives agencies a clearer path from first draft to final delivery.
It cuts through the messy parts of WordPress development so your team can stay focused on the work clients actually see.
Plus, the WordPress.com team supporting Studio ships updates fast and often, so you can always expect new features and performance enhancements to streamline your workflows further. And if you have any feature requests for the team, we encourage you to open an issue on GitHub.
Try WordPress Studio for free and give your team a faster, more reliable way to build and ship on WordPress.
Explore WordPress Studio for free
View the full article

By Drewfus · December 19, 2025Dec 19
When Typepad Shut Down, We Helped 3,684 Blogs Find a New Home

30 days’ notice. Years of memories at stake. Here’s how WordPress.com stepped up.
On August 28, 2025, Typepad announced it was shutting down.
Creators who’d been blogging since the early 2000s suddenly faced an impossible deadline: save everything or lose it forever in 30 days.
We couldn’t let that happen.
A race against the clock
By September 30 — Typepad’s official shutdown date — 3,684 blogs had successfully migrated to WordPress.com.
And here’s the thing: these weren’t small archives.
Some creators brought over 3,400+ posts, thousands of images, and nearly 10,000 comments dating back to 2005.
The migration wasn’t always smooth. Typepad’s export files often didn’t include media. Some archives were massive — multi-gigabyte files that required special handling.
But we worked through each case, one by one.
More than websites
For many creators, this move was about preserving a body of work — not just keeping a site online.
Book launches chronicled post-by-post. Family milestones captured over the years. Niche communities that had grown over a decade or more.
Most were individual bloggers. Many had been writing for 10, 15, even 20+ years.
One blogger with 3,400 posts, 9,000+ images, and 7,000 comments going back to February 2005:
“Truly bowled over by the level of service and the courtesy and friendliness! Wish I’d made the move long ago.”
Another with a similarly massive archive shared:
“I see all of my Typepad posts on WordPress! I am so happy I am crying! Thank you so very much! This feels huge for me!”
That’s exactly why we do this.
How the migration worked
The process was straightforward in theory: export your Typepad archive, import it to WordPress.com, done.
In practice? Not always that simple.
Typepad’s exports often arrived without media. Some archives were enormous — we’re talking decades of posts crammed into multi-gigabyte files.
Our team worked through the tricky cases hands-on, making sure nothing got left behind.
Once the dust settled, many creators took the opportunity to pick a fresh theme or finally clean up years of messy categories.
A forced move turned into a fresh start.
Your archives deserve a stable home
Platforms come and go. Your work shouldn’t have to.
WordPress.com is built for the long haul — with speed, security, automatic backups, and support whenever you need it.
Whether you’re running a personal journal or a publication with thousands of posts, there’s room to grow.
We’re honored to welcome thousands of Typepad creators to WordPress.com. Your archives matter — and now they have a home built to last.
Thinking about moving your blog? Get started here or reach out to our support team — we’re happy to help.

View the full article

By Drewfus · December 18, 2025Dec 18
How to Manage Multiple Client Sites with WordPress Studio

Managing multiple client sites often means juggling local setups, updates, and changes across different environments.
It works — until the workflow starts getting in your way.
Small issues, like inconsistent configurations, overwritten files, and repetitive setup tasks, can all add up and slow you down.
WordPress Studio simplifies all of that.
The free, open-source tool lets you spin up local sites quickly, share previews instantly, and move changes between environments without the usual hassle — helping you focus on creating rather than configuring and troubleshooting.
Here’s how you can use it to manage multiple client WordPress sites.
Step 1: Set up a new local site
You have three options for creating a new site in WordPress Studio:
Start with a blank site: Create a fresh WordPress installation. Start from a Blueprint: Build a preconfigured site using a “recipe.” Import from a backup: Use the backup of an existing site. Here are more details on those three options.
Start with a blank site
Starting with a blank site creates a fresh WordPress installation using the default out-of-the-box configuration.
This option works well for one-off builds, but Studio can save even more time once you start using Blueprints.
Start from a Blueprint
Blueprints are reusable JSON files that act as recipes for creating preconfigured local sites — they’re one of the key ways that Studio helps you save time and reduce repetitive tasks.
Instead of setting up each project from scratch, you can create Blueprints for various website types (e.g., blogs or online stores) — defining everything your site needs, from WordPress and PHP versions to themes, plugins, settings, and content.
The Studio Assistant and interactive builder help you generate these automatically — simply tell the AI-powered assistant the site configuration, and it will create the Blueprint.
To use a Blueprint in Studio, choose “Start from a Blueprint” and either pick one of the featured options or upload your own Blueprint file.
Studio currently offers three featured Blueprints (you can preview each in WordPress Playground):
Quick Start: A WordPress.com-like setup with the plugins and themes included on new Business-plan sites. Development: A configuration for theme and plugin developers, with debug settings and tools like Query Monitor, Plugin Check, Theme Check, and Create Block Theme. Commerce: A WooCommerce-ready setup with companion plugins for building online stores. You can also browse the WordPress Blueprints Gallery for community-created configurations.
Import a site from a backup file
Note: Sites on the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans don’t need to be imported from a backup. Instead, they can use the Studio Sync feature. This is more powerful and efficient than importing from a backup file.
You can also import a WordPress site into Studio from a backup file. This is useful if you have an existing site you’d like to work on locally.
Follow these steps to import from a backup file:
Install one of the supported backup plugins, such as the free All-in-One WP Migration and Backup plugin, on the site you’d like to import into Studio.
Then, create a backup of the site (WP Admin → All-in-One WP Migration → Backups → Create Backup).
From here, download the backup file and load it into WordPress Studio.
When you’re done working on the local version, use the plugin to create a new backup and import that backup into the live site.
Step: Configure your local site
Studio lets you configure each local site to match the hosted environment, making sure they’re compatible.
The local site’s environment can be configured from the “Advanced settings” panel.
Whether you start with a blank site, a Blueprint, or a backup, Studio lets you adjust a range of optional settings for your local environment. For example, you can:
Set a custom local path: Define where the site folder is stored on your computer. Change the WordPress version: Use the latest release, a specific version, or a Beta/Nightly build (useful for testing upcoming releases). Change the PHP version: Match your hosting environment or test different versions. Use a custom domain (must end with .local): Make accessing your local site in the browser easier. Use SSL to enable HTTPS: Enable HTTPS on your local site so it closely resembles a live environment. Tip: You can change these settings after you’ve created a site.
After configuring the environment, you can also set up the tools you want Studio to use while you work.
These settings can be accessed from Settings → Preferences.
Your preferred tools will be used when accessing the site from the “Open in…” section of the Overview tab.
Step 3: Develop and collaborate
Once your local site is configured, you can begin developing and testing changes.
WordPress Studio applies updates instantly as you work, so you can move quickly and collaborate without delays.
Build locally
Your local site updates in real time — whether you’re editing files, adjusting settings in WP Admin, or adding plugins and themes.
When you do need to add plugins or themes, you can install them through WP Admin just as you would on a hosted site, or drop the files directly into the site’s folders.
If you use certain plugins or themes regularly, keeping them on your computer makes adding them to each new project even faster.
Tip: If you reuse the same plugins across projects, Blueprints (from Step 1) let you spin up sites preconfigured with your preferred plugins, themes, and settings. Studio’s AI Assistant can also help you make updates to your local sites.
Edit individual files
Beyond installing plugins and themes, you can also edit your site’s files directly.
Studio gives you quick access to those files from the Overview tab.
The “Open in…” section gives you quick access to the site’s files and folders.
This is useful if you want to edit a local site’s files, including plugin or theme files, in your preferred code editor.
Each time you edit and save a file, your local site will immediately start using the updated version — there’s no need to wait for files to upload to a server.
Tip: Our blog post on Local WordPress Development Workflows Using WordPress Studio includes a helpful section on the ideal development workflow, whether you’re creating sites, plugins, or themes.
Share a preview of a local site
While working on a site, you can also use the preview feature to get client and collaborator feedback.
Previews are a useful addition to any workflow because they help you get more accurate feedback, faster.
This way, your clients get to experience the site for themselves, instead of relying on inefficient screenshots or video walkthroughs.
All you need to do is share the temporary URL with clients and team members, and they can inspect the site snapshot remotely.
The preview feature is powered by WordPress.com and uses a temporary domain (wp.build).
The main aspects of the preview sites feature include:
One-time snapshot: Any changes you make to the site after creating the preview won’t be applied to the preview (unless you update it). This lets you continue to work on the local site without affecting the preview. WP Admin access: Anyone with a WordPress user account on the site can log in to the preview to access WP Admin. Free functionality: You don’t need hosting to create a preview site, just a free WordPress.com account. Create multiple preview sites: You can have up to 10 preview sites at a time. Seven-day access: Preview sites are temporary and are deleted after seven days, but updating a site restarts the seven-day expiry period. Step 4: Connect and sync with a remote site
After building locally, use Studio’s Sync feature to synchronize your local and hosted sites in either direction (push or pull).
The user-friendly interface and ability to selectively sync reduce the risk of accidental overwrites that can happen when transferring files manually.
Tip: Sync is available on WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans. These plans have Jetpack enabled by default, so your hosted site can connect to Studio and use Sync without any extra setup.
You can synchronize between a local site and the hosted production and staging environments.
Synchronizing with the staging site is especially useful as it lets you test your work in a private hosted environment before moving it to the live production site.
As Studio supports selective sync, you can push or pull only the files, folders, or database tables you need.
Thanks to selective sync, it’s easy to push just a theme from your local site to your hosted WordPress.com site and vice versa, leaving the rest of the site intact.
A backup is created when you initiate a sync, so you can restore your site if necessary. An email notification is also sent when the sync completes.
Step 5: Test on staging and push changes
Now it’s time to test the site in a staging environment — a feature available to WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans.
This gives you a safe place to identify issues before they go live.
For the best results, follow one of these workflows after creating a WordPress.com staging site:
Go to your Sites list in the WordPress.com dashboard. Select the site you want to create a staging site for. Open the Overview tab and click the “Add staging site +” link. You can use the switcher to change between the production and staging environments.
See the WordPress.com documentation to find out how staging sites work.
Now that your staging site is set up, here are two workflows that show how to use WordPress Studio when working on client sites:
Workflow for new sites
This workflow for building a new client site involves creating a local site, sharing a preview, pushing to the staging site, and then pushing to the production site.
Follow these steps:
Create a new local site in Studio. Use the Preview feature to share your work with the client. Once the client approves the work, push the local site to the staging environment. After testing, push the staging site to the production environment to make it available online. WordPress.com has a built-in Coming Soon mode with a preview feature that’s useful for controlling access to sites in development.
Workflow for existing sites
This workflow lets you update an existing live site without overwriting important content or disrupting anything outside the changes you’ve made.
Selective Sync ensures you don’t overwrite important live content — such as form submissions, comments, orders, or anything added while you were working.
For this scenario:
Use Studio’s Sync feature to pull the entire live site to a local site. Update the local site, such as editing the theme files. Use the Preview feature to share those changes with the client. After client approval, selectively sync the theme files to push them from the local site to the staging site. Test the staging site. If everything works as expected, push the relevant files and folders from the staging site to the production site without syncing the database. The live site now includes your theme changes, and any other updates made while you were working locally won’t be overwritten.
Step 6: Scale across multiple clients
Once your workflow is in place, WordPress Studio makes it easy to scale your process across multiple client projects.
Instead of repeating setup work or jumping between disconnected tools, you can reuse configurations, switch between projects instantly, and keep each site organized and isolated.
Use Studio’s core actions to stay efficient as your client list grows:
Create: Set up a separate local site for each client — start with a fresh installation, use a Blueprint, or import a backup. Switch: Move easily between projects by switching between local sites. Share: Use the Preview feature to share work with clients and collaborators. Sync: If you’re on WordPress.com Business or Commerce plans, use Sync to transfer work between local, staging, and production environments. Streamline client projects with WordPress Studio
WordPress Studio is a fast, open-source, and free way to build and manage local WordPress sites.
It helps you save time, share work with clients more effectively, and reduce errors when transferring files.
Blueprints let you spin up consistent, pre-configured sites in seconds, reducing setup time and repetitive work — so you can receive and apply client feedback with ease.
If you’re using WordPress.com’s Business or Commerce plans, Sync adds an extra layer by letting you move work between local, staging, and production safely and with confidence.
The bottom line: No matter where the final site is hosted, Studio helps you manage multiple client projects with less overhead and more control.
Explore WordPress Studio View the full article

By Drewfus · December 17, 2025Dec 17
Grow Your Website’s Audience with Our New Free Course

Want more people to actually find and follow your website?
Our new course — Grow Your Website’s Audience — is here to guide you through the strategies and tools that help you attract visitors, build trust, and turn casual readers into loyal followers.
It’s fully self-paced, so you can jump into any lesson at any time and spend more time on the topics that matter most to you.
Start the free course What you’ll learn
Across seven practical lessons, you’ll learn how to:
Create content that builds trust and engagement — craft posts that show expertise, clarity, and personality. Get found in search results — master SEO basics and make your content discoverable by both search engines and AI tools. Leverage social media — connect your site to platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn with Jetpack Social, and make it easy for readers to share your work. Build an email audience — set up a newsletter and keep your readers coming back with every new post. Advertise your content — use Blaze to promote posts directly from your dashboard and reach new audiences across WordPress.com and Tumblr. Use your stats for smarter decisions — track what’s working, identify your most popular content, and refine your strategy. Plan for long-term success — set realistic goals, stay consistent, and keep evolving with your audience. Why you should take this course
Your website won’t grow on its own — you need a clear strategy for attracting the right people and keeping them engaged, and this course gives you that foundation.
It gives you a simple framework to move forward, with practical steps, real examples, and tools you can start using right away.
Start the free course More video resources to explore
If you’re new to WordPress.com or ready to keep leveling up, check out our other popular courses and video tutorials:
Intro to SEO course Create a Website course Start a Blog course Create and edit menus in WordPress Learn the WordPress Editor Speed Up Your Design with WordPress Patterns Master WordPress Images, Galleries, Slideshows & More How to Accept Payments on WordPress.com (No Store Needed) View the full article

By Drewfus · December 15, 2025Dec 15
Why Start a Blog in 2026? 9 Solid Reasons From a Blogger

A blog is one of the best investments you can make — personally and professionally.
It can drive traffic to your website, boost your career or business, help you learn valuable skills, or simply give you a creative outlet.
Even after 10 years of blogging for myself and others, I still find it enjoyable, meaningful, and one of the most effective ways to earn web traffic.
So come along and see why you should start a blog in 2026.
1. Be visible in search engines
Search is changing in 2025 — but blogs are still one of the best ways to ensure people find you online.
Traditional search engines like Google still send huge amounts of traffic to the posts and pages that rank — and the same content often gets cited or summarized by AI tools like ChatGPT.
Here’s a quick snapshot:
In 2024, Google alone received more than five trillion searches (around 14 billion per day). Website visitors from AI search are projected to surpass traditional search visitors in 2028, while being worth 4.4x the value of traditional organic search traffic because visitors come more informed. Consequently, it’s not surprising that 81% of marketers continue to see results from their blog posts, 21% even report strong results.
Blogging is an essential tool to showcase your expertise, which is key for both Google and AI search tools.
So, if your goal is to attract website visitors from those sources, starting a blog is definitely a step in the right direction.
2. Attract long-term, sustainable traffic
Unlike the short-lived bursts of social media content, blog posts continue to create value and bring in visitors long after they’ve been published.
Blogging efforts compound over time.
On most social networks, your visibility often declines quickly when you stop posting.
However, the content you publish on your blog is a long-term investment that keeps paying off.
For example, below is a screenshot from an article on my own website:
Published at the end of May 2025, you can clearly see that its rank, impressions, and clicks have slowly improved over the months. Six months later, it has become one of my top five pages for organic traffic.
This goes hand in hand with insights from Databox, where nearly half of the people surveyed stated that older blog posts bring in 61-80% of their organic traffic.
This research also highlights the value of consistency and patience: 32% of survey respondents said it took them four to six months to reach 1,000 monthly visitors.
Blogging is effective because once you’ve reached a certain level, you can expect your efforts to keep paying dividends.
3. Build a brand and attract clients
A blog helps you sharpen your online profile and build a reputation, both for a personal website and/or for your business.
It’s the perfect vehicle to demonstrate your expertise, skills, values, personality, and what you want people to associate with you.
According to HubSpot’s 2025 State of Blogging Report:
66% of businesses that blog do so to boost brand awareness 53% do it for customer engagement 49% do it for lead generation Half of marketers said their ROI from blogging increased in 2024, and 45% were planning to expand their blogging budgets in 2025.
Blogging isn’t just for companies, though.
Even a personal blog can create real-world opportunities. Think paid writing gigs, speaking engagements, consulting jobs, or media and brand partnerships.
Some bloggers, like Chris Guillebeau and James Clear, even translate their blogging into book deals:
I’ve experienced this myself.
In my 10+ years as a freelance writer, I rarely had to do active outreach. I got my start by writing a blog, then used that body of work to land my first client.
For the past decade, I have continued to find work because of articles I had already published on my clients’ sites, as well as my own.
Blogging has allowed me to demonstrate my expertise and build a reputation — and it can do the same for you.
4. Generate a stable income
Besides opening doors to paid opportunities, a blog itself can be a direct source of income.
Blogging has low overhead, can be done from anywhere, and offers many paths for monetization.
Here are the most common ways bloggers earn money:
Services: Write about the problems your target audience faces and let them hire you to help. For example, SEO agencies and consultants may publish SEO tutorials and upsell their services. Affiliate marketing: Recommend products or services using special links. When someone buys through your link, you earn a commission. Digital products: Create and sell your own ebooks, templates, courses, or downloads. You keep 100% of the profit. Advertisement: Reserve space on your site for ads, either through ad networks or direct deals, and earn money through clicks or impressions. For example, users on the WordPress.com Premium plan and above can join WordAds — the platform’s built-in ad network for monetizing site traffic. You can see this in action in the food blog The Fig Jar.
In the last quarter of 2024, its owner earned nearly $7,000 in net profit from a mix of display ads, affiliate marketing, and digital products.
Another example is Meal Prep Manual, which, you guessed it, mainly publishes meal prep recipes.
It’s monetized through affiliate marketing and digital products.
While the site doesn’t publish income reports, Semrush’s Traffic Analytics tool estimates it received over 120K total visitors in September 2025 alone:
That’s a solid traffic base for a blog that has been around since 2020, especially when paired with its YouTube channel.
Using these tactics, a blog can grow into an income stream — or even a full-time business — that gives you independence and the ability to be your own boss. For example, you could start a content writing or web design agency.
5. Own your presence and audience
Unlike a social media profile, your blog can’t be taken from you. It’s an online presence you actually own, which makes you far more resilient to changes.
Influencer culture has made it seem like being present online means massive followings on Instagram, TikTok, or other social networks.
You should never lose sight of the fact that your profiles on these platforms are assets you don’t really own:
When platforms change their algorithms, designs, or priorities, your reach can evaporate. Your account could be suspended for an accidental violation of the terms of service. Legislation or policy changes could shut the network down — or block access in your region. A company or person you don’t want to support might acquire your favorite platform. In simple terms, when you don’t own the infrastructure, everything you’ve built can disappear overnight, including your audience, income, and archive of work.
Just look at the responses in this Reddit thread about a potential ban of TikTok in the US:
Owning your blog gives you complete control over your content. That said, you can always combine multiple channels and grow your presence — just don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
With a WordPress-based site, you own both your content, data, and design. You can export it, download it, and take it with you wherever you want. Including your audience, especially if you build an email list alongside your blog.
6. Build a content foundation for repurposing
A blog not only gives you a hub for all your content efforts — every post you publish is raw material for dozens of other content pieces.
Blogging allows you to do the hard work once and then repurpose it for the rest of your marketing channels.
This is why so many creators, marketers, and businesses build their content strategy around long-form blog posts. One article can become:
One or more YouTube or TikTok videos A series of Bluesky or Threads posts An email series for your newsletter The basis for an infographic Podcast material For example, I turned a book summary I wrote for my own blog into a LinkedIn carousel:
Sure, repurposing takes time — but a large share of the work is already done.
Why waste it? Each new article you publish can fuel your social feeds, nurture your email list, and reinforce your expertise across platforms.
7. Learn, grow, and inspire others
Running a blog is a powerful tool for learning — and teaching. It forces you to truly understand the topics you cover and also lets you contribute to the success of others in a meaningful way.
If there’s something you are deeply interested in or passionate about, starting a blog about it is a great way to expand your knowledge and competence in that area.
It takes a lot of research to understand something to the point where you can explain it to other people.
For example, much of what I know about SEO, CSS, or how to customize WordPress through code comes from writing blog posts about these topics.
In addition, sharing what you learn is very satisfying. It allows you to help other people. In fact, many bloggers start out because they want to make a difference and contribute to society.
8. Build a valuable skill set
Besides expanding your knowledge, running a blog teaches you a wide range of valuable skills, both technical, creative, organizational, and interpersonal.
Many of these make you a stronger employee, collaborator, freelancer, or creator.
Naturally, one of the main skills you’ll sharpen is your writing ability.
In addition, here is a sampling of the design and marketing skills you’ll use regularly when producing blog content:
Coming up with blog topics and ideas Keyword research Outlining and structuring content Research skills Editing and revising Content management Content formatting and readability Using header tags correctly Retouching images with tools like Photoshop Creating visuals (e.g., with Canva) On-page SEO Image optimization Besides that, you also learn a surprising number of soft skills: self-motivation, goal setting, discipline, time management, and putting yourself in your readers’ shoes.
Running a blog is an education in its own right.
9. Enjoy yourself
You don’t have to blog with a financial goal in mind or to achieve a strategic outcome.
Blogging can also be a deeply personal activity you simply do because it’s fun, meaningful, or provides you with a creative outlet.
For example, you might start a blog to:
Share your ideas Document a journey (emotional or physical) Chronicle your everyday life Build a creative habit Claim your own little corner of the web Clarify your thinking Explore hobbies Confront fears or shyness Share your passions Grow as a person Champion a cause you care about These are just a few examples. When you look online, you will find that people have many reasons to start a blog.
For example, this blogger turned to writing and sharing recipes online after losing her restaurant during COVID, using a blog to keep her passion alive and reach people worldwide:
How to easily start a blog with WordPress.com
Does the list above have you feeling motivated and wanting to start a blog right away?
Good news: You can have one up and running in less than 15 minutes.
Just click on Get started in the top right corner of this blog or the WordPress.com homepage.
Every WordPress.com hosting plan comes with automated backups, updates, performance optimization, and security features.
That way, you can fully concentrate on creating content, learning, and connecting with your audience.
Once signed up, pick a blog theme in your admin panel under Appearance → Themes to choose what your blog will look like.
Customize your design using the Site Editor — from colors and fonts to individual page elements. Access it under Appearance → Editor.
You can also create new pages, add them to a menu, and define your blog page if you don’t want your posts to appear on your front page.
That’s basically it. All that’s left is to start creating blog posts and putting them online.
If you want more details and step-by-step instructions, check our detailed article on how to start a blog. We also have instructions for how to properly write a blog post and how to increase blog traffic.
Your blog starts here
So, why should you start a blog, even in 2026?
The better question is: Why not?
Everything that made blogging successful is still relevant today, even if the online environment is changing.
Running a blog allows you to attract long-term traffic, make a name for yourself or your business, and monetize your audience.
It’s also a way to build knowledge, learn valuable skills, or simply do something enjoyable.
If you want a partner that makes it easy to start a blog at any skill level and without a technical background, sign up for WordPress.com.
View the full article

By Drewfus · December 11, 2025Dec 11
10 Best WordPress Holiday Plugins for a Little Holiday Cheer

The holidays are here, and your website deserves a glow-up to celebrate the season.
Whether you run an online store or a blog, plugins can transform your site into a festive experience that delights visitors and boosts engagement.
From falling snowflakes to advent calendar giveaways, we’ve rounded up 10 holiday plugins that add seasonal charm and set you up for holiday success.
1. Christmas Panda
Christmas Panda lets you add festive Christmas decorations to your site with just a few clicks.
In the Christmas Panda tab in your WordPress admin panel, you can select from a variety of decorations.
The plugin offers a merry mix of header and footer banner designs, bold snowflakes that drift down your pages, and holiday pop-ups.
You have the option to add just one Christmas design element, or you can add all three for a maximalist Christmas extravaganza.
Our favorite features
Intuitive admin panel: Christmas Panda’s admin tab is extremely intuitive, with just a few buttons to configure. Even beginning website owners can set up decorations within minutes. Lots of banner options: Whether you want garlands, bows, or plain pine needles, Christmas Panda’s banners will suit many different site designs. Snowflakes: If your site has a background color, the snowflakes feature adds a bit of cheer without overwhelming your content. How to use Christmas Panda on your site
Add a Christmas mood to your site: Create a small seasonal moment that turns static layouts into something visitors instantly recognize as festive and intentional. Tip: If you’re a WordPress.com user, you can add falling snow without installing a plugin — check out this quick guide on how to do it.
2. Super Advent Calendar
The Super Advent Calendar plugin adds a customizable block featuring flippable cards for each day leading up to Christmas.
You can add as many days as you’d like to your advent calendar — e.g., the traditional 24 days of flippable cards or a custom number.
You can also customize both the front and back text, as well as the colors, creating a calendar that matches your site’s styling.
Our favorite features
Calendar Customization: We like that this holiday plugin lets you customize each Advent card individually. Because you control the text on both card sides and can add as many days to the calendar as you’d like, you can create a truly unique experience. Opportunities for daily engagement: You can set each Advent block’s start and end dates to offer site users daily perks. The 24-hour window for each gift can incentivize shoppers to complete their orders and encourage them to return for more.   How to use the Super Advent Calendar on your site
Create an Advent Calendar of deals: If you run a WooCommerce or other digital store, you can create a “12 (or 24) Days of Deals” page with your calendar. This seasonal addition gamifies the shopping experience and rewards daily visitors. Share other fun content behind each card: If you don’t sell anything on your site, you can still get creative with the advent calendar. Consider sharing subscriber-only content, fun facts relevant to your blog topic, and more. 3. Woo Store Vacation
Woo Store Vacation is a plugin that automatically pauses your WooCommerce store for a set vacation period, because website owners deserve a break over the holiday, too!
It’s meant to support a variety of business needs. You can close your store completely (don’t worry, this won’t affect your SEO thanks to the plugin’s settings) or simply alert customers that there will be a processing delay before their order is fulfilled.
Our favorite features
Site banner: You can customize the text and color of your vacation announcement. This banner shows up at the top of all of your store pages. Customize what products are disabled: You can also decide which products and shipping options are disabled during your vacation. Find this option in the “Conditions page,” which shows up once you’ve disabled purchases. How to use Woo Store Vacation on your site
Add a banner with vacation dates in advance: Transparent communication with customers is vital. If you fulfill orders manually or need to do backend admin for fulfillment partners, communicating your vacation dates sets clear expectations and keeps customers happy. Only disable products you fulfill manually: If external providers fulfill some of your orders automatically or you offer digital products and gift cards, you can continue earning income on these items while you’re away. 4. Weather Effect
The Weather Effect plugin is another way to add a holiday twist to your site with falling holiday emojis.
Choose from several sets of icons, including a Christmas set — snowmen, ornaments, candy canes, and more — or customizable snowflakes.
Our favorite features
Multiple holidays included: There are various occasion sets available, giving you multiple opportunities throughout the year to add a little movement to your site. Works well on white backgrounds: Because most of the icons are colorful, you can use this plugin even if your site has a white background (though the round snowflakes are only available in white). Adjust speed and density: You can also adjust how fast your holiday icons fall and their density for greater customization. How to use it on your site
Add Christmas or winter decor: Dust your site with snowflakes or snowmen for a touch of winter charm. Keep it clean: Keep the density and speed low to minimize clutter. Add effects for upcoming holidays: Then, change up the icons to celebrate New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, or to mark the start of Spring. 5. Santa’s Christmas Countdown
Santa’s Christmas Countdown is a simple plugin that lets you display the number of days until Christmas on any page of your site.
On Christmas Day, the Santa icon wishes visitors a Merry Christmas.

Use a shortcode block with the code [countdown] to add Santa and the number of days until Christmas to any page.
You can also format the element to the center, left, or right by expanding the shortcode to [countdown-center], etc.
Our favorite features
Simple and lightweight: This plugin has just one preset icon (Santa) and his countdown. This simplicity means it’s easy to set up and lightweight to run. How to use Christmas Countdown on your site
Add a countdown across your site: Use the countdown as a header or sidebar widget to keep visitors excited about the upcoming holiday. Use the countdown year-round on relevant pages: If you have Christmas-themed content pages — like a Christmas recipe collection or Christmas DIY — leave the widget up year-round. 6. WooCommerce Gift Wrapper
WooCommerce Gift Wrapper lets WooCommerce stores offer holiday wrapping services as an add-on purchase.
This is a great upsell opportunity for e-commerce stores, which adds convenience for shoppers who may prefer to ship gifts directly to friends and families.
You can also add a gift note to complete the Christmas package.
Our favorite features
Flexible add-ons: While the plugin is called “Gift Wrapper,” it doesn’t limit you to offering just gift wrap. You can also use it to sell other holiday add-ons such as greeting cards, gift messages, and more. Seamless setup: The plugin integrates seamlessly into your WooCommerce checkout flow, making the upsell more helpful than pushy. How to use WooCommerce Gift Wrapper on your site
Offer seasonal gift wrapping services: Offer gift wrapping at checkout to increase your average order value during the holiday shopping season. You can set a flat fee for wrapping or create tiered pricing for different wrapping styles, like basic, premium, and luxury. Plan your wrapping services accordingly: You can also choose whether you want to charge for wrapping the whole order or per item. 7. Snow Fall
If you’re looking for a subtle holiday addition, the Snow Fall plugin adds just a glimmer of snow to your web pages.
Simply activate the plugin, and a light dusting of shimmering white flakes will appear across your site — no configuration required.
Our favorite features
A lightweight plugin: Snow Fall is just a few lines of code, so you’ll get snowflakes without any freeze on your load time. One-click activation: Once you activate the Snow Fall plugin, you’re all set! No additional configuration is required.   How to use Snow Fall on your site
Because the snowflakes are white and it’s not possible to adjust the color, this plugin will only work on sites with a colored background.
If that applies to your site, activate Snow Fall and enjoy a little holiday spirit on every page.
8. Poptin Popups
Poptin Popups offers customizable, gamified popups and forms that can be triggered on a variety of customer clicks or views.
Use these pop-ups to encourage users to sign up for your mailing list or to complete checkout from your store.
While Poptin Popups is a powerful integrated marketing tool that can be used year-round, a holiday-themed campaign is a great place to start.
Our favorite features
Powerful feature set: Poptin is extremely powerful and flexible, which makes it a great tool for marketing teams who want tons of control. Pre-made templates and campaign ideas: Poptin offers a ton of pre-made templates and resources, including a list of Christmas pop-up ideas. Intuitive dashboard: Poptin’s simple dashboard, template collection, and built-in WordPress integration make it easy for first-time users to experiment with smaller campaigns. How to use Poptin Popups on your site
Design a holiday-themed campaign: The sky is the limit when it comes to building a holiday pop-up campaign. For example, create a pop-up offering 15% off for visitors who sign up before Christmas Eve, or use a countdown timer pop-up to remind shoppers of your shipping cut-off for holiday orders. Continue using pop-ups for future events: After the holidays, consider other themed campaign opportunities. 9. RS Christmas Trees
Like Christmas Panda, the RS Christmas Trees plugin offers holiday-themed banners and snowflakes.
If your Christmas style is truly maximalist, this holiday WordPress plugin might be perfect for you.
It’s the most robust decor plugin on this list, offering a trove of banners, countdowns, snowflakes, and more — including holiday music.
Our favorite features
Automatic scheduling: If you upgrade to Ultimate, you can decide how many days you want to activate your Christmas features. Once it’s set up, you’ll get automatic Christmas cheer without any admin. Snowflakes that work on white backgrounds: We like that their snowflake colors can be customized, so even sites with white backgrounds can get in on the holiday fun. How to use RS Christmas Trees on your site
Create a cohesive design: Add header and footer banners to your site in coordinating styles and match your snowflake color to your brand palette for a polished look. Test your banners: If you’re using sticky footer banners, be sure to test them on multiple pages to ensure they don’t block critical text. 10. The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar plugin lets you publish events and offer tickets directly on your site.
It includes features like custom ticket types, venue details with maps, multiple organizers, and event search — all available in the free version.
Our favorite features
Easy setup: The Events Calendar walks you through setup in five simple steps, including adding a venue, an organizer, and ticketing. You still need to navigate the WordPress admin, but the onboarding makes each required field clear. Ticketing: You can create free tickets or enable paid ticketing with the free Tickets Commerce. Ticketed events can be a great source of income, and using an integrated app like The Events Calendar helps you keep all your data in one place. How to use Random Christmas Facts on your site
Add upcoming holiday events: Whether you host in-person or virtual events for the holidays, you can add them directly to your website with the Events Calendar. Create a discount or deal calendar: If you prefer a true calendar-style layout instead of the simpler Advent-style list, you can use The Events Calendar to showcase holiday discounts or daily deals. It takes a bit of creativity, but one approach is to create a “deal event” for each day, limit RSVPs to that date, and then send everyone who RSVP’d a special discount code. Light up your site for the holidays
Preparing your site for the holidays doesn’t need to be as complicated as untangling your Christmas lights.
You can add plugins to any WordPress.com site on a plugin-enabled plan, so choose just one or multiple ideas from this guide to experiment with this December.
Don’t forget to check your site analytics afterward: Did your calendar giveaway increase repeat visitors? Did the sprinkle of snowfall increase your average user session? If you’re a WordPress.com user, you can explore these stats right in your admin panel using Jetpack stats.
Consider these plugins your gift to your visitors — a festive site means happier users, better engagement, and a merrier holiday season.
Explore more WordPress plugins View the full article

By Drewfus · December 10, 2025Dec 10
AI Website Building: Separating Hype from Reality

I built my business site on WordPress and often recommend it — along with tools like Jetpack and the new AI website builder — to people in my network.
I’m an experienced website designer, but I’m not a software developer.
Vibe coding has been a fun, seemingly magical way to turn ideas into working mini-apps, but that “magic” comes with limits. The tools I’ve created work well for my internal team, yet I don’t understand the backend deeply enough to share them publicly or monetize them safely.
After building dozens of prototypes, I’ve learned that AI prototyping tools are great for fast experimentation — but some fall short in powering the backend of long-term business websites.
In this article, I’ll break down what AI site generators can do, where their limitations show up, and why WordPress.com’s AI website builder takes a very different approach.
What are AI website builders?
The term “AI site builder” refers to the use of AI tools and plain-language prompts to generate a website.
There are two major categories of these tools:
Lightweight AI builders: Similar to Lovable and Framer, which are also referred to as AI prototyping tools. They’re great for simple landing pages or MVPs, but their limitations show quickly when you need security, SEO, integrations, or room to grow. This is what people refer to when talking about “vibe coding.” Full-featured AI builders: Similar to WordPress.com’s AI website builder. They package prompt-based website generation backed by the stability and proven track record of managed platforms like WordPress. The reality is: If you want something more than an MVP or single landing page, vibe coding alone isn’t enough.
You need a platform that can support performance, reliability, security, and growth.
The limitations of AI prototyping tools
AI prototyping tools are great for quick ideas — but not for lasting websites.
They deliver instant results: Describe what you want, and a site appears.
That speed makes them perfect for brainstorming, testing concepts, or validating ideas without friction.
Unfortunately, that’s also their limitation.
These tools hide much of the complexity behind building a dependable site for your business, making it hard to spot problems until something breaks.
When you add new features or generate a site, you often end up troubleshooting issues you didn’t even know existed.
For example:
You can’t see or control the underlying systems. Integrations break without clear reasons. Downtime is difficult to diagnose. Security isn’t guaranteed or built in. Your website represents your brand — and you shouldn’t rely on something you can’t fully understand or maintain.
What makes WordPress.com’s AI website builder different
WordPress.com’s AI website builder gives you the “type a prompt, get a site” experience on a platform that actually scales.
What makes it special?
Your site is built on WordPress — the CMS powering 43% of the web — and hosted on WordPress.com’s fully managed infrastructure.
In other words, you get fast generation plus the customization, plugins, performance, and security needed to actually run and grow a real website.
Security
Many AI-generated sites are rife with security issues precisely because they simplify everything so heavily.
You can accidentally expose API keys, break authentication, mishandle user data, or leave vulnerabilities without knowing.
For any site hosted on WordPress.com, security and infrastructure are managed by a 20-plus-year ecosystem and a dedicated team that continually hardens code, patches vulnerabilities, and maintains platform standards.
With vetted plugins, managed WordPress hosting, and standardized best practices, most of the security risk is taken off your plate.
Performance
SEO isn’t something you can just bolt on later. Many vibe coding tool brands are realizing they need to offer SEO features, but WordPress has been building toward this for decades.
WordPress has long been considered an SEO-friendly platform because of its clean baseline code, fast rendering, and structured content.
WordPress.com also includes managed hosting and performance-focused infrastructure across its paid plans: high-frequency CPUs, a global CDN/edge cache, unmetered traffic, and automated burst-scaling.
In other words, you’re not just getting features — you’re getting faster, more resilient hosting by default.
Extensibility
Speaking from experience, vibe coding and using external APIs or third-party services is harder than it looks, even for semi-technical users.
Access to WordPress.com’s plugins means your site can grow with you instead of boxing you in.
You don’t have to build everything manually or worry that your integrations will silently fail.
Hosting
When using vibe coding tools, the web hosting layer is often hidden from you, so you have little visibility or control.
With these tools, if your site goes down or integrations fail, you’re the one responsible for troubleshooting, often without the tools or access needed to fix the issue.
Moreover, if you don’t know what you’re dealing with, it’s also likely that you don’t know how to get assistance at a reasonable price — costs spiral quickly.
With WordPress.com, hosting is managed for you in a way that’s optimized, secure, and monitored. If something goes wrong, you’re not left guessing — you have the peace of mind that comes with access to 24/7 support from the human Happiness Engineers.
Design
Vibe-coding tools feel instantly creative, but that freedom usually comes without structure — and if you’re not a designer, it can get overwhelming fast.
WordPress.com’s AI website builder is different.
It lets you create websites using AI prompts, but with a real block-based WordPress foundation behind it.
You can edit every section cleanly with blocks (alongside the AI chat), keep your layout consistent, and avoid the chaos of loose, AI-generated code.
Costs
No AI site builder stays completely “free” once you move past the free trial.
If you want to publish, update your site regularly, or add essential features, you’ll need a paid plan with any platform.
However, vibe coding (especially for a non-technical user) can obscure hidden costs like dealing with:
Downtime Broken integrations Manual debugging Data exposure A managed platform like WordPress.com reduces the likelihood of costly failures and handles maintenance for you. Once you’re happy with your AI site, you can simply pick a plan and publish it.
How to use WordPress.com’s AI builder
You start with a simple prompt: describe your idea, your tone, your brand, and your purpose.
As an homage to a blog I created after graduating college, which solidified my love for writing and SEO, I went with this prompt:
“Create a lifestyle blog called ‘ChiTown on a Dime’ for young professionals in Chicago living large on a budget. It will feature affordable restaurant reviews, budget-friendly events, insider local guides, and personal reflections on city life. Design pages for Home, Eats & Drinks, Things to Do, Living in Chicago, About, and Contact. Use a modern, minimalistic layout with vibrant photos and easy navigation. Tone should be energetic, stylish, and relatable.”
The result?
A full block-based website that would’ve taken hours to create from scratch — not loose code you can’t maintain.
The builder definitely understood the assignment, creating the following site with a photo of Chicago deep-dish pizza, front and center:
With the foundation in place, you can refine the site using conversational language with the AI copilot:
“Adjust the layout.” “Change these colors.” “Rewrite this section.” “Suggest improvements.” Here’s what it suggested when I prompted the assistant to show me new fonts for my site, and what it looked like to apply changes from chat:
Here’s the helpful advice it shared for making my new creation more SEO-friendly when I asked it for tips:

The AI builder gives you a full trial to create and refine your site without paying up front.
When it’s time to launch publicly and rely on managed hosting, security, and performance, you can move to a paid plan.
Can your site grow with you?
These are the questions you should ask before choosing your ideal AI website building solution:
Can this site evolve? Can it scale? Can it handle more pages, products, languages, or additional features? WordPress.com’s AI website builder blends the speed of modern AI with the maturity of a platform that has supported millions of websites for 20 years.
Your site can grow indefinitely with plugins, SEO tools, plugins like WooCommerce, and reliable hosting.
Try WordPress.com’s AI website builder for free, then publish it for the world to see with a paid plan.

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By Drewfus · December 8, 2025Dec 8
State of the Word 2025 Recap: The Top Highlights

On December 2, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Executive Director Mary Hubbard, and Lead Architect Matías Ventura took the stage in San Francisco — joined by contributors and guests from around the world.
And for the first time, a major WordPress release launched live during the keynote — WordPress 6.9 went out to the world as the audience watched.
If you missed the livestream, you can watch the full recording below:
Our favorite highlights from 2025
2025 was a milestone year for WordPress. The project shipped two major releases, welcomed record numbers of first-time contributors, and saw global adoption accelerate — especially in non-English markets.
Here’s what stood out:
WordPress continues to power the open web. About 43% of all websites run on WordPress, with roughly 60% CMS market share. Among the top 1,000 sites, adoption grew to 49.4% — up 2.3% from last year. A truly global community. For the first time, over 56% of WordPress sites are in languages other than English. Japanese became the second-most-used language, with Japan reaching 58.5% website share and 83% CMS share. A thriving ecosystem. Over 60,000 plugins are now available, with downloads on track to hit 2.1 billion by year’s end. Block theme adoption grew over 40%, passing 1,000 themes. Record contributor numbers. WordPress 6.8 had 921 contributors. WordPress 6.9 brought over 900, including 230 first-timers. WordPress 6.9 launched live on stage. By the end of the keynote, over 700,000 sites had already been updated. Tip: Learn more about the most exciting WordPress 6.9 features for website owners and developers.
AI takes center stage
This year’s AI panel featured James LePage (Automattic), Felix Arntz (Google), and Jeff Paul (10up).
And here’s one of the central themes from the keynote: AI is becoming foundational to WordPress.
Matt Mullenweg announced that a dedicated AI team was formed earlier this year. In just six months, they shipped all four planned “building blocks”:
Abilities API: Exposes the capabilities of plugins, themes, and WordPress core to AI agents in a standardized, machine-readable format. WP AI Client: An abstraction layer for communicating with any generative AI model — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or others — so developers can write prompts without locking into one provider. MCP Adapter: Bridges the Abilities API with AI providers through the Model Context Protocol, letting AI assistants understand and act within WordPress. AI Experiments plugin: Now live on the WordPress plugin repository. Besides, the keynote featured a demo of Telex, a tool that generates Gutenberg blocks from natural language.
During the keynote, Mullenweg showed how Nick Hamze used it to build a Lego price calculator and Google Calendar integration — without writing any code.

All these building blocks set the stage for what the AI panel previewed for 7.0: a Workflows API for stringing abilities together, collaborative editing with AI assistance, and the WP AI Client moving into core.
AI features aren’t visible in the interface yet, but WordPress is now intelligible to AI systems — and the groundwork is laid for what comes next.
Tip: WordPress.com users can also explore our AI website builder, which helps you create, design, customize, and launch your site much faster and more easily.
WordPress around the world
The keynote also highlighted the increasingly global nature of WordPress:
81 WordCamps — community-organized conferences for WordPress users and contributors — took place across 39 countries this year. Over 5,200 volunteers organized them, reaching more than 100,000 people in person. And there are still 16 more scheduled before year’s end. Learn.wordpress.org served over 1.5 million users, with average engagement time up 32% after WordCamp US 2025. Education programs are expanding, too. Campus Connect is bringing WordPress into universities — Stephanie Garita Johnson from Universidad Fidélitas in Costa Rica spoke about how students there now earn academic credit for contributing to open source. And in Nicaragua, Youth Day brought together 75 kids ages 8 to 20 to build their first WordPress sites — with teenagers teaching teenagers. Ecosystem and infrastructure updates
WordPress is also getting faster to ship, easier to test, and safer to update.
This year’s improvements focused on reducing friction for plugin developers and making it easier to spin up new sites and migrate existing ones:
Plugin reviews now take under 7 days thanks to AI-assisted review processes. The team is also handling about 100 more submissions per week than last year. A new 24-hour safety window for auto-updates gives developers time to catch issues from early adopters before updates roll out widely. WordPress Playground hit 1.4 million users from 227 countries this year. It now includes a file browser, a visual gallery of blueprints, and a stable CLI. Q&A session
The community Q&A touched on several topics:
On domains and owning your online presence
Mullenweg emphasized that a domain is “your real estate on the web” — the thing that truly belongs to you. He encouraged everyone to get their own domain, even buying one for kids at birth. Without one, “you’re kind of like a digital sharecropper.”
On the “agentic web” and AI
As AI tools start browsing and acting on websites, Mullenweg shared ideas about serving markdown versions of pages for easier AI consumption and embedding micropayments for content attribution.
On open social platforms
He pointed to Bluesky as a positive example — where you can use your own domain as your username — and noted that X has improved its handling of external links.
Explore WordPress 6.9 on WordPress.com
This year’s State of the Word made one thing clear: WordPress is evolving fast — with AI foundations in place, a growing global community, and tools that make building and collaborating easier than ever.
WordPress 6.9 is also live on WordPress.com. Explore the new features in our detailed posts:
What’s new in WordPress 6.9 for bloggers, creators, and site owners What’s new in WordPress 6.9 for developers And if you missed the livestream, the full recording is available above.
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By Drewfus · December 4, 2025Dec 4
WordPress 6.9: What’s New for Developers

WordPress 6.9 is a pivotal release that strengthens the foundation for where WordPress is heading next.
The updates to the Abilities API, Interactivity API, Block Bindings, DataViews, and DataForm make the platform more connected and easier to customize.
This release also puts developers in a better position to build interactive and intelligent features as WordPress moves into an AI-assisted future.
Read on to learn about key updates, see what’s possible, and get excited to start building with WordPress 6.9.
1. Register AI‑ready functions with the Abilities API and MCP
One of the most exciting additions to WordPress 6.9 is the new Abilities API.
When paired with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the Abilities API opens the door to AI orchestration — intelligent agents that can understand, extend, and act inside WordPress itself.
Abilities API
The Abilities API makes it possible to expose the capabilities of plugins, themes, and WordPress core to AI agents and automation tools in a standardized, machine-readable format.
This lets AI systems such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other assistants understand precisely what a particular WordPress site can do.
For example, users could give an AI assistant a natural language request to complete a range of tasks, such as:
Create a post: An AI assistant, together with external tools, could generate and schedule content, leveraging the site’s full capabilities. Audit site content: Using a site’s SEO plugin and connected tools, an AI assistant would analyze content and suggest updates. Generate sales reports: Using the ecommerce solution, an AI assistant could review sales data and produce reports. See the Abilities API in WordPress 6.9 post for more information.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
https://modelcontextprotocol.io The Abilities API works in conjunction with the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
MCP is an open standard that lets AI assistants and apps, including WordPress, understand each other.
It allows a WordPress site’s functionality, exposed by the Abilities API, to connect to AI assistants and other servers and tools in the MCP ecosystem.
Developers can install the MCP Adapter plugin to bridge their Abilities API registry with AI providers, paving the way for intelligent agents that can create posts, audit content, or generate reports from within WordPress.
Learn more about the MCP adapter for WordPress.
The AI building blocks vision
The Abilities API and the MCP Adapter are part of the AI Building Blocks initiative to allow users and developers to create powerful AI implementations within WordPress.
While AI features aren’t yet visible in the interface, the foundations being built mean WordPress is now intelligible to AI systems.
It’s still early days, but it’s the start of something meaningful.
Looking ahead, this could enable AI agents to perform real actions within WordPress, such as generating content, automating workflows, and dynamically connecting to external data sources, all through standardized APIs.
Besides, using MCP future-proofs WordPress for an AI-driven world. It allows for quick adaptation to new AI systems and protocols without requiring a restructuring of core functionality.
From that perspective, WordPress 6.9 doesn’t just set the stage for 7.0; it begins to redefine what the platform can become.
2. Build custom dashboards with DataViews and DataForm
WordPress 6.9 also strengthens the data‑management infrastructure in WordPress.
While there are no visible changes for end users, the updates to DataViews, DataForm, and the Fields API give plugin developers more control and flexibility when building custom dashboards or admin interfaces.
DataViews: more robust data displays
The DataViews component has gained several powerful enhancements:
Infinite scroll Locked filters Filtering with type-specific operators (e.g., less than, contains) Alignment and action column pinning for table layouts These improvements make it easier for developers to create consistent, flexible interfaces that display data from any source.
If you’re not yet familiar with DataViews, the component provides a powerful API for plugin developers to create interfaces that display items from a data source.
For example, an e‑commerce plugin can use it to display orders inside WP Admin. You choose which fields appear, and whether to show them as a table, grid, or list.
Users can then filter, search, paginate, and act on that data, and WordPress 6.9 adds finer control over those interactions through features like infinite scrolling and locked filters.
If you’re interested in getting started with the DataViews component, read this article on how to display and interact with data in plugins.
DataForm: flexible layouts and real‑time validation
In 6.9, updates to DataForm allow developers to choose from a number of new layout options.
These new layouts, including a new modal panel and customizable card designs, give developers more control over how complex forms are structured and presented.
Here’s what’s new:
New card and row layouts: display form fields in cards or side‑by‑side rows, rather than a single long list.
Modal or dropdown panels: choose how secondary panels open—either as dropdowns or modal dialogs.
Asynchronous validation: real‑time, rule‑based field validation means you can validate inputs both synchronously and asynchronously. These updates give developers more control over how forms look and behave, making interfaces cleaner and more intuitive.
DataViewsPicker: easier item selection
A new DataViewsPicker component extends the DataViews API with selection management and action buttons.
It’s ideal for building media pickers or any interface where users need to choose multiple items from a dataset.
End users can browse, filter, and select items in one place, improving usability.
Fields API enhancements
Finally, the Fields API has been expanded from three to 13 field types, adding support for arrays, booleans, colors, dates, email addresses, media, numbers, passwords, telephones, and URLs.
Validation is now rule‑based and supports both synchronous and asynchronous checks, making it easier to build and verify custom forms.
Together, these enhancements mean developers can define richer forms with less boilerplate and ensure data quality more easily.
3. Inject dynamic data and interactions with Block Bindings and the Interactivity APIs
Updates to the Block Bindings API and the Interactivity API in WordPress 6.9 give developers more power and flexibility to build dynamic, interactive experiences.
Block Bindings API improvements
Another change is that WordPress developers can now control which block attributes are eligible for data binding.
The Block Bindings API introduces a new filter, which lets you specify the bindable attributes of any block:
block_bindings_supported_attributes_{$block_type}
Beyond that, the API has been expanded in three important ways:
Custom binding sources in the editor: You can now register your own data sources by adding a getFieldsList() method to your source registration. This method returns an array of objects (each with a label, type, and args) to populate the binding dropdown. More blocks support binding: Binding can now be enabled for additional core blocks, including the Date block and the Image block caption, extending the range of dynamic data you can inject into content. Simpler UI for switching sources: The updated interface in the block editor makes it easy for users to switch between data sources and bind or unbind attributes with a single click. Interactivity API updates
The Interactivity API has been significantly enhanced in WordPress 6.9, making interactive features faster and more reliable.
Updates include:
Reusing shared stylesheets: 6.9 speeds up client-side navigation. Loaded stylesheets are reused where possible, with new stylesheets only loaded when needed. Script modules for interactive blocks: JavaScript modules for interactive blocks are dynamically loaded, and dependencies are automatically managed, ensuring blocks stay fast and responsive. Support for router regions: Interactive blocks can now include nested router regions and can dynamically render overlays anywhere on the page. This makes interactive features like modals, pop-ups, and dropdowns more flexible and reliable. Improved getServerState and getServerContext functions: These functions now reset properly between page transitions to ensure interactive blocks start with the correct data. New TypeScript helpers: AsyncAction and TypeYield have been introduced to help developers address potential TypeScript issues when working with asynchronous actions. Want to jump in and start experimenting with 6.9? Try binding a custom field to a caption of an Image block or using the Interactivity API to load comments or search results without reloading the entire page.
4. Style your themes faster with form controls and border-radius presets
Finally, WordPress 6.9 brings a set of practical updates for theme developers.
You get better form styling, button typography that now inherits correctly, and new options for setting border-radius size presets.
Together, these changes give you more flexibility when designing and refining themes.
Theme.json form styling
Theme.json now supports styling for form elements.
With the styles.elements property, you can target inputs and select fields to set colors, borders, and typography.
These styles apply across the entire site — including third-party plugins — giving theme developers much more control and consistency.
For more information on styling these form elements, read this blog post on how WordPress 6.9 gives forms a theme.json makeover.
Border-radius size presets
Theme creators can now define border-radius presets using human-readable names like Small, Medium, and Large.
Users can then choose these presets from a dropdown in the Block Editor and apply them to supported blocks.
This replaces repeated manual input with simple, reusable options, making designs more consistent.
Explore a step-by-step guide to creating these presets in the WordPress Developer Blog post Border radius size presets in WordPress 6.9.
Button typography inheritance
Buttons can now inherit typography from their parent styles when defined in theme.json, making it easier to maintain a consistent look across a site.
When users adjust typography in Global Styles — such as font style, text transform, letter spacing, or font weight — the wp-element-button class now picks up those changes automatically.
The before-and-after image below demonstrates how the button text has inherited the typography styles:
Try out 6.9 and help shape the future of WordPress
WordPress 6.9 brings a range of useful updates for developers — from the Abilities and Interactivity APIs to improvements in DataViews and more.
Here’s a video recap of all key updates:
The best part: It’s easy to start experimenting with them.
The fastest way to start is with WordPress Playground, a browser-based sandbox with no setup required.
Alternatively, use WordPress Studio to quickly spin up new local sites that can sync with the developer-ready managed hosting from WordPress.com. Business and Commerce plans include staging sites, SFTP/SSH access, WP-CLI, and GitHub Deployments.
Let us know how you get on and help shape the future of WordPress.

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By Drewfus · December 3, 2025Dec 3
WordPress 6.9: What’s New for Bloggers, Creators, and Site Owners

WordPress 6.9 is here, bringing a handful of upgrades that make life easier for bloggers, creators, and site owners.
This release speeds up everyday work, improves how teams collaborate, and adds new block options that give you more room to shape your site the way you want.
Here’s a look at the standout WordPress 6.9 features that have arrived since the last update in April 2025, and how they help you build more with WordPress.com.
Collaborate and stage content directly in your posts
Explore the latest Site Editor updates, which make it easier to do more directly inside WordPress without relying on extra tools or touching backend code.
Block-level Notes
Block-level Notes make collaboration much easier by letting teams leave feedback directly on the block that needs attention.
You can add threaded, resolvable notes from the toolbar or sidebar, and authors automatically get email alerts when new comments come in.
This keeps all feedback — pre-launch edits, content fixes, design tweaks, and even post-publication updates like adding new links — in one place, without needing extra tools.
Hide and Show blocks
Hide and Show lets you switch blocks on and off without deleting them, making it easier to manage content you’ll need again.
Use the visibility toggle in a block’s toolbar to temporarily hide sections like seasonal promos or recurring announcements.
This gives you a simple, built-in way to stage updates without juggling duplicate blocks or storing drafts elsewhere, and your reusable content stays exactly where you left it for when you’re ready to bring it back.
Visual drag and drop
You can now see exactly where a block will land as you drag it.
The live preview makes it much easier to move things around without guessing or fixing mistakes afterward.
It currently works with single blocks, although multi-block dragging is expected in WordPress 7.0.
Allowed blocks UI and other workflow tools
The allowed blocks UI, found under Advanced settings (with a keyboard shortcut to copy settings: Ctrl/Cmd + Alt/Option + V), lets you specify which block types are allowed within a given container.
Previously, this was only editable through block markup in code view.
By bringing these controls into the interface, WordPress now makes it easier to build more complex layouts and features without touching code.
Enrich your content with creative blocks for improved storytelling
Take advantage of new ways to display information visually within WordPress without installing additional plugins or using custom code.
Accordion block
The Accordion block lets you add collapsible sections with headings and panels, creating an interactive reading experience without requiring code or extra plugins.
It’s ideal for adding frequently asked questions (FAQs) or for expanding details and lists to add additional context within your content.
Term Query and companion blocks
The Term Query block simplifies building category and tag pages by offering a built-in way to display them, similar to the Query Loop block.
It supports sorting options (e.g., “order-by” sorting), design tools for styling, and a toggle to turn each item into a link.
When combined with the Term Description block, it offers a powerful setup for directory and magazine sites that use structured filtering or subpage navigation.
Supporting (companion) blocks include:
Term Template block Term Name block Term Count block Time‑to‑Read block
The Time-to-Read block sets expectations for readers by providing an estimated reading time (including a range) based on word count.
Although incorporating this information doesn’t directly correlate to better SEO performance, it can have an impact on user engagement, which is tangentially related.
Math block
LaTeX is a markup language and high-quality typesetting system for technical and scientific documentation.
The new Math block implements LaTeX for better visualizing mathematical equations and notations, making it especially useful for technical and educational posts.
Comment Count and Comment Link blocks
By separating the comment count from the comment link, the Comment Count and Comment Link blocks let you place comment access wherever it makes the most sense in a post.
It also lets you control which posts allow comments at all.
This functionality was once exclusive to the Site Editor, but it’s now available throughout the entire editing experience.
Create and manage reusable layouts with safe drafts and flexible templates
WordPress 6.9 introduces several exciting features that make life easier for anyone building across multiple sites — cutting down on repeat work and helping you move faster without recreating the same layouts from scratch.
Starter pattern modal everywhere
All post types containing patterns (previously just pages) now display the pop-up modal for using starter patterns.
This makes it easier for creators to drop in structured layouts across different content types, especially when working with varied or more complex designs.
Fit Text (stretchy text)
The new Fit Text option in Heading and Paragraph blocks automatically adjusts text to fill its container.
This gives you precise typographic control without writing custom CSS, making it easier to create eye-catching headers and hero sections that look polished across all screen sizes.
Gallery block aspect ratios and Cover block posters
The Gallery block’s new aspect ratio setting lets you apply a consistent ratio to all images with a single click from the sidebar.
No more manual edits or custom CSS are necessary to get a clean, unified layout.
Besides, you can add poster images to Cover blocks with video backgrounds, giving visitors on slower connections a still image to view while the video loads.
Find anything instantly with the Dashboard-wide Command Palette
You can now use the Command Palette across the entire WP Admin dashboard (not just the Site Editor), making navigation commands universally accessible.
With a single keyboard shortcut, power users and admins can bypass repetitive menu clicking and streamline their workflows.
Press Ctrl/Cmd + K on any admin screen (Posts, Pages, Media, Settings, the Site Editor, and more) to open the search/command bar and quickly run actions or jump to content.
Developers can also register custom commands through Extensible Commands, giving users even faster access to frequently used features.
Enjoy faster load times with no extra effort
WordPress is known for performance and is constantly raising the standard with new updates.
The latest technical improvements in WordPress 6.9 work together to boost performance without any extra setup on your part.
For example, these include:
On‑demand block CSS: Loads styles only for the blocks actually used on a page, improving performance for classic themes that normally ship more CSS than needed. Optimized cron execution: Improves Core Web Vitals tangentially through better Time to First Byte, by scheduling tasks to run after the page loads. Template output buffer and hidden block styles: An updated system that template developers can use to optimize HTML outputs, which results in small improvements to page performance — loading block styles only when needed, moving them to the <head> section, and reducing CSS output. It’s enabled by default for classic WordPress themes and skips loading styles for hidden blocks. Together, these changes help your pages load faster and feel smoother for visitors, all without any extra configuration.
Try WordPress 6.9’s new features today
WordPress 6.9 is already live on WordPress.com, so you can try the new tools right away and see how they fit into your workflow.
These updates might improve your experience as a content creator, boost user engagement, and ultimately increase blog traffic.
Test out Notes, the new storytelling blocks, and the template updates to get a feel for what’s possible.
If you create something you’re proud of, share it and tag us — we’d love to see it.
Want a faster, more reliable setup for everything in 6.9? Get started with WordPress.com.

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By Drewfus · December 2, 2025Dec 2
How to Create a WordPress Website With AI: Step-by-Step Tutorial

Using AI website builders is like having a conversation with a designer, developer, and copywriter rolled into one — anything you describe can be turned into a reality.
Whether you’re designing layouts, writing copy, or refining appearances, AI handles it all through simple language prompts.
This guide shows you how to build a WordPress website using AI in 12 easy steps.
Let’s assume we’re creating a site that reviews various snacks to help busy moms and health enthusiasts make purchasing decisions. You can adapt the following prompts to the site you’re building.
Step 1: Define your website’s purpose and content focus
First, list the key details about your site’s foundation. Clearly defining your brand and business details will help you draft specific prompts, which in turn sets up AI website builders for success.
You don’t need to know everything right away, but try to define the basics:
Your business or website name The kind of site you want to build (personal blog, portfolio, business site, etc.) The core focus of your site (sharing detailed articles, selling products, etc.) Your target audience What success looks like for your site Brand tone (professional, funny, modern, friendly) Key pages and sections for your site (Home, About, Products, etc.) If you’re unsure about your website’s details, you can also ask AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude for help.
For example, I used this ChatGPT prompt to brainstorm my site’s details:
“Act as a website strategist. I run Snack Reviews, which offers detailed reviews of nutrients, taste, ingredients, and more for popular snack options on the market for busy moms and health enthusiasts. Suggest the essential pages I should include, three content ideas for each, and a short list of brand adjectives that describe my ideal look and feel.”
As a result, I got several suggestions for key pages and content I could add to my site:
It’s tempting to miss this step and jump directly to creating a site, but clarifying your site’s focus and purpose will reduce the number of edits you need to make in the future.
Step 2: Explore your visual and brand style
Next, gather a few rough ideas for your website’s appearance. Think of the words that you’d use to describe your site’s visual feel — cozy, minimalistic, artistic, etc.
For example, Olipop’s site instantly appears energetic and colorful.
The bright colors, fonts, and elements give the website a playful feel:
Bosch’s website, on the other hand, is minimalistic.
The greys, clean lines, and visuals lend the site an informational and established feeling:
If you don’t know what direction you want to take your visual asthetic, use AI to brainstorm some ideas.
Here is the prompt I used with ChatGPT to find my site’s brand style:
“Suggest three color palettes and font pairings that fit a review website for snacks described as clean and minimalistic. Explain briefly what feeling each palette gives.”
I liked the second palette choice, which caters to both segments of my target audience (busy moms and fitness enthusiasts).
Step 3: Choose an AI site builder
Next, choose an AI website builder that helps you create, refine, and launch your site.
There are many AI website builders that can produce a quick layout from a prompt, but creating the initial site is only the first step.
You need a tool that lets you customize your design, edit content, add key features, and take your site live when you’re ready.
Here’s what to look for:
Easy editing: You should be able to update pages, layouts, images, and copy using both AI and manual tools (like the Site Editor). Flexible design and content: Make sure you can customize fonts, colors, sections, and regenerate copy or visuals as your site evolves. Being able to go live: Your builder should make launching simple — letting you connect a domain, publish your site, and rely on built-in hosting so everything works without extra setup. SEO and performance basics: Choose a builder that takes care of the technical side for you — like automatic speed and mobile optimization, built-in SSL, a sitemap, and fast loading through caching/CDN. It should also help you improve your pages with simple SEO recommendations. Growth features: Make sure you can add newsletters, analytics, social integrations, or ecommerce (depending on your needs). Ownership and pricing: Choose an AI builder that lets you keep your content, scale affordably, and avoid platform lock-in. For example, I’m using WordPress.com’s AI site builder. It can create a complete draft site from a single prompt — including webpages, copy, design, and navigation. You can then easily customize your site using AI or the Site Editor.
Create your website with AI Step 4: Generate your first AI-built website draft
Next, create a detailed, specific prompt using the information that you’ve gathered in steps one and two.
I used this prompt to create a website for my review site:
“Create a website called Snack Reviews that reviews popular snack options in the market for busy moms and health enthusiasts. The tone should be friendly and helpful. Include five pages: Home, Product Reviews, About, and Contact. Use a bright blue and crisp white color palette and Poppins & Inter fonts in the headings and copy, respectively.”

In a few minutes, the first draft of my website was ready.
The tool followed all the instructions given in the prompt — right from the name to the color palette to the font.
I will admit it has taken me some trial and error to learn how to prompt.
The secret is to be as specific as possible — mention the pages you want on your site, who you are making the site for, and the tone you want your site to have.
If something still doesn’t look the way you hoped, you can always prompt the AI again to work on it.
Step 5: Review and organize your pages and navigation
Next, make sure your website is smooth to navigate for your visitors.
Once your site’s first draft comes to life, you can see how all the pages appear together — and decide whether to reorder them, add a new page, or delete any unnecessary pages.
For my site, I realized people often have questions about the authenticity of food reviews if they don’t know the methods used and aren’t aware of an affiliate partnership.
So I first made a dedicated new page to address the concern using this prompt:
“Add a new page titled “Learn how we pick and review snacks” that shows how Snack Reviews chooses and reviews all the snacks on the website. Include three sections inside this page — the first section is “Our reviewing process,” the second section is “How we choose snacks to review,” and the last section is “Do we earn a commission.” Add a call-to-action button at the end that says “See an example reviewing process in action.”

I picked one layout from three options.
I also added and edited some CTA buttons to ensure the navigation is just the way I want.
After adding a new page, I wanted to reorder how the pages appeared in the navigation bar.
You can prompt AI to do this, but I chose the manual route:
1. Click on the WordPress icon in the top left corner.
2. Go to Navigation.
3. Click on Header Navigation.
4. Drag-and-drop the pages in the order you want them.
Once your site has updated the pages and navigation according to your preference, start zooming in on the design.
Step 6: Customize your site’s design
Adjust the visual design aspects of your site to match your preferences. T
hese can be big changes — like changing your site’s layout — or small ones — such as making all the buttons on your site a particular shape.
Tip: Your site’s visual layout should be consistent across all pages. When your audience navigates between pages, they should feel oriented and familiar — as if they were under the same roof. This builds familiarity and trust.
In my case, I wanted to do three things:
Use different fonts Rearrange the homepage Make all the buttons round Here’s how I did it.
Change fonts
I wanted to check if there’s a different font pairing I could use. The current ones felt too sharp for my taste. I prompted the AI website builder this:
“Show me new font pairings that feel softer and more relaxed.”

The tool offered me several fonts for headers and body text that worked well together and matched the vibe I was going for.
I browsed all the options and went with the one that best aligned with the color palette and brand.
Change homepage layout
Next, I wanted to check if there’s a better way to arrange the homepage.
The homepage is the most important part of the site because it’s the first thing someone sees when they land on your site.
I wanted the site’s homepage to be as striking as possible, but I couldn’t pinpoint which changes would improve it. So I used this prompt to get AI’s help:
“Suggest different layouts for the homepage.”
The various options helped me identify what I could add or remove from the homepage.
The previews are also helpful in gauging how the changes appear before committing to one option.
I went with the first choice.
Change button shapes
Finally, I wanted to make all the buttons square. Here’s the prompt I used:
“Make all the buttons on the site square.”
Step 7: Refine your copy and on-page sections
The AI website builder will automatically generate the text for each section. Polish it for accuracy until it achieves your styleand goals.
You can either edit the text directly by clicking on any block, or you can seek AI’s help.
For example, I selected the text block on the homepage and asked AI to rewrite it in a friendlier tone using this prompt:
“Rewrite this paragraph in a friendlier tone.”
You can also ask the AI website builder to reword a section for brevity, expand descriptions, remove sections, add taglines, and more.
Tip: A good best practice here is to blend AI’s recommendations with manual adjustments. Doing so ensures your site copy doesn’t sound unnatural or dispaly any inaccurate information.
Step 8: Add images, logos, and visual sections
Next, complete the design of your website with additional elements, such as visuals and logos.
For example, I wanted to update the hero image on the homepage. I prompted the AI website builder to help:
“Create a hero image for this page that shows a person in a laboratory conducting a lab test.”
You can also use similar prompts to rewire all visuals on your site to match a certain aesthetic — if that’s what you want.
Image generation is honestly my favorite part of the AI website-building process.
So many standalone image generation tools give you poor results (six fingers and a gazillion teeth smiles, anyone?), but WordPress.com’s AI website builder always aces the assignment.
It can also help you come up with a logo for your site. I used this prompt to create mine:
“Create a logo that says “Snack Reviews” inside of an icon of a chips packet.”
Step 9: Add engagement and monetization features
You can also add elements to your site that will encourage visitors to engage — e.g., subscribe to a newsletter.
For example, I used this prompt to add a newsletter form to my site:
“Add a newsletter signup form in the last section of the homepage with an ‘Email’ field along with a CTA button to ‘Subscribe.’ Name the new section ‘Stay in touch.’”
You can also use similar prompts to add monetization features, social media icons, donation buttons, or whatever else you might need for your website.
AI produces editable blocks of your instructions, which you can configure to meet your requirements.
Step 10: Review SEO basics
Before you publish, check a few simple SEO essentials — titles, descriptions, headings, links, and image alt text.
The good news is: WordPress.com already covers the technical side of SEO (speed, security, mobile optimization).
For on-page SEO, make sure you:
Have a clear H1 (title tag) and clean heading structure Write readable, scannable content Add internal links to related pages Add descriptive image alt text Use a short, logical URL You can use AI to make your search presence even stronger by asking it to provide SEO recommendations. For example, I used this prompt:
“Review this page for on-page SEO issues and suggest improvements — check my H1, headings, URLs, internal links, readability, and image alt text, then tell me what’s missing, what I should change, and give specific examples of better titles, descriptions, headings, and alt text.”
The tool then provided multiple suggestions related to keywords, headings, internal linking, and more:
Step 11: Ask AI for improvement ideas
Before launching your site, use the AI website builder to get smart suggestions to improve it. It can recommend:
Creating new sections or pages Navigation simplifications Tone or clarity adjustments Content and site section ideas For example, I asked the tool to provide some broad recommendations to improve my site using this prompt:
“Suggest improvements to make this site more engaging for visitors.”
It generated lots of ideas, like adding quizzes and images:
The best part: The AI website builder provides recommendations that are specifically tailored to your website.
Step 12: Launch your site
The final step is releasing your site into the world.
Every new WordPress.com site starts in Coming Soon mode, so you can refine the design and content before going live.
Once you’re ready to launch, just click on the Launch button in the top right corner.
After you click Launch, you can choose the pricing plan that fits your goals and set up everything you need to go live (e.g., a domain).
Tip: If you already own a domain, you can also transfer it to WordPress.com.
Once you launch, your website is instantly live on a secure, fast WordPress.com server — no extra setup, plugins, or third-party services needed. SSL encryption, backups, and a global CDN are all included automatically.
You can continue using the AI website builder to customize your site even after launching it. Add new pages, update copy and images, and brainstorm new ideas to improve your site.
Create your new WordPress site with the AI website builder
Building a website used to take hours. With WordPress.com’s AI website builder, you can launch a polished site in minutes and keep improving it as you grow.
Once your site is live, you can continue using AI to refine pages, adjust your design, and publish new content quickly — without touching code.
Tip: Try the WordPress.com AI site builder for free. When you’re ready to launch, upgrade to a Premium or Business plan to take your site live.
Create your WordPress site with AI

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By Drewfus · December 1, 2025Dec 1
The Ultimate WordPress Migration Checklist for Beginners

If you’re planning to move your site to WordPress.com, this step-by-step WordPress migration checklist covers everything you need for a smooth, stress-free process.
You’ll find the exact workflow and steps I’ve used to successfully move WordPress sites so that you can complete your own website migration with confidence.
TL;DR: Quick WordPress migration checklist
Here’s a quick overview of the WordPress migration checklist that’s covered in full detail in this guide:
Pre-migration steps:
Plan and communicate: Decide when you’ll migrate, and let your visitors know via emails, social media, and a prominent notice on your homepage. Pause site activity: Place the site in maintenance mode and stop making changes. Back up the site: Create a full site backup and verify you can restore it. Measure site performance: Record load times, SEO benchmarks, and other metrics for comparison after the migration. Prepare the site: Update to the latest software versions, remove unused plugins and themes, and gather all logins. Practice the migration: Choose a migration method and rehearse moving the site to a safe environment, and verify the results. Prepare the new site: Create a WordPress site on the new host, ensure that the software versions match those on the source site, and set the search engine visibility. During migration:
Move the site: Start the migration process, whether you’re using a plugin or the WordPress.com migration service. Manage the domain: Point your domain to the new site and enable SSL. SSL encrypts data transferred between the site and the visitor’s browser to keep information private and secure. Post-migration:
Test the site: Explore the site to verify it looks and functions as expected. Check URLs: Ensure all URLs and links are working. Compare performance: Refer to pre-migration test results to confirm SEO and performance have remained stable or improved. Set visibility: Make the site accessible to visitors and search engines. Monitor analytics: Track key metrics to ensure service continuity. Cancel old host: Close your old hosting account after the migration is complete. Let’s go through the checklist in detail so you’re fully prepared to successfully migrate your WordPress site to a new host.
WordPress migration checklist: 10 key steps
From planning and preparation to testing and monitoring, our checklist walks you through the WordPress website migration process.
1. Plan your migration and communicate clearly
Begin with a clear plan and transparent communication.
Migrations can lead to short periods of downtime, and letting people know what’s coming helps avoid confusion.
Here’s what you can do:
Communicate: Be clear about why you’re migrating and how it will benefit your site and its audience. This will make it easier to communicate your plans effectively. Plan: Schedule the move during a quiet period, usually the early hours of Sunday morning, but check your analytics to see when visits and conversions are at their lowest. Take seasonal peaks, such as Black Friday, into account. Inform: Tell your audience what’s happening and why. Highlight the benefits of the migration, such as faster load times or improved security. Explain what to expect, including temporary unavailability or limited functionality. This helps users to be patient during any downtime. Communicate: Use multiple channels to reach everyone, including email, social media, and on-site banners. Include the date and time of the migration, how long it will take, and the main benefits users can expect once it’s complete. Tip: A free plugin like My Sticky Bar makes it easy to create a site notification bar.
For example, this website uses a notification bar to announce its migration window:
2. Enable maintenance mode
Next, enable maintenance mode using a plugin.
This lets you display a clear message about the migration to visitors and prevents anyone from interacting with your site — like submitting forms or leaving comments — while the move is happening.
Here’s how:
Install a plugin: For example, CMP – Coming Soon & Maintenance Plugin is a good free option. Enable maintenance mode: Turn on the plugin’s maintenance mode and add a custom message for your visitors. In addition to displaying a custom message and restricting access to your site, a good migration plugin will also return a “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” status code.
This code signals to search engines that any downtime is temporary, helping to protect your rankings.
You can also use an online tool or PowerShell to check the HTTP status code of your site:
curl.exe -I https://yourgroovydomain.com
Don’t make any changes to your site while it’s in maintenance mode. This ensures no data or changes are lost during the move.
3. Create and verify a site backup
Before migrating, create a complete site backup (including files and database) to protect against data loss.
Create a backup: A backup plugin makes it easy to back up your site. Popular options include UpdraftPlus and Jetpack VaultPress Backup (included on the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans). Store safely: Save your backup files off-site, such as on your computer or in cloud storage. Verify the restore: Ensure the backup can be successfully restored before beginning the migration. Use a staging site or local installation for testing. Tip: Our guide to backing up WordPress sites has step-by-step instructions and extra advice.
4. Audit SEO and performance
From here, record your site’s current performance and SEO metrics before migration.
This provides a clear baseline, so you can confirm that everything is working as expected once the move is complete.
Follow these steps:
SEO audit: Note your top-ranking pages, keyword visibility, and traffic levels, using tools like Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console. Page speed: Record load times using the WordPress Speed Test tool and Google PageSpeed Insights. Core Web Vitals: Note FCP, LCP, CLS, TTFB, and TBT metrics. Together, these show how quickly your site loads, how smooth it feels to use, and whether anything shifts or delays interaction. Tip: This data can be used after the migration to verify the success of the move.
5. Update and prepare your site
Next, prepare your site for migration by making sure everything’s up to date and ready to move.
Give your site a quick cleanup and compatibility check so the migration goes smoothly and nothing unexpected breaks along the way:
Update everything: Update WordPress core, themes, plugins, and PHP to the latest versions. Clean up: Remove any plugins or themes you no longer need. For example, WordPress.com already offers various features like caching, security, backups, and performance optimization, so plugins in those categories aren’t needed after the migration. Temporarily disable any caching, firewall, and redirection plugins before migrating to avoid conflicts. Gather credentials: Record all account login details for your site, including those for hosting and third-party services. Check compatibility: Note any plugins, themes, or custom code that may need to be replaced. Check which plugins are incompatible with WordPress.com hosting to see if you’ll need to find alternatives. 6. Practice the migration in a safe environment
You can now choose a migration method and set up a safe environment to practice moving your site.
Here’s how:
Choose a migration method: The Migrate to WordPress.com plugin makes it very easy to move your site to WordPress.com, with most sites completing the migration in less than 10 minutes. If you have either the WordPress.com Business or Commerce plan, our expert team can handle the migration for you at no cost, while your live site remains unaffected. Create a test environment: Set up a staging site, a WordPress.com test site, or a local WordPress installation to practice the migration. Tip: If migrating your WordPress site to another web host, refer to this step-by-step guide.
7. Prepare your new WordPress site
In the final step before the move, get the new site ready and check that your new hosting plan meets your requirements.
Review the following:
Figure out domain setup: Decide whether your site will use a new domain or continue with the existing one after the move. Using your existing domain with WordPress.com hosting is straightforward, and the documentation walks you through the steps. Create a new WordPress site: Set up a fresh WordPress installation at your new host. Keep it empty — don’t add posts, pages, or extra settings — so there’s nothing that could conflict with the content you’ll import. Make sure it’s running the latest versions of WordPress and PHP to match your current site. Manage search engine visibility: Instruct search engines not to index the new site (not yet). This is enabled by default for new sites on WordPress.com as part of the coming soon mode. For other hosts, enable the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” setting (WP Admin → Settings → Reading). Check hosting plan resources: Find out how much storage and bandwidth your site uses (this information is available from your current host). Make sure the new hosting plan meets these requirements. WordPress.com plans have unmetered bandwidth and varying amounts of storage. Assess your new hosting plan: Check whether it has features that can replace plugins you’re currently using. For example, the WordPress.com plans include many features, such as forms, backups, security, and SEO tools. 8. Transfer your site and its content
Once you’ve tested the migration and prepared the new site, it’s time to move your WordPress site to its new home.
Start the migration: Use the same method as when you tested the migration. If moving to WordPress.com, this could be the done-for-you service or the Migrate to WordPress.com plugin. Follow this guide if moving to another host. Set site visibility: The coming soon mode is enabled by default on new WordPress.com sites, but you should check that it’s still active after the migration. 9. Connect your domain and secure the site
After the migration, connect your domain and enable SSL so visitors can safely use the site.
Make sure to:
Update domain settings: Change the nameservers or DNS records at your domain registrar so that your domain points to your new hosting provider. This guide explains how to connect a domain to a site hosted by WordPress.com. Enable SSL: This ensures the site loads over “https://” and data is encrypted as it is transferred between the site and the visitor’s browser to keep it private and secure. Some hosts take care of this for you. For example, SSL is enabled by default on sites hosted by WordPress.com. 10. Test, redirect, and monitor
Make sure that everything works correctly and your SEO and performance are intact after migration.
Here’s what to consider:
General verification: Visually check that all posts and pages have been transferred and load correctly. Verify the theme, plugins, menus, forms, logins, and all eCommerce features work as expected. Mobile responsiveness: Ensure your site functions smoothly across different devices. Meta tags and headings: Check that the title tags, meta descriptions, and heading structures of your content are intact. Redirects: If using your existing domain, visitors will be automatically directed to your new site and its pages when following a link or entering a URL. If you’ve changed the URLs of any content, create 301 redirects for them to preserve SEO and prevent broken links. Use this free online tool to check that the redirects are working. Error pages and broken links: Use Google Search Console to identify and fix 404 errors or missing pages. Backlinks and internal links: Refer to your SEO audit from Step 4 and verify that high-value backlinks and internal links still point to the correct pages. Sitemaps and robots.txt: Use Google Search Console to check that your site’s XML sitemaps are up to date and accessible, and that your site’s robots.txt file isn’t causing any issues. Compare performance: Rerun site speed tests using the same tools to confirm your site performs as well as or better than before. Make your website public: Make sure the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” option isn’t checked. Monitor: Track site analytics, including Jetpack Stats and Google Search Console for any traffic or ranking changes. Cancel old hosting: Once everything is stable, decommission your site’s previous hosting environment. Testing, checking redirects, and monitoring your site are the final steps in a successful migration.
Tip: If you’re moving to the WordPress.com Business or Commerce plan, you can use the Site Monitoring tool to detect and resolve many of these issues.
Move your WordPress site with confidence
This checklist walks you through every step of migrating a WordPress site to a new host.
If you’re moving to WordPress.com, you can use either the migration plugin or — on Business and Commerce plans — our free migration service to handle the process for you.
WordPress.com also gives you strong performance, reliable uptime, built-in security, and access to plugins on all paid plans.
With the right preparation and a clear plan, your site will migrate smoothly, keep its SEO intact, and stay accessible to your audience throughout the transition.

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By Drewfus · November 26, 2025Nov 26
Managed vs. Shared WordPress Hosting: Which is Best for You?

When you’re starting a website, hosting can feel like one of the trickier choices — especially if you’re trying to balance cost, performance, security, and simplicity.
In short, shared hosting is the budget-friendly option where multiple websites share the same server, while managed WordPress hosting offers better speed, security, and automatic maintenance.
This guide breaks down how each option works, what you get with managed WordPress hosting, and how to choose the best fit for your needs.
TL;DR: Managed WordPress hosting vs. shared hosting
Managed WordPress hosting takes care of hosting, advanced security, automatic updates, and ongoing maintenance for your WordPress site. Shared WordPress hosting, on the other hand, provides hosting and basic server-level security, but leaves most site-specific maintenance and performance tasks to you.
Here’s a quick summary:
Managed WordPress hostingShared WordPress hostingHandles all the technical upkeep — from updates and security to backups and optimization. It usually runs on virtual private or dedicated servers optimized for WordPress performance.Hosts multiple websites on the same server with shared resources and basic security. It’s the most affordable option, but comes with trade-offs in speed, reliability, and support. Tip: Not all “managed WordPress hosting” is truly managed — some providers simply bundle shared hosting with basic tools. With WordPress.com, you get expert support, advanced security, global infrastructure, and a 99.999% uptime guarantee.
Managed WordPress hosting vs. shared hosting: what’s the user experience like?
The main differences between managed WordPress hosting and shared hosting include cost, speed, maintenance, customization, and support.
These factors affect your site’s performance, budget, and time investment.
Speed
The main difference in speed between managed and shared hosting is stability — managed hosting keeps your site fast and responsive even under heavy traffic, while shared hosting performance drops as more websites compete for the same resources.
Managed WordPress hosting: Your website loads in milliseconds, powered by global CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) that deliver content from the nearest location.
On WordPress.com, for example, your website is powered by our Global Edge Caching with 28+ data centers to deliver your site content from servers closest to each visitor.
During one of the latest AWS outages, many websites went offline — but WordPress.com stayed up.
Since all WordPress.com websites run on our own global infrastructure — we don’t rely on AWS or other third-party clouds — your site always remains online, no matter what issue arises on the web.
Shared hosting: Websites on shared servers run more slowly because multiple sites compete for the same resources.
Upgrading to a higher-tier plan can help by adding SSD storage and improving read/write speeds (how fast the server accesses your files and databases).
Still, even premium shared plans can’t guarantee consistent speed — resource limits eventually cap performance.
You shouldn’t be penalized for growth. Upgrade to a managed hosting plan on WordPress.com from $4/month (annual billing) for unlimited traffic, unmatched speed, and 99.999% uptime.
Maintenance
The key difference in maintenance between managed and shared hosting is the level of responsibility — managed hosting covers all backups, updates, and security patches, while shared hosting requires you to troubleshoot on your own.
Managed WordPress hosting: Your managed WordPress hosts handle all technical maintenance, like:
Automatic core updates so your website runs on the latest and most secure version of WordPress. Regular backups, where you can easily restore your website in a few clicks if anything breaks. Real-time security monitoring to keep your WordPress site secure 24/7. This lightens your technical workload, saving you several hours weekly to reinvest in your site and business.
Shared hosting: Shared web hosts usually offer basic backups, updates, and security — the scope of site maintenance will ultimately depend on your provider and hosting plan. With shared hosts, expect more work to maintain your website.
Flexibility
The main difference in flexibility between managed and shared hosting lies in control — shared hosting gives you more freedom to install anything, while managed WordPress hosting prioritizes stability and security by including trusted features out of the box.
Managed WordPress hosting: Hosts may limit certain plugins or themes to maintain top performance and security across their infrastructure.
However, because your host handles all technical tasks for you, you rarely need extra plugins to achieve the same results.
If you’re using WordPress.com, most key features related to security, analytics, SEO, etc., are already built into the platform:
Shared hosting: Some hosting providers may limit themes and plugins to optimize performance for all websites on the same server, while others offer more flexibility.
Even though the latter may seem like an attractive perk, it risks you installing unsuitable plugins that compromise your site speed and security.
Support
The key difference in support is expertise — managed WordPress hosting gives you access to WordPress specialists, while shared hosting relies on general support teams that handle many platforms.
Managed WordPress hosting: Managed hosts provide high-quality, specialized support. Since these specialists work only with WordPress, they possess years of in-depth knowledge.
Whether it’s a plugin conflict or a faulty media button, they’ve likely encountered and solved all these common issues within minutes.
Shared hosting: You might experience inconsistent support from generalists.
Because shared hosting providers cater to customers using different web platforms, the level of expertise may vary.
Cost
The key difference in cost comes down to what you’re paying for — shared hosting is cheaper but limited, while managed WordPress hosting might cost more because it includes speed, security, scalability, and hands-off maintenance.
Managed WordPress hosting: Prices range from $10 to $2,000+ (for enterprises) per month, depending on your server type.
This is mainly because managed hosting delivers premium performance, advanced security, and full technical management.
Tip: WordPress.com gives you more flexibility when budgeting for hosting. You can start with the Personal plan ($4/month on annual billing) and upgrade to Business ($25/month) or higher as your needs grow. All plans include unlimited bandwidth and visits.
Shared hosting: Typically costs $2-$15/month and suits small or starter sites.
However, you share resources with many other websites, which slows performance as traffic increases.
For growing or ecommerce sites, these trade-offs often outweigh the savings — a fast, managed plan quickly pays for itself.
What do you get with managed WordPress hosting?
You get all the technical staples in managed WordPress hosting, including automatic backups, quality WordPress support, speed, and enterprise-grade security. Here’s a deeper look.
Bandwidth and traffic-based pricing
Managed WordPress hosting is designed to handle traffic spikes smoothly, but some providers still charge based on bandwidth or monthly visits.
When your traffic grows, your costs can rise — or performance can dip — depending on their limits.
For example, if your site doubles from 65,000 to 125,000 monthly visits, your plan might increase from about $50 to $90 per month, adding roughly $480 annually.
Fortunately, WordPress.com is different: every plan includes unlimited bandwidth and visits for a fixed monthly price. Your site stays fast and accessible during viral spikes — with no surprise fees.
Site backups
Managed WordPress hosting typically includes automated daily backups with 14-30 days of storage, allowing quick one-click recovery if something goes wrong.
Most providers also let you create on-demand backups for major updates or changes.
WordPress.com provides enhanced protection through real-time cloud backups powered by Jetpack VaultPress Backup. On eligible plans, you can restore backups from your archive (typically up to 30 days, or longer on select plans).
Improved speed
Managed WordPress hosts speed up your website through a WordPress-optimized infrastructure with multiple CDNs across the world.
This ensures your site remains fast no matter where visitors are located.
At WordPress.com, two core features keep your website consistently fast:
Site Accelerator CDN: Reduces server load by offloading your image and static files. Global Edge Caching: Routes content from data centers closest to your visitors. Security
Managed WordPress hosts protect your website through SSL certificates, advanced brute-force defense, automated malware scanning, and continuous monitoring to keep you safe from cyber attacks.
Many providers, including WordPress.com, offer free domain privacy (where available), which hides your domain contact information, like your address and phone number, from the public.
To further boost your site security, you can use plugins like Akismet to block spam and Jetpack Scan to detect security threats and vulnerabilities.
Reliability
Managed WordPress hosting is built for maximum uptime and stability, keeping your website online even during unexpected network issues.
Most leading hosts promise 99.9% uptime, which still allows for about 43 minutes of downtime per month.
WordPress.com goes a step further with infrastructure engineered for 99.999% uptime. This makes downtime extremely rare compared to other hosts.
Automatic updates
Managed WordPress hosts also handle all technical maintenance automatically, including the WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates — freeing you up hours to focus on your website, passion, and business.
Similarly, WordPress.com manages all technical updates automatically.
Our team keeps your site running on the latest, most secure version of WordPress — so you don’t have to worry about manual updates or constant monitoring.
Staging sites
Managed WordPress hosts provide a staging environment to safely test themes, plugins, design changes, and updates without risking your actual website’s functionality.
You can usually clone your site with just one click.
Then, make your updates, check that everything works as expected, and publish the changes to your live site when you’re ready.
On WordPress.com, you can access this feature on the Business and Commerce plans.
Migration services
Managed WordPress hosting typically offers free migration services with no downtime, either through one-click plugins or manual services — both options axe all technical headaches when moving to a new hosting company.
On WordPress.com, you can use the Migrate to WordPress.com plugin or request a free expert migration (available for Business and Commerce plans). Your live site stays online during the process, and most migrations finish within 2-3 business days.
Specialized customer support
Managed WordPress hosts have teams that know WordPress inside and out.
They can spot and fix tricky issues — whether it’s a plugin conflict, a broken layout, or something slowing down your site — typically faster than general hosting providers.
On WordPress.com, free plan users can get help through our active community forums, while paid plan users get access to our Happiness Engineers — a global team spread across 18 time zones, ready to help whenever you need it.
How do you know if managed WordPress hosting is the right choice?
Managed WordPress hosting is the right choice if you want to solve technical issues before they impact your website, protect it 24/7, and reclaim hours while specialists handle ongoing maintenance.
Still undecided?
Ask yourself these questions to see if managed WordPress hosting is the right fit for your website:
Are you planning to grow your website traffic or functionality in the future? Do you prefer experts to handle your WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates — and save yourself from technical headaches? Can you benefit from redirecting the hours spent on technical maintenance toward your website’s growth? Would downtime or a security breach harm your business or brand? If you answered yes to most of these questions, you can’t go wrong with managed WordPress hosting.
Launch your website on WordPress.com today
The kind of hosting you choose shapes how much time you spend managing your site versus growing it.
While shared hosting can work for smaller or temporary projects, managed WordPress hosting gives you the freedom to grow without worrying about updates, backups, or downtime.
On WordPress.com, you get that extra layer of care.
Our team handles updates, security, and performance in the background, so you can stay focused on creating and running your site.
Host your website on WordPress.com

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By Drewfus · November 24, 2025Nov 24

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Is WordPress Free? Yes and No — Here’s Why

WordPress itself is free and open source, but getting a site online always involves costs like a domain and hosting.
In this guide, you’ll learn what WordPress includes for free and what you should realistically expect to pay for when running a full website.
Is WordPress really free? Yes, but with a caveat
WordPress core software is free and open source under the General Public License (GPL). You don’t pay to download it, install it, or build with it.
What does cost money is putting your website online. To publish a full site, you’ll need at least:
A domain: your site’s address Hosting: the service that keeps your site running and available to visitors Everything else — premium themes, plugins, or advanced features — is optional depending on what you want your site to do.
Want to test the waters first? Start free on WordPress.com today.
WordPress.org vs WordPress.com: How the cost differs
Both options let you start a WordPress site for free — the difference is how hosting, maintenance, and site setup are handled. With WordPress.org, hosting and technical setup are your responsibility; with WordPress.com, they’re covered at the platform level.
Here’s a quick summary:
WordPress.com provides free access to WordPress software. You can then upgrade to paid plans to benefit from managed WordPress hosting that handles security, updates, backups, and performance for you. WordPress.org also offers the free WordPress software, but you’re responsible for finding a hosting provider and buying a domain, as well as setting up any additional tools or services you want to use. What you get for free with WordPress — and why
The WordPress software is free because it’s open source, and the GPL license ensures it will always be available to use, study, and modify at no cost.
Anyone can publish, build improvements, or add new extensions — continuing the project’s mission of open, community-driven web publishing.
Overall, you can access:
The WordPress website builder; there is no license fee to download or use it Hundreds of free themes and plugins available in the WordPress ecosystem The ability to export, move, and reuse your site’s files wherever you choose WordPress Studio, a free local development app for building and testing sites on your computer What costs extra when you use WordPress
Running a fully functional website always incurs costs regardless of the web builder or host you use.
Here’s what you need to budget for.
Domain name
A domain name usually costs under $30 annually. Most web hosts, including WordPress.com, offer free domains in the first year on any paid annual plan.
On WordPress.com, popular domain extensions like .com, .org, and .net average $13 per year.
Web hosting
Web hosting can cost anywhere from a few dollars per month to hundreds for higher-traffic or enterprise sites.
The price depends on the type of hosting you choose, the resources included, and how much traffic your site receives.
As your traffic grows and you exceed your plan’s limits, you may also need to upgrade — e.g., going from 35,000 to 105,000 monthly visits can raise costs from about $35 to $90 per month, adding roughly $660 per year.
WordPress.com takes a different approach. Every paid plan includes unlimited bandwidth and visits for a predictable monthly price (from $4 to $45 with annual billing), along with security protections, backups, updates, and expert support.
Premium plugins and themes
Premium WordPress plugins and themes come with annual license fees — these are optional upgrades offering advanced functionality or more professional designs.
Prices vary widely, with most plugins falling in the $20–$200/year range and premium themes costing $20–$100+, depending on the provider and features.
For example, the Sensei Pro plugin ($9/month) lets you create, manage, and sell online courses — a useful upgrade for creators growing their knowledge businesses online.
Development and maintenance costs
Hiring third-party professionals for custom development or ongoing maintenance can range anywhere from $15 to over $200 per hour, depending on their experience and the complexity of the work.
This is common in WordPress setups where hosting, updates, backups, security, and performance are not handled at the platform level, and responsibility ultimately sits with the site owner.
On WordPress.com, advanced security, performance optimization, and automatic updates and backups are included in your plan — saving you the effort of paying separate services.
You get SSL certificates, DDoS protection, encryption, brute force prevention, advanced firewalls, and more.
Tip: If you prefer a hands-on workflow, WordPress Studio is a free tool that lets you build and test WordPress sites locally before publishing them anywhere. It’s useful for developers and creators who want full control during the building phase.
Other considerations (email, ecommerce, monetization, etc.)
Hosting covers the basics, but many site features — especially for email, marketing, monetization, and ecommerce — typically add $5–$60+ per month.
These can include:
Business email, SMTP, and newsletter tools Payment processing and subscription features Ecommerce add-ons like shipping tools or advanced WooCommerce extensions Performance and marketing upgrades, such as CDNs, analytics tools, or SEO assistants On WordPress.com, many of these extras are already included, so you get built-in tools for ecommerce, newsletters, social sharing, memberships, performance, and AI content generation — without stacking add-on fees.
You also get access to the AI website builder that lets you generate and set up your entire website using simple text prompts.
Here’s what it looks like:
Benefits of using WordPress
After breaking down what different parts of a WordPress site may cost, let’s look at what you get in return.
Here are the key benefits of using WordPress:
Scalability and performance: WordPress is a great choice for any website, and WordPress.com’s full-stack performance infrastructure keeps your site fast even during traffic spikes. SEO friendliness: WordPress uses clean, crawlable code, and WordPress.com automates essential SEO tasks, including generating sitemaps. Themes and plugins: You can choose from 100,000+ themes and plugins to add features — like crowdfunding, quizzes, memberships, etc. — without hiring developers. Customization and ownership: As open-source software, WordPress gives you full control over design, functionality, and long-term ownership — which is also true for WordPress.com. Support and community: WordPress has a huge global community, and WordPress.com paid plans include 24/7 expert support from our Happiness Engineers. Tip: WordPress.com also includes essentials like Jetpack for security, backups, and analytics, so you don’t need multiple add-ons and extensive experience to successfully grow your website.
Start your website journey with WordPress.com
The WordPress software itself is free, but running a fully functional website always involves costs — hosting, a custom domain, and the premium features you need to operate your site reliably.
If you want everything handled in one place, WordPress.com simplifies the entire setup.
You get managed WordPress hosting with automatic updates and backups, built-in security monitoring, unmetered bandwidth and visits, a free domain for the first year, expert support, and tools like the AI Website Builder.
Launch your site on WordPress.com View the full article

By Drewfus · December 23, 2025Dec 23
What Is WordPress Hosting? A Simple Breakdown

WordPress hosting helps you get a WordPress site online faster and keep it running smoothly by reducing setup and configuration work.
This guide explains what WordPress hosting is, how it differs from other hosting options, and what to look for in a provider.
What is WordPress hosting?
WordPress hosting is a specialized type of web hosting built and optimized for running WordPress. It gives you the right environment and features to keep your site fast, secure, and low-maintenance.
WordPress hosting becomes relevant as soon as you create a WordPress site, since it’s prepared for how WordPress works.
Such hosting plans typically include:
WordPress pre-installed or one-click installation A domain name (often bundled in the plan) Built-in security features like backups or malware scanning Performance optimizations for WordPress (PHP versions, caching, database tuning) Support teams familiar with WordPress Tip: WordPress.com offers a fully managed WordPress environment with automatic updates, built-in performance tools, and a secure infrastructure designed to scale with your site.
How does hosting actually work?
Hosting stores your website on a server and shows it to people when they visit your domain.
When someone types yourblogsname.com into their browser, their device requests your website’s information from your hosting provider’s server — a computer that is always online.
The server then locates your site’s files and sends them to the visitor’s browser so the page can load.
In turn, the page’s loading time depends on your hosting plan and provider.
The bottom line: every host follows the same basic flow, but not all of them optimize it for WordPress.
Tip: If you’re curious to know what powers that speed, this behind-the-scenes tour of WordPress.com’s data centers explains it really well.
WordPress hosting vs. regular web hosting
Regular web hosting gives you a standard server where you set up WordPress yourself, while WordPress hosting provides an environment already optimized for it.
This usually means WordPress is faster to install, performance settings are already tuned for it, and getting started takes less work.
Tip: Web hosting comes in different types (e.g., VPS, dedicated, cloud), which describe how server resources are allocated. WordPress hosting works on top of these by optimizing the environment specifically for WordPress.
Here’s how regular web hosting and WordPress hosting compare across key areas:
FeatureRegular web hostingWordPress hostingBuilt forAny type of websiteOptimized specifically for WordPress sitesSetupYou install and configure WordPress yourselfWordPress is pre-installed, or ready in one clickMaintenanceYou manage updates, backups, security tools, caching, and troubleshootingThe hosting environment is pre-tuned for WordPress, reducing initial setup and configuration workSpeedDepends on the server setup and how well you configure WordPressServer settings (PHP, caching, database tuning) are optimized for WordPress out of the boxSecurityHost defaults + whatever WordPress protections you add manuallyComes with WordPress-friendly security defaults (firewall rules, malware scanning, HTTPS)Ease of useMore manual setup and configurationEasier onboarding thanks to WordPress-ready defaults and helpful built-in toolsSupportGeneral hosting support; WordPress knowledge variesSupport teams familiar with WordPress, themes, plugins, and common issues These differences explain how WordPress hosting compares to general hosting, but there’s another important layer to consider: how much of the ongoing work the host handles for you.
Managed vs. unmanaged WordPress hosting
Managed WordPress hosting handles updates, security, backups, and performance for you.
With unmanaged WordPress hosting, the host provides the server, but you handle WordPress setup, updates, and maintenance yourself.
The key is choosing a level of management based on how much time and responsibility you want to take on for updates, security, and performance.
How does managed WordPress hosting make things easier?
Managed WordPress hosting gives you a smoother, more predictable experience because you’re not dealing with the technical issues that usually slow site owners down.
Instead of troubleshooting errors, comparing plugins, or fixing problems after updates, the hosting environment prevents most of those issues before they happen.
What this means in practice:
Fewer surprises: Updates and changes don’t break your site unexpectedly. No plugin juggling: You don’t need extra tools for speed, backups, or security. No firefighting: Errors, threats, and performance drops are handled before you ever see them. Consistent stability: Your site behaves the same day-to-day without tuning settings. More time on real work: You spend your effort building pages, writing content, and improving the site experience — not managing the technical side. Tip: Plenty of hosts label their plans as “managed WordPress,” but many are just shared hosting with a few extras. WordPress.com delivers true managed hosting with expert support, built-in security, a global infrastructure, and a 99.999% uptime guarantee.
How to choose the best WordPress hosting provider
The right WordPress host gives you speed, reliable uptime, strong security, and support so you can run your site without extra work.
Here’s what to look for when comparing WordPress hosting providers:
Fast loading speed: Built-in caching, CDN, and servers optimized for WordPress. Reliable uptime: Consistent availability with fast recovery and alerts if issues occur. Built-in security: SSL certificates, malware scanning, and automatic backups at no extra cost. Ease of use: Simple UI and automatic updates, without touching code. Expert WordPress support: Access to support teams trained specifically in WordPress. Room to grow and transparent pricing: Plans that can handle spikes and long-term traffic. WordPress.com, for example, includes unmetered traffic on every plan, so your costs don’t rise as your audience grows. How much work you avoid: Check how much setup, maintenance, performance tuning, and security the host handles for you versus what you’re expected to manage yourself. Go with WordPress.com’s managed hosting
Choosing between hosting options ultimately comes down to your priorities and how much work you’re willing to handle yourself.
The differences we outlined are straightforward:
General web hosting: You get a standard server and install/configure WordPress yourself. WordPress hosting: The server is pre-tuned for WordPress, so setup is quicker and fewer settings need manual adjustment. Managed WordPress hosting: Ongoing updates, security, performance, and backups are also handled for you. If you don’t want to deal with technical upkeep, WordPress.com gives you a fast, fully managed WordPress environment backed by automatic updates and expert support.
Get started with WordPress.com
View the full article

By Drewfus · December 22, 2025Dec 22
How to Build Faster, Safer Local WordPress Dev Workflows for Your Agency

Agencies move quickly. With constant new client builds, redesigns, plugin audits, and last-minute fixes, everything relies on a workflow that’s stable, fast, and consistent across the team.
For many WordPress agencies, the challenge isn’t shipping great work; it’s getting every team member working the same way, on the same stack, without losing time to process.
WordPress Studio was created to remove those slowdowns so agencies can spend more time building and less time wrestling with overhead — giving every developer a consistent workflow and helping agencies deliver higher-quality work in less time.
Watch the complete walkthrough of these agency workflows below, and keep reading to see how each fits into modern agency development with Studio:
Spin up identical development environments for all
Every agency knows the pain of onboarding a new developer, configuring a stack from scratch, or replicating a teammate’s environment.
You can start a clean local site, restore from a backup, or use a Blueprint, a reusable site recipe that defines specs such as which themes and plugins to install, which PHP version to use, and which content or settings to apply.
Using Blueprints means every project starts from the same proven foundation, not from a blank slate, which, for agencies, results in faster onboarding and better handoffs between team members, turning hours of setup work into seconds of standardized automation.
Once you start a Studio site with a Blueprint, you and your team can build from your desired specs rather than a blank slate. This alone compresses hours of administrative work into seconds.
To start a site with Blueprints in Studio:
Click the “Add site” button. Select “Start from a Blueprint,” and you will see a gallery of featured Blueprints and an option to choose your own custom Blueprint file. Select a featured Blueprint that fits your needs or “Choose Blueprint file” and select the JSON file from your computer. Click Continue. On the setup screen, give your site a name. You can open “Advanced settings” for more options. Click “Add site.“ Behind the scenes, Studio will build the site from whichever Blueprint you selected or added. To keep your team aligned across projects, check out our guide to creating custom Blueprints.
Share “always-online” snapshots for faster team and client approvals
Once you’ve created a site in Studio, you can keep your team and clients in the loop with reliable, shareable, and fully online preview sites.
Preview sites allow you to share snapshots of your local builds publicly. They’re built on a temporary domain powered by WordPress.com, and each Studio user can spin up 10 at a time.
The beauty of preview sites is that they’re fully hosted sites — they’re not tunnels that require you to be online for your team and clients to see them. Not only that, you can share login credentials with your team or clients so they can explore the backend as well.
Preview sites are temporary and automatically deleted after seven days. This feature ensures that preview environments are used for short-term feedback and review purposes.
To send a preview site to your team or clients:
Select the local site within the Studio. Click on the Previews tab. Log in to WordPress.com if you haven’t already. Click on the “Create preview site” button. Once the preview site is created, copy your preview site domain and share. You can provide login credentials to folks by clicking the Settings tab in the Studio and copying the username and password under WP Admin. While preview sites are intended for sharing with clients and gathering early feedback for up to seven days, a hosting plan is required to make your site permanently accessible. Use the Studio Sync or Import/Export features to connect your Studio site to a hosting plan.
Stay in sync with staging and prod
When it’s time to go live, Studio Sync helps you move updates with confidence, without wrestling with exports, plugins, or fragile workflows.
Studio Sync allows you to synchronize a WordPress.com or Pressable-hosted staging or production site with your Studio sites in either direction.
Not only that, sync functionality is selective, meaning you have precise control over what gets transferred between Studio and any connected production or staging sites. No more accidentally overwriting the plugins already running smoothly in production or having your local test content affect the live database.
To sync with staging or production:
Select the site you wish to synchronize from the Studio sidebar. Open the Sync tab. Locate the WordPress.com or Pressable-connected site or connect to another one. Making this connection won’t transfer any data; it simply tells Studio which hosted site you want to pull from or push to. Click Pull or Push to open the sync modal. Choose to sync “All files and folders” or “Specific files and folders.” Select the elements you want to synchronize from or to your production or staging environment. You can expand the plugins, themes, and uploads folders to select individual items. Decide whether to include the Database in the sync. Click the Pull or Push button. Sync is an excellent accompaniment to preview sites for agencies. You can pull a live site into Studio, use preview sites to demo your local work for others, and once you’re happy, you can push the changes to staging or production.
There are some requirements for Studio Sync, so be sure to check out the full documentation to get the most out of this feature.
Set your preferences to get into the work faster
A “small but big” feature in Studio is Preferences, allowing you to quickly work on Studio site files in the editor and terminal application you rely on every day.
Once you have a Studio site running, you’ll notice some buttons under the “Open in…” heading on the Overview tab.
You can specify which code editor and terminal app you use in your everyday workflows in the Studio preferences menu — click on the user icon in the top right corner to open “User Settings,” then click the Preference tab and make your selections.
Work on development sites locally
If you’re part of our free agency program, Automattic for Agencies, you have access to five free development sites.
These are fully-hosted WordPress.com websites that act as staging sites, and if you want to work on them locally in a safe, isolated environment, you can use Studio’s sync feature.
To spin up a development site and sync it to and from Studio:
Log into your Automattic for Agencies account. Click the Marketplace button from the sidebar, then click Hosting and Standard. Scroll down to find the Start building for free section, and click on the “Create a development site →” button. Specify your site address, PHP version, and primary data center, and click “Create site.” This will be a fully-hosted development site on WordPress.com. Once the site is created, it can be synced into Studio by following the syncing instructions above.
It’s a workflow that keeps everything aligned — your local builds, your development site, and your final production push — without the tool mismatch, manual migration steps, or “which version is this?” confusion agencies often battle.
This means fewer unknowns and faster turnaround times across your entire portfolio.
Streamline your agency’s workflows with Studio
When your team moves fast, every slowdown compounds. The tools you use can create friction or remove it — and Studio is built to remove it.
From spinning up consistent environments to sharing always-on previews and safely syncing with staging and production, it gives agencies a clearer path from first draft to final delivery.
It cuts through the messy parts of WordPress development so your team can stay focused on the work clients actually see.
Plus, the WordPress.com team supporting Studio ships updates fast and often, so you can always expect new features and performance enhancements to streamline your workflows further. And if you have any feature requests for the team, we encourage you to open an issue on GitHub.
Try WordPress Studio for free and give your team a faster, more reliable way to build and ship on WordPress.
Explore WordPress Studio for free
View the full article

By Drewfus · December 19, 2025Dec 19
When Typepad Shut Down, We Helped 3,684 Blogs Find a New Home

30 days’ notice. Years of memories at stake. Here’s how WordPress.com stepped up.
On August 28, 2025, Typepad announced it was shutting down.
Creators who’d been blogging since the early 2000s suddenly faced an impossible deadline: save everything or lose it forever in 30 days.
We couldn’t let that happen.
A race against the clock
By September 30 — Typepad’s official shutdown date — 3,684 blogs had successfully migrated to WordPress.com.
And here’s the thing: these weren’t small archives.
Some creators brought over 3,400+ posts, thousands of images, and nearly 10,000 comments dating back to 2005.
The migration wasn’t always smooth. Typepad’s export files often didn’t include media. Some archives were massive — multi-gigabyte files that required special handling.
But we worked through each case, one by one.
More than websites
For many creators, this move was about preserving a body of work — not just keeping a site online.
Book launches chronicled post-by-post. Family milestones captured over the years. Niche communities that had grown over a decade or more.
Most were individual bloggers. Many had been writing for 10, 15, even 20+ years.
One blogger with 3,400 posts, 9,000+ images, and 7,000 comments going back to February 2005:
“Truly bowled over by the level of service and the courtesy and friendliness! Wish I’d made the move long ago.”
Another with a similarly massive archive shared:
“I see all of my Typepad posts on WordPress! I am so happy I am crying! Thank you so very much! This feels huge for me!”
That’s exactly why we do this.
How the migration worked
The process was straightforward in theory: export your Typepad archive, import it to WordPress.com, done.
In practice? Not always that simple.
Typepad’s exports often arrived without media. Some archives were enormous — we’re talking decades of posts crammed into multi-gigabyte files.
Our team worked through the tricky cases hands-on, making sure nothing got left behind.
Once the dust settled, many creators took the opportunity to pick a fresh theme or finally clean up years of messy categories.
A forced move turned into a fresh start.
Your archives deserve a stable home
Platforms come and go. Your work shouldn’t have to.
WordPress.com is built for the long haul — with speed, security, automatic backups, and support whenever you need it.
Whether you’re running a personal journal or a publication with thousands of posts, there’s room to grow.
We’re honored to welcome thousands of Typepad creators to WordPress.com. Your archives matter — and now they have a home built to last.
Thinking about moving your blog? Get started here or reach out to our support team — we’re happy to help.

View the full article

By Drewfus · December 18, 2025Dec 18
How to Manage Multiple Client Sites with WordPress Studio

Managing multiple client sites often means juggling local setups, updates, and changes across different environments.
It works — until the workflow starts getting in your way.
Small issues, like inconsistent configurations, overwritten files, and repetitive setup tasks, can all add up and slow you down.
WordPress Studio simplifies all of that.
The free, open-source tool lets you spin up local sites quickly, share previews instantly, and move changes between environments without the usual hassle — helping you focus on creating rather than configuring and troubleshooting.
Here’s how you can use it to manage multiple client WordPress sites.
Step 1: Set up a new local site
You have three options for creating a new site in WordPress Studio:
Start with a blank site: Create a fresh WordPress installation. Start from a Blueprint: Build a preconfigured site using a “recipe.” Import from a backup: Use the backup of an existing site. Here are more details on those three options.
Start with a blank site
Starting with a blank site creates a fresh WordPress installation using the default out-of-the-box configuration.
This option works well for one-off builds, but Studio can save even more time once you start using Blueprints.
Start from a Blueprint
Blueprints are reusable JSON files that act as recipes for creating preconfigured local sites — they’re one of the key ways that Studio helps you save time and reduce repetitive tasks.
Instead of setting up each project from scratch, you can create Blueprints for various website types (e.g., blogs or online stores) — defining everything your site needs, from WordPress and PHP versions to themes, plugins, settings, and content.
The Studio Assistant and interactive builder help you generate these automatically — simply tell the AI-powered assistant the site configuration, and it will create the Blueprint.
To use a Blueprint in Studio, choose “Start from a Blueprint” and either pick one of the featured options or upload your own Blueprint file.
Studio currently offers three featured Blueprints (you can preview each in WordPress Playground):
Quick Start: A WordPress.com-like setup with the plugins and themes included on new Business-plan sites. Development: A configuration for theme and plugin developers, with debug settings and tools like Query Monitor, Plugin Check, Theme Check, and Create Block Theme. Commerce: A WooCommerce-ready setup with companion plugins for building online stores. You can also browse the WordPress Blueprints Gallery for community-created configurations.
Import a site from a backup file
Note: Sites on the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans don’t need to be imported from a backup. Instead, they can use the Studio Sync feature. This is more powerful and efficient than importing from a backup file.
You can also import a WordPress site into Studio from a backup file. This is useful if you have an existing site you’d like to work on locally.
Follow these steps to import from a backup file:
Install one of the supported backup plugins, such as the free All-in-One WP Migration and Backup plugin, on the site you’d like to import into Studio.
Then, create a backup of the site (WP Admin → All-in-One WP Migration → Backups → Create Backup).
From here, download the backup file and load it into WordPress Studio.
When you’re done working on the local version, use the plugin to create a new backup and import that backup into the live site.
Step: Configure your local site
Studio lets you configure each local site to match the hosted environment, making sure they’re compatible.
The local site’s environment can be configured from the “Advanced settings” panel.
Whether you start with a blank site, a Blueprint, or a backup, Studio lets you adjust a range of optional settings for your local environment. For example, you can:
Set a custom local path: Define where the site folder is stored on your computer. Change the WordPress version: Use the latest release, a specific version, or a Beta/Nightly build (useful for testing upcoming releases). Change the PHP version: Match your hosting environment or test different versions. Use a custom domain (must end with .local): Make accessing your local site in the browser easier. Use SSL to enable HTTPS: Enable HTTPS on your local site so it closely resembles a live environment. Tip: You can change these settings after you’ve created a site.
After configuring the environment, you can also set up the tools you want Studio to use while you work.
These settings can be accessed from Settings → Preferences.
Your preferred tools will be used when accessing the site from the “Open in…” section of the Overview tab.
Step 3: Develop and collaborate
Once your local site is configured, you can begin developing and testing changes.
WordPress Studio applies updates instantly as you work, so you can move quickly and collaborate without delays.
Build locally
Your local site updates in real time — whether you’re editing files, adjusting settings in WP Admin, or adding plugins and themes.
When you do need to add plugins or themes, you can install them through WP Admin just as you would on a hosted site, or drop the files directly into the site’s folders.
If you use certain plugins or themes regularly, keeping them on your computer makes adding them to each new project even faster.
Tip: If you reuse the same plugins across projects, Blueprints (from Step 1) let you spin up sites preconfigured with your preferred plugins, themes, and settings. Studio’s AI Assistant can also help you make updates to your local sites.
Edit individual files
Beyond installing plugins and themes, you can also edit your site’s files directly.
Studio gives you quick access to those files from the Overview tab.
The “Open in…” section gives you quick access to the site’s files and folders.
This is useful if you want to edit a local site’s files, including plugin or theme files, in your preferred code editor.
Each time you edit and save a file, your local site will immediately start using the updated version — there’s no need to wait for files to upload to a server.
Tip: Our blog post on Local WordPress Development Workflows Using WordPress Studio includes a helpful section on the ideal development workflow, whether you’re creating sites, plugins, or themes.
Share a preview of a local site
While working on a site, you can also use the preview feature to get client and collaborator feedback.
Previews are a useful addition to any workflow because they help you get more accurate feedback, faster.
This way, your clients get to experience the site for themselves, instead of relying on inefficient screenshots or video walkthroughs.
All you need to do is share the temporary URL with clients and team members, and they can inspect the site snapshot remotely.
The preview feature is powered by WordPress.com and uses a temporary domain (wp.build).
The main aspects of the preview sites feature include:
One-time snapshot: Any changes you make to the site after creating the preview won’t be applied to the preview (unless you update it). This lets you continue to work on the local site without affecting the preview. WP Admin access: Anyone with a WordPress user account on the site can log in to the preview to access WP Admin. Free functionality: You don’t need hosting to create a preview site, just a free WordPress.com account. Create multiple preview sites: You can have up to 10 preview sites at a time. Seven-day access: Preview sites are temporary and are deleted after seven days, but updating a site restarts the seven-day expiry period. Step 4: Connect and sync with a remote site
After building locally, use Studio’s Sync feature to synchronize your local and hosted sites in either direction (push or pull).
The user-friendly interface and ability to selectively sync reduce the risk of accidental overwrites that can happen when transferring files manually.
Tip: Sync is available on WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans. These plans have Jetpack enabled by default, so your hosted site can connect to Studio and use Sync without any extra setup.
You can synchronize between a local site and the hosted production and staging environments.
Synchronizing with the staging site is especially useful as it lets you test your work in a private hosted environment before moving it to the live production site.
As Studio supports selective sync, you can push or pull only the files, folders, or database tables you need.
Thanks to selective sync, it’s easy to push just a theme from your local site to your hosted WordPress.com site and vice versa, leaving the rest of the site intact.
A backup is created when you initiate a sync, so you can restore your site if necessary. An email notification is also sent when the sync completes.
Step 5: Test on staging and push changes
Now it’s time to test the site in a staging environment — a feature available to WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans.
This gives you a safe place to identify issues before they go live.
For the best results, follow one of these workflows after creating a WordPress.com staging site:
Go to your Sites list in the WordPress.com dashboard. Select the site you want to create a staging site for. Open the Overview tab and click the “Add staging site +” link. You can use the switcher to change between the production and staging environments.
See the WordPress.com documentation to find out how staging sites work.
Now that your staging site is set up, here are two workflows that show how to use WordPress Studio when working on client sites:
Workflow for new sites
This workflow for building a new client site involves creating a local site, sharing a preview, pushing to the staging site, and then pushing to the production site.
Follow these steps:
Create a new local site in Studio. Use the Preview feature to share your work with the client. Once the client approves the work, push the local site to the staging environment. After testing, push the staging site to the production environment to make it available online. WordPress.com has a built-in Coming Soon mode with a preview feature that’s useful for controlling access to sites in development.
Workflow for existing sites
This workflow lets you update an existing live site without overwriting important content or disrupting anything outside the changes you’ve made.
Selective Sync ensures you don’t overwrite important live content — such as form submissions, comments, orders, or anything added while you were working.
For this scenario:
Use Studio’s Sync feature to pull the entire live site to a local site. Update the local site, such as editing the theme files. Use the Preview feature to share those changes with the client. After client approval, selectively sync the theme files to push them from the local site to the staging site. Test the staging site. If everything works as expected, push the relevant files and folders from the staging site to the production site without syncing the database. The live site now includes your theme changes, and any other updates made while you were working locally won’t be overwritten.
Step 6: Scale across multiple clients
Once your workflow is in place, WordPress Studio makes it easy to scale your process across multiple client projects.
Instead of repeating setup work or jumping between disconnected tools, you can reuse configurations, switch between projects instantly, and keep each site organized and isolated.
Use Studio’s core actions to stay efficient as your client list grows:
Create: Set up a separate local site for each client — start with a fresh installation, use a Blueprint, or import a backup. Switch: Move easily between projects by switching between local sites. Share: Use the Preview feature to share work with clients and collaborators. Sync: If you’re on WordPress.com Business or Commerce plans, use Sync to transfer work between local, staging, and production environments. Streamline client projects with WordPress Studio
WordPress Studio is a fast, open-source, and free way to build and manage local WordPress sites.
It helps you save time, share work with clients more effectively, and reduce errors when transferring files.
Blueprints let you spin up consistent, pre-configured sites in seconds, reducing setup time and repetitive work — so you can receive and apply client feedback with ease.
If you’re using WordPress.com’s Business or Commerce plans, Sync adds an extra layer by letting you move work between local, staging, and production safely and with confidence.
The bottom line: No matter where the final site is hosted, Studio helps you manage multiple client projects with less overhead and more control.
Explore WordPress Studio View the full article

By Drewfus · December 17, 2025Dec 17
Grow Your Website’s Audience with Our New Free Course

Want more people to actually find and follow your website?
Our new course — Grow Your Website’s Audience — is here to guide you through the strategies and tools that help you attract visitors, build trust, and turn casual readers into loyal followers.
It’s fully self-paced, so you can jump into any lesson at any time and spend more time on the topics that matter most to you.
Start the free course What you’ll learn
Across seven practical lessons, you’ll learn how to:
Create content that builds trust and engagement — craft posts that show expertise, clarity, and personality. Get found in search results — master SEO basics and make your content discoverable by both search engines and AI tools. Leverage social media — connect your site to platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn with Jetpack Social, and make it easy for readers to share your work. Build an email audience — set up a newsletter and keep your readers coming back with every new post. Advertise your content — use Blaze to promote posts directly from your dashboard and reach new audiences across WordPress.com and Tumblr. Use your stats for smarter decisions — track what’s working, identify your most popular content, and refine your strategy. Plan for long-term success — set realistic goals, stay consistent, and keep evolving with your audience. Why you should take this course
Your website won’t grow on its own — you need a clear strategy for attracting the right people and keeping them engaged, and this course gives you that foundation.
It gives you a simple framework to move forward, with practical steps, real examples, and tools you can start using right away.
Start the free course More video resources to explore
If you’re new to WordPress.com or ready to keep leveling up, check out our other popular courses and video tutorials:
Intro to SEO course Create a Website course Start a Blog course Create and edit menus in WordPress Learn the WordPress Editor Speed Up Your Design with WordPress Patterns Master WordPress Images, Galleries, Slideshows & More How to Accept Payments on WordPress.com (No Store Needed) View the full article

By Drewfus · December 15, 2025Dec 15
Why Start a Blog in 2026? 9 Solid Reasons From a Blogger

A blog is one of the best investments you can make — personally and professionally.
It can drive traffic to your website, boost your career or business, help you learn valuable skills, or simply give you a creative outlet.
Even after 10 years of blogging for myself and others, I still find it enjoyable, meaningful, and one of the most effective ways to earn web traffic.
So come along and see why you should start a blog in 2026.
1. Be visible in search engines
Search is changing in 2025 — but blogs are still one of the best ways to ensure people find you online.
Traditional search engines like Google still send huge amounts of traffic to the posts and pages that rank — and the same content often gets cited or summarized by AI tools like ChatGPT.
Here’s a quick snapshot:
In 2024, Google alone received more than five trillion searches (around 14 billion per day). Website visitors from AI search are projected to surpass traditional search visitors in 2028, while being worth 4.4x the value of traditional organic search traffic because visitors come more informed. Consequently, it’s not surprising that 81% of marketers continue to see results from their blog posts, 21% even report strong results.
Blogging is an essential tool to showcase your expertise, which is key for both Google and AI search tools.
So, if your goal is to attract website visitors from those sources, starting a blog is definitely a step in the right direction.
2. Attract long-term, sustainable traffic
Unlike the short-lived bursts of social media content, blog posts continue to create value and bring in visitors long after they’ve been published.
Blogging efforts compound over time.
On most social networks, your visibility often declines quickly when you stop posting.
However, the content you publish on your blog is a long-term investment that keeps paying off.
For example, below is a screenshot from an article on my own website:
Published at the end of May 2025, you can clearly see that its rank, impressions, and clicks have slowly improved over the months. Six months later, it has become one of my top five pages for organic traffic.
This goes hand in hand with insights from Databox, where nearly half of the people surveyed stated that older blog posts bring in 61-80% of their organic traffic.
This research also highlights the value of consistency and patience: 32% of survey respondents said it took them four to six months to reach 1,000 monthly visitors.
Blogging is effective because once you’ve reached a certain level, you can expect your efforts to keep paying dividends.
3. Build a brand and attract clients
A blog helps you sharpen your online profile and build a reputation, both for a personal website and/or for your business.
It’s the perfect vehicle to demonstrate your expertise, skills, values, personality, and what you want people to associate with you.
According to HubSpot’s 2025 State of Blogging Report:
66% of businesses that blog do so to boost brand awareness 53% do it for customer engagement 49% do it for lead generation Half of marketers said their ROI from blogging increased in 2024, and 45% were planning to expand their blogging budgets in 2025.
Blogging isn’t just for companies, though.
Even a personal blog can create real-world opportunities. Think paid writing gigs, speaking engagements, consulting jobs, or media and brand partnerships.
Some bloggers, like Chris Guillebeau and James Clear, even translate their blogging into book deals:
I’ve experienced this myself.
In my 10+ years as a freelance writer, I rarely had to do active outreach. I got my start by writing a blog, then used that body of work to land my first client.
For the past decade, I have continued to find work because of articles I had already published on my clients’ sites, as well as my own.
Blogging has allowed me to demonstrate my expertise and build a reputation — and it can do the same for you.
4. Generate a stable income
Besides opening doors to paid opportunities, a blog itself can be a direct source of income.
Blogging has low overhead, can be done from anywhere, and offers many paths for monetization.
Here are the most common ways bloggers earn money:
Services: Write about the problems your target audience faces and let them hire you to help. For example, SEO agencies and consultants may publish SEO tutorials and upsell their services. Affiliate marketing: Recommend products or services using special links. When someone buys through your link, you earn a commission. Digital products: Create and sell your own ebooks, templates, courses, or downloads. You keep 100% of the profit. Advertisement: Reserve space on your site for ads, either through ad networks or direct deals, and earn money through clicks or impressions. For example, users on the WordPress.com Premium plan and above can join WordAds — the platform’s built-in ad network for monetizing site traffic. You can see this in action in the food blog The Fig Jar.
In the last quarter of 2024, its owner earned nearly $7,000 in net profit from a mix of display ads, affiliate marketing, and digital products.
Another example is Meal Prep Manual, which, you guessed it, mainly publishes meal prep recipes.
It’s monetized through affiliate marketing and digital products.
While the site doesn’t publish income reports, Semrush’s Traffic Analytics tool estimates it received over 120K total visitors in September 2025 alone:
That’s a solid traffic base for a blog that has been around since 2020, especially when paired with its YouTube channel.
Using these tactics, a blog can grow into an income stream — or even a full-time business — that gives you independence and the ability to be your own boss. For example, you could start a content writing or web design agency.
5. Own your presence and audience
Unlike a social media profile, your blog can’t be taken from you. It’s an online presence you actually own, which makes you far more resilient to changes.
Influencer culture has made it seem like being present online means massive followings on Instagram, TikTok, or other social networks.
You should never lose sight of the fact that your profiles on these platforms are assets you don’t really own:
When platforms change their algorithms, designs, or priorities, your reach can evaporate. Your account could be suspended for an accidental violation of the terms of service. Legislation or policy changes could shut the network down — or block access in your region. A company or person you don’t want to support might acquire your favorite platform. In simple terms, when you don’t own the infrastructure, everything you’ve built can disappear overnight, including your audience, income, and archive of work.
Just look at the responses in this Reddit thread about a potential ban of TikTok in the US:
Owning your blog gives you complete control over your content. That said, you can always combine multiple channels and grow your presence — just don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
With a WordPress-based site, you own both your content, data, and design. You can export it, download it, and take it with you wherever you want. Including your audience, especially if you build an email list alongside your blog.
6. Build a content foundation for repurposing
A blog not only gives you a hub for all your content efforts — every post you publish is raw material for dozens of other content pieces.
Blogging allows you to do the hard work once and then repurpose it for the rest of your marketing channels.
This is why so many creators, marketers, and businesses build their content strategy around long-form blog posts. One article can become:
One or more YouTube or TikTok videos A series of Bluesky or Threads posts An email series for your newsletter The basis for an infographic Podcast material For example, I turned a book summary I wrote for my own blog into a LinkedIn carousel:
Sure, repurposing takes time — but a large share of the work is already done.
Why waste it? Each new article you publish can fuel your social feeds, nurture your email list, and reinforce your expertise across platforms.
7. Learn, grow, and inspire others
Running a blog is a powerful tool for learning — and teaching. It forces you to truly understand the topics you cover and also lets you contribute to the success of others in a meaningful way.
If there’s something you are deeply interested in or passionate about, starting a blog about it is a great way to expand your knowledge and competence in that area.
It takes a lot of research to understand something to the point where you can explain it to other people.
For example, much of what I know about SEO, CSS, or how to customize WordPress through code comes from writing blog posts about these topics.
In addition, sharing what you learn is very satisfying. It allows you to help other people. In fact, many bloggers start out because they want to make a difference and contribute to society.
8. Build a valuable skill set
Besides expanding your knowledge, running a blog teaches you a wide range of valuable skills, both technical, creative, organizational, and interpersonal.
Many of these make you a stronger employee, collaborator, freelancer, or creator.
Naturally, one of the main skills you’ll sharpen is your writing ability.
In addition, here is a sampling of the design and marketing skills you’ll use regularly when producing blog content:
Coming up with blog topics and ideas Keyword research Outlining and structuring content Research skills Editing and revising Content management Content formatting and readability Using header tags correctly Retouching images with tools like Photoshop Creating visuals (e.g., with Canva) On-page SEO Image optimization Besides that, you also learn a surprising number of soft skills: self-motivation, goal setting, discipline, time management, and putting yourself in your readers’ shoes.
Running a blog is an education in its own right.
9. Enjoy yourself
You don’t have to blog with a financial goal in mind or to achieve a strategic outcome.
Blogging can also be a deeply personal activity you simply do because it’s fun, meaningful, or provides you with a creative outlet.
For example, you might start a blog to:
Share your ideas Document a journey (emotional or physical) Chronicle your everyday life Build a creative habit Claim your own little corner of the web Clarify your thinking Explore hobbies Confront fears or shyness Share your passions Grow as a person Champion a cause you care about These are just a few examples. When you look online, you will find that people have many reasons to start a blog.
For example, this blogger turned to writing and sharing recipes online after losing her restaurant during COVID, using a blog to keep her passion alive and reach people worldwide:
How to easily start a blog with WordPress.com
Does the list above have you feeling motivated and wanting to start a blog right away?
Good news: You can have one up and running in less than 15 minutes.
Just click on Get started in the top right corner of this blog or the WordPress.com homepage.
Every WordPress.com hosting plan comes with automated backups, updates, performance optimization, and security features.
That way, you can fully concentrate on creating content, learning, and connecting with your audience.
Once signed up, pick a blog theme in your admin panel under Appearance → Themes to choose what your blog will look like.
Customize your design using the Site Editor — from colors and fonts to individual page elements. Access it under Appearance → Editor.
You can also create new pages, add them to a menu, and define your blog page if you don’t want your posts to appear on your front page.
That’s basically it. All that’s left is to start creating blog posts and putting them online.
If you want more details and step-by-step instructions, check our detailed article on how to start a blog. We also have instructions for how to properly write a blog post and how to increase blog traffic.
Your blog starts here
So, why should you start a blog, even in 2026?
The better question is: Why not?
Everything that made blogging successful is still relevant today, even if the online environment is changing.
Running a blog allows you to attract long-term traffic, make a name for yourself or your business, and monetize your audience.
It’s also a way to build knowledge, learn valuable skills, or simply do something enjoyable.
If you want a partner that makes it easy to start a blog at any skill level and without a technical background, sign up for WordPress.com.
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By Drewfus · December 11, 2025Dec 11
10 Best WordPress Holiday Plugins for a Little Holiday Cheer

The holidays are here, and your website deserves a glow-up to celebrate the season.
Whether you run an online store or a blog, plugins can transform your site into a festive experience that delights visitors and boosts engagement.
From falling snowflakes to advent calendar giveaways, we’ve rounded up 10 holiday plugins that add seasonal charm and set you up for holiday success.
1. Christmas Panda
Christmas Panda lets you add festive Christmas decorations to your site with just a few clicks.
In the Christmas Panda tab in your WordPress admin panel, you can select from a variety of decorations.
The plugin offers a merry mix of header and footer banner designs, bold snowflakes that drift down your pages, and holiday pop-ups.
You have the option to add just one Christmas design element, or you can add all three for a maximalist Christmas extravaganza.
Our favorite features
Intuitive admin panel: Christmas Panda’s admin tab is extremely intuitive, with just a few buttons to configure. Even beginning website owners can set up decorations within minutes. Lots of banner options: Whether you want garlands, bows, or plain pine needles, Christmas Panda’s banners will suit many different site designs. Snowflakes: If your site has a background color, the snowflakes feature adds a bit of cheer without overwhelming your content. How to use Christmas Panda on your site
Add a Christmas mood to your site: Create a small seasonal moment that turns static layouts into something visitors instantly recognize as festive and intentional. Tip: If you’re a WordPress.com user, you can add falling snow without installing a plugin — check out this quick guide on how to do it.
2. Super Advent Calendar
The Super Advent Calendar plugin adds a customizable block featuring flippable cards for each day leading up to Christmas.
You can add as many days as you’d like to your advent calendar — e.g., the traditional 24 days of flippable cards or a custom number.
You can also customize both the front and back text, as well as the colors, creating a calendar that matches your site’s styling.
Our favorite features
Calendar Customization: We like that this holiday plugin lets you customize each Advent card individually. Because you control the text on both card sides and can add as many days to the calendar as you’d like, you can create a truly unique experience. Opportunities for daily engagement: You can set each Advent block’s start and end dates to offer site users daily perks. The 24-hour window for each gift can incentivize shoppers to complete their orders and encourage them to return for more.   How to use the Super Advent Calendar on your site
Create an Advent Calendar of deals: If you run a WooCommerce or other digital store, you can create a “12 (or 24) Days of Deals” page with your calendar. This seasonal addition gamifies the shopping experience and rewards daily visitors. Share other fun content behind each card: If you don’t sell anything on your site, you can still get creative with the advent calendar. Consider sharing subscriber-only content, fun facts relevant to your blog topic, and more. 3. Woo Store Vacation
Woo Store Vacation is a plugin that automatically pauses your WooCommerce store for a set vacation period, because website owners deserve a break over the holiday, too!
It’s meant to support a variety of business needs. You can close your store completely (don’t worry, this won’t affect your SEO thanks to the plugin’s settings) or simply alert customers that there will be a processing delay before their order is fulfilled.
Our favorite features
Site banner: You can customize the text and color of your vacation announcement. This banner shows up at the top of all of your store pages. Customize what products are disabled: You can also decide which products and shipping options are disabled during your vacation. Find this option in the “Conditions page,” which shows up once you’ve disabled purchases. How to use Woo Store Vacation on your site
Add a banner with vacation dates in advance: Transparent communication with customers is vital. If you fulfill orders manually or need to do backend admin for fulfillment partners, communicating your vacation dates sets clear expectations and keeps customers happy. Only disable products you fulfill manually: If external providers fulfill some of your orders automatically or you offer digital products and gift cards, you can continue earning income on these items while you’re away. 4. Weather Effect
The Weather Effect plugin is another way to add a holiday twist to your site with falling holiday emojis.
Choose from several sets of icons, including a Christmas set — snowmen, ornaments, candy canes, and more — or customizable snowflakes.
Our favorite features
Multiple holidays included: There are various occasion sets available, giving you multiple opportunities throughout the year to add a little movement to your site. Works well on white backgrounds: Because most of the icons are colorful, you can use this plugin even if your site has a white background (though the round snowflakes are only available in white). Adjust speed and density: You can also adjust how fast your holiday icons fall and their density for greater customization. How to use it on your site
Add Christmas or winter decor: Dust your site with snowflakes or snowmen for a touch of winter charm. Keep it clean: Keep the density and speed low to minimize clutter. Add effects for upcoming holidays: Then, change up the icons to celebrate New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, or to mark the start of Spring. 5. Santa’s Christmas Countdown
Santa’s Christmas Countdown is a simple plugin that lets you display the number of days until Christmas on any page of your site.
On Christmas Day, the Santa icon wishes visitors a Merry Christmas.

Use a shortcode block with the code [countdown] to add Santa and the number of days until Christmas to any page.
You can also format the element to the center, left, or right by expanding the shortcode to [countdown-center], etc.
Our favorite features
Simple and lightweight: This plugin has just one preset icon (Santa) and his countdown. This simplicity means it’s easy to set up and lightweight to run. How to use Christmas Countdown on your site
Add a countdown across your site: Use the countdown as a header or sidebar widget to keep visitors excited about the upcoming holiday. Use the countdown year-round on relevant pages: If you have Christmas-themed content pages — like a Christmas recipe collection or Christmas DIY — leave the widget up year-round. 6. WooCommerce Gift Wrapper
WooCommerce Gift Wrapper lets WooCommerce stores offer holiday wrapping services as an add-on purchase.
This is a great upsell opportunity for e-commerce stores, which adds convenience for shoppers who may prefer to ship gifts directly to friends and families.
You can also add a gift note to complete the Christmas package.
Our favorite features
Flexible add-ons: While the plugin is called “Gift Wrapper,” it doesn’t limit you to offering just gift wrap. You can also use it to sell other holiday add-ons such as greeting cards, gift messages, and more. Seamless setup: The plugin integrates seamlessly into your WooCommerce checkout flow, making the upsell more helpful than pushy. How to use WooCommerce Gift Wrapper on your site
Offer seasonal gift wrapping services: Offer gift wrapping at checkout to increase your average order value during the holiday shopping season. You can set a flat fee for wrapping or create tiered pricing for different wrapping styles, like basic, premium, and luxury. Plan your wrapping services accordingly: You can also choose whether you want to charge for wrapping the whole order or per item. 7. Snow Fall
If you’re looking for a subtle holiday addition, the Snow Fall plugin adds just a glimmer of snow to your web pages.
Simply activate the plugin, and a light dusting of shimmering white flakes will appear across your site — no configuration required.
Our favorite features
A lightweight plugin: Snow Fall is just a few lines of code, so you’ll get snowflakes without any freeze on your load time. One-click activation: Once you activate the Snow Fall plugin, you’re all set! No additional configuration is required.   How to use Snow Fall on your site
Because the snowflakes are white and it’s not possible to adjust the color, this plugin will only work on sites with a colored background.
If that applies to your site, activate Snow Fall and enjoy a little holiday spirit on every page.
8. Poptin Popups
Poptin Popups offers customizable, gamified popups and forms that can be triggered on a variety of customer clicks or views.
Use these pop-ups to encourage users to sign up for your mailing list or to complete checkout from your store.
While Poptin Popups is a powerful integrated marketing tool that can be used year-round, a holiday-themed campaign is a great place to start.
Our favorite features
Powerful feature set: Poptin is extremely powerful and flexible, which makes it a great tool for marketing teams who want tons of control. Pre-made templates and campaign ideas: Poptin offers a ton of pre-made templates and resources, including a list of Christmas pop-up ideas. Intuitive dashboard: Poptin’s simple dashboard, template collection, and built-in WordPress integration make it easy for first-time users to experiment with smaller campaigns. How to use Poptin Popups on your site
Design a holiday-themed campaign: The sky is the limit when it comes to building a holiday pop-up campaign. For example, create a pop-up offering 15% off for visitors who sign up before Christmas Eve, or use a countdown timer pop-up to remind shoppers of your shipping cut-off for holiday orders. Continue using pop-ups for future events: After the holidays, consider other themed campaign opportunities. 9. RS Christmas Trees
Like Christmas Panda, the RS Christmas Trees plugin offers holiday-themed banners and snowflakes.
If your Christmas style is truly maximalist, this holiday WordPress plugin might be perfect for you.
It’s the most robust decor plugin on this list, offering a trove of banners, countdowns, snowflakes, and more — including holiday music.
Our favorite features
Automatic scheduling: If you upgrade to Ultimate, you can decide how many days you want to activate your Christmas features. Once it’s set up, you’ll get automatic Christmas cheer without any admin. Snowflakes that work on white backgrounds: We like that their snowflake colors can be customized, so even sites with white backgrounds can get in on the holiday fun. How to use RS Christmas Trees on your site
Create a cohesive design: Add header and footer banners to your site in coordinating styles and match your snowflake color to your brand palette for a polished look. Test your banners: If you’re using sticky footer banners, be sure to test them on multiple pages to ensure they don’t block critical text. 10. The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar plugin lets you publish events and offer tickets directly on your site.
It includes features like custom ticket types, venue details with maps, multiple organizers, and event search — all available in the free version.
Our favorite features
Easy setup: The Events Calendar walks you through setup in five simple steps, including adding a venue, an organizer, and ticketing. You still need to navigate the WordPress admin, but the onboarding makes each required field clear. Ticketing: You can create free tickets or enable paid ticketing with the free Tickets Commerce. Ticketed events can be a great source of income, and using an integrated app like The Events Calendar helps you keep all your data in one place. How to use Random Christmas Facts on your site
Add upcoming holiday events: Whether you host in-person or virtual events for the holidays, you can add them directly to your website with the Events Calendar. Create a discount or deal calendar: If you prefer a true calendar-style layout instead of the simpler Advent-style list, you can use The Events Calendar to showcase holiday discounts or daily deals. It takes a bit of creativity, but one approach is to create a “deal event” for each day, limit RSVPs to that date, and then send everyone who RSVP’d a special discount code. Light up your site for the holidays
Preparing your site for the holidays doesn’t need to be as complicated as untangling your Christmas lights.
You can add plugins to any WordPress.com site on a plugin-enabled plan, so choose just one or multiple ideas from this guide to experiment with this December.
Don’t forget to check your site analytics afterward: Did your calendar giveaway increase repeat visitors? Did the sprinkle of snowfall increase your average user session? If you’re a WordPress.com user, you can explore these stats right in your admin panel using Jetpack stats.
Consider these plugins your gift to your visitors — a festive site means happier users, better engagement, and a merrier holiday season.
Explore more WordPress plugins View the full article

By Drewfus · December 10, 2025Dec 10
AI Website Building: Separating Hype from Reality

I built my business site on WordPress and often recommend it — along with tools like Jetpack and the new AI website builder — to people in my network.
I’m an experienced website designer, but I’m not a software developer.
Vibe coding has been a fun, seemingly magical way to turn ideas into working mini-apps, but that “magic” comes with limits. The tools I’ve created work well for my internal team, yet I don’t understand the backend deeply enough to share them publicly or monetize them safely.
After building dozens of prototypes, I’ve learned that AI prototyping tools are great for fast experimentation — but some fall short in powering the backend of long-term business websites.
In this article, I’ll break down what AI site generators can do, where their limitations show up, and why WordPress.com’s AI website builder takes a very different approach.
What are AI website builders?
The term “AI site builder” refers to the use of AI tools and plain-language prompts to generate a website.
There are two major categories of these tools:
Lightweight AI builders: Similar to Lovable and Framer, which are also referred to as AI prototyping tools. They’re great for simple landing pages or MVPs, but their limitations show quickly when you need security, SEO, integrations, or room to grow. This is what people refer to when talking about “vibe coding.” Full-featured AI builders: Similar to WordPress.com’s AI website builder. They package prompt-based website generation backed by the stability and proven track record of managed platforms like WordPress. The reality is: If you want something more than an MVP or single landing page, vibe coding alone isn’t enough.
You need a platform that can support performance, reliability, security, and growth.
The limitations of AI prototyping tools
AI prototyping tools are great for quick ideas — but not for lasting websites.
They deliver instant results: Describe what you want, and a site appears.
That speed makes them perfect for brainstorming, testing concepts, or validating ideas without friction.
Unfortunately, that’s also their limitation.
These tools hide much of the complexity behind building a dependable site for your business, making it hard to spot problems until something breaks.
When you add new features or generate a site, you often end up troubleshooting issues you didn’t even know existed.
For example:
You can’t see or control the underlying systems. Integrations break without clear reasons. Downtime is difficult to diagnose. Security isn’t guaranteed or built in. Your website represents your brand — and you shouldn’t rely on something you can’t fully understand or maintain.
What makes WordPress.com’s AI website builder different
WordPress.com’s AI website builder gives you the “type a prompt, get a site” experience on a platform that actually scales.
What makes it special?
Your site is built on WordPress — the CMS powering 43% of the web — and hosted on WordPress.com’s fully managed infrastructure.
In other words, you get fast generation plus the customization, plugins, performance, and security needed to actually run and grow a real website.
Security
Many AI-generated sites are rife with security issues precisely because they simplify everything so heavily.
You can accidentally expose API keys, break authentication, mishandle user data, or leave vulnerabilities without knowing.
For any site hosted on WordPress.com, security and infrastructure are managed by a 20-plus-year ecosystem and a dedicated team that continually hardens code, patches vulnerabilities, and maintains platform standards.
With vetted plugins, managed WordPress hosting, and standardized best practices, most of the security risk is taken off your plate.
Performance
SEO isn’t something you can just bolt on later. Many vibe coding tool brands are realizing they need to offer SEO features, but WordPress has been building toward this for decades.
WordPress has long been considered an SEO-friendly platform because of its clean baseline code, fast rendering, and structured content.
WordPress.com also includes managed hosting and performance-focused infrastructure across its paid plans: high-frequency CPUs, a global CDN/edge cache, unmetered traffic, and automated burst-scaling.
In other words, you’re not just getting features — you’re getting faster, more resilient hosting by default.
Extensibility
Speaking from experience, vibe coding and using external APIs or third-party services is harder than it looks, even for semi-technical users.
Access to WordPress.com’s plugins means your site can grow with you instead of boxing you in.
You don’t have to build everything manually or worry that your integrations will silently fail.
Hosting
When using vibe coding tools, the web hosting layer is often hidden from you, so you have little visibility or control.
With these tools, if your site goes down or integrations fail, you’re the one responsible for troubleshooting, often without the tools or access needed to fix the issue.
Moreover, if you don’t know what you’re dealing with, it’s also likely that you don’t know how to get assistance at a reasonable price — costs spiral quickly.
With WordPress.com, hosting is managed for you in a way that’s optimized, secure, and monitored. If something goes wrong, you’re not left guessing — you have the peace of mind that comes with access to 24/7 support from the human Happiness Engineers.
Design
Vibe-coding tools feel instantly creative, but that freedom usually comes without structure — and if you’re not a designer, it can get overwhelming fast.
WordPress.com’s AI website builder is different.
It lets you create websites using AI prompts, but with a real block-based WordPress foundation behind it.
You can edit every section cleanly with blocks (alongside the AI chat), keep your layout consistent, and avoid the chaos of loose, AI-generated code.
Costs
No AI site builder stays completely “free” once you move past the free trial.
If you want to publish, update your site regularly, or add essential features, you’ll need a paid plan with any platform.
However, vibe coding (especially for a non-technical user) can obscure hidden costs like dealing with:
Downtime Broken integrations Manual debugging Data exposure A managed platform like WordPress.com reduces the likelihood of costly failures and handles maintenance for you. Once you’re happy with your AI site, you can simply pick a plan and publish it.
How to use WordPress.com’s AI builder
You start with a simple prompt: describe your idea, your tone, your brand, and your purpose.
As an homage to a blog I created after graduating college, which solidified my love for writing and SEO, I went with this prompt:
“Create a lifestyle blog called ‘ChiTown on a Dime’ for young professionals in Chicago living large on a budget. It will feature affordable restaurant reviews, budget-friendly events, insider local guides, and personal reflections on city life. Design pages for Home, Eats & Drinks, Things to Do, Living in Chicago, About, and Contact. Use a modern, minimalistic layout with vibrant photos and easy navigation. Tone should be energetic, stylish, and relatable.”
The result?
A full block-based website that would’ve taken hours to create from scratch — not loose code you can’t maintain.
The builder definitely understood the assignment, creating the following site with a photo of Chicago deep-dish pizza, front and center:
With the foundation in place, you can refine the site using conversational language with the AI copilot:
“Adjust the layout.” “Change these colors.” “Rewrite this section.” “Suggest improvements.” Here’s what it suggested when I prompted the assistant to show me new fonts for my site, and what it looked like to apply changes from chat:
Here’s the helpful advice it shared for making my new creation more SEO-friendly when I asked it for tips:

The AI builder gives you a full trial to create and refine your site without paying up front.
When it’s time to launch publicly and rely on managed hosting, security, and performance, you can move to a paid plan.
Can your site grow with you?
These are the questions you should ask before choosing your ideal AI website building solution:
Can this site evolve? Can it scale? Can it handle more pages, products, languages, or additional features? WordPress.com’s AI website builder blends the speed of modern AI with the maturity of a platform that has supported millions of websites for 20 years.
Your site can grow indefinitely with plugins, SEO tools, plugins like WooCommerce, and reliable hosting.
Try WordPress.com’s AI website builder for free, then publish it for the world to see with a paid plan.

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By Drewfus · December 8, 2025Dec 8
State of the Word 2025 Recap: The Top Highlights

On December 2, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Executive Director Mary Hubbard, and Lead Architect Matías Ventura took the stage in San Francisco — joined by contributors and guests from around the world.
And for the first time, a major WordPress release launched live during the keynote — WordPress 6.9 went out to the world as the audience watched.
If you missed the livestream, you can watch the full recording below:
Our favorite highlights from 2025
2025 was a milestone year for WordPress. The project shipped two major releases, welcomed record numbers of first-time contributors, and saw global adoption accelerate — especially in non-English markets.
Here’s what stood out:
WordPress continues to power the open web. About 43% of all websites run on WordPress, with roughly 60% CMS market share. Among the top 1,000 sites, adoption grew to 49.4% — up 2.3% from last year. A truly global community. For the first time, over 56% of WordPress sites are in languages other than English. Japanese became the second-most-used language, with Japan reaching 58.5% website share and 83% CMS share. A thriving ecosystem. Over 60,000 plugins are now available, with downloads on track to hit 2.1 billion by year’s end. Block theme adoption grew over 40%, passing 1,000 themes. Record contributor numbers. WordPress 6.8 had 921 contributors. WordPress 6.9 brought over 900, including 230 first-timers. WordPress 6.9 launched live on stage. By the end of the keynote, over 700,000 sites had already been updated. Tip: Learn more about the most exciting WordPress 6.9 features for website owners and developers.
AI takes center stage
This year’s AI panel featured James LePage (Automattic), Felix Arntz (Google), and Jeff Paul (10up).
And here’s one of the central themes from the keynote: AI is becoming foundational to WordPress.
Matt Mullenweg announced that a dedicated AI team was formed earlier this year. In just six months, they shipped all four planned “building blocks”:
Abilities API: Exposes the capabilities of plugins, themes, and WordPress core to AI agents in a standardized, machine-readable format. WP AI Client: An abstraction layer for communicating with any generative AI model — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or others — so developers can write prompts without locking into one provider. MCP Adapter: Bridges the Abilities API with AI providers through the Model Context Protocol, letting AI assistants understand and act within WordPress. AI Experiments plugin: Now live on the WordPress plugin repository. Besides, the keynote featured a demo of Telex, a tool that generates Gutenberg blocks from natural language.
During the keynote, Mullenweg showed how Nick Hamze used it to build a Lego price calculator and Google Calendar integration — without writing any code.

All these building blocks set the stage for what the AI panel previewed for 7.0: a Workflows API for stringing abilities together, collaborative editing with AI assistance, and the WP AI Client moving into core.
AI features aren’t visible in the interface yet, but WordPress is now intelligible to AI systems — and the groundwork is laid for what comes next.
Tip: WordPress.com users can also explore our AI website builder, which helps you create, design, customize, and launch your site much faster and more easily.
WordPress around the world
The keynote also highlighted the increasingly global nature of WordPress:
81 WordCamps — community-organized conferences for WordPress users and contributors — took place across 39 countries this year. Over 5,200 volunteers organized them, reaching more than 100,000 people in person. And there are still 16 more scheduled before year’s end. Learn.wordpress.org served over 1.5 million users, with average engagement time up 32% after WordCamp US 2025. Education programs are expanding, too. Campus Connect is bringing WordPress into universities — Stephanie Garita Johnson from Universidad Fidélitas in Costa Rica spoke about how students there now earn academic credit for contributing to open source. And in Nicaragua, Youth Day brought together 75 kids ages 8 to 20 to build their first WordPress sites — with teenagers teaching teenagers. Ecosystem and infrastructure updates
WordPress is also getting faster to ship, easier to test, and safer to update.
This year’s improvements focused on reducing friction for plugin developers and making it easier to spin up new sites and migrate existing ones:
Plugin reviews now take under 7 days thanks to AI-assisted review processes. The team is also handling about 100 more submissions per week than last year. A new 24-hour safety window for auto-updates gives developers time to catch issues from early adopters before updates roll out widely. WordPress Playground hit 1.4 million users from 227 countries this year. It now includes a file browser, a visual gallery of blueprints, and a stable CLI. Q&A session
The community Q&A touched on several topics:
On domains and owning your online presence
Mullenweg emphasized that a domain is “your real estate on the web” — the thing that truly belongs to you. He encouraged everyone to get their own domain, even buying one for kids at birth. Without one, “you’re kind of like a digital sharecropper.”
On the “agentic web” and AI
As AI tools start browsing and acting on websites, Mullenweg shared ideas about serving markdown versions of pages for easier AI consumption and embedding micropayments for content attribution.
On open social platforms
He pointed to Bluesky as a positive example — where you can use your own domain as your username — and noted that X has improved its handling of external links.
Explore WordPress 6.9 on WordPress.com
This year’s State of the Word made one thing clear: WordPress is evolving fast — with AI foundations in place, a growing global community, and tools that make building and collaborating easier than ever.
WordPress 6.9 is also live on WordPress.com. Explore the new features in our detailed posts:
What’s new in WordPress 6.9 for bloggers, creators, and site owners What’s new in WordPress 6.9 for developers And if you missed the livestream, the full recording is available above.
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By Drewfus · December 4, 2025Dec 4

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