WordPress Review 2026: Is This Popular Platform the Best for Small Businesses?

WordPress.com is a low-cost and effective way to start a blog or host a portfolio, but it may have too many plugins and restrictions for beginner ecommerce sites.

WordPress started as a blogging platform and continues to do that very well. Whether you want a free account to write down your thoughts into the ether of the internet or are building a basic website to showcase your work, WordPress has a variety of plans and features.

Budding online entrepreneurs who want to launch their business quickly may find that WordPress relies on too many plugins to be cost-effective. Plus, WordPress paywalls WooCommerce, which offers ecommerce and analytics plugins, so you can’t use the free plan to test whether the platform will work for your ecommerce website.

We created a test WordPress website and edited it through the platform to experience what it’s really like for someone starting from scratch. Read on for our firsthand WordPress website builder review.

WordPress review at a glance

Price	$4.00-$45.00/mo
Free plan	Yes
Money-back guarantee	Yes — 14 days
Number of collaborators	Unlimited
Storage space	6GB – 150GB (for additional fee)
Custom domain	Free for one year with most plans
Site analytics	Yes, starting with the Personal plan
Ecommerce tools	Yes, Business and Commerce plans only
AI tools	Yes, via plugins
Learn more	Get WordPress

We last tested WordPress on December 21, 2025.

Our experience

For the most part, we had a positive experience with WordPress, even though the platform is a bit complex. Just when we thought we’d utilized all the features, we went to a different section and found something new to test. 

There is an AI website builder, but we weren't prompted to use it, nor did we try. We just used the theme selection feature, chose a theme, and then used the WordPress Full Site Editor to edit the homepage. We also used the Jetpack AI Assistant to generate images and edit text.

WordPress also gave us domain options when we first started. It was nice to see we could snag a fairly uncomplicated free subdomain name with the free plan. (Subdomains are branded, so your free website will have the wordpress.com branding at the end of the URL. You can get a free custom domain with premium subscriptions.) 

You can access the domain search page from the "My Home" screen. There is a "Quick Links" menu on the right, and one of the links is "Manage all domains." From there, it’s very straightforward.

The default website-building process uses the WordPress block editor, but it’s augmented by the AI Assistant, which speeds things up (especially for beginners). You can add custom code (optionally), but the flexibility of that varies depending on your plan. On the Premium plan that we signed up for, you can add custom CSS inside the block editor (as you’d normally be able to in self-hosted WordPress). You can also install a plugin like WP Code to add custom code snippets.

Once we answered the questions, we got to peruse the template library. The templates are sorted into categories, and when you click on one, it tells you what type of site is best for that design.

Once we selected our template, we tried editing the actual page and found the editing tools easy to use. We could edit the page itself or the template, which helped make the page layout exactly how we wanted it.

However, Self-hosted WordPress doesn’t restrict you from downloading and using all 14,000+ available themes in the WordPress repository. On the other hand, WordPress.com places artificial restrictions on themes and doesn’t let you install them unless you are on higher plans. For example, the Neve theme is a super popular freemium theme, but you can’t install it unless you are on the Business plan. There are still many themes to choose from, but these restrictions are arbitrary.

Overall, WordPress was a little more time-consuming than some of the other web hosting and drag-and-drop website builders we’ve tested. A lot of the features we wanted, like analytics and payment methods, were behind paywalls and available only via WordPress plugins. From an expert's perspective, WordPress.com is a decent service, but it’s overpriced, and we prefer self-hosted WordPress. The whole dashboard and the augmented WP-Admin are too busy. 

If you’re already familiar with WordPress, then you don’t need the extra features. The price point is higher than just buying a Namecheap hosting plan and installing WordPress on it. Not to mention the random restrictions on theme usage and the list of “incompatible plugins” that you aren’t allowed to install. Finally, the AI tools are subpar (especially the image generators), and they add to the too-busy ambiance without providing much value in return. 

We found the Hosting.com AI Assistant to be a lot more useful. In that sense, if I were planning to rely on such a tool, I’d rather pay for one of the best WordPress hosts like Hosting.com and get a better one I’d actually use.

However, for someone new to WordPress who wants all the tools they need at their fingertips, we think it can be a good service to start with (though we’d eventually move to self-hosted WordPress). But we think WordPress.com really needs to improve its AI tools, as they are a big draw for beginners and aren’t very helpful in their current form. They are easily the worst AI tools we’ve used recently.

As far as business website creation goes, there are better website builders with proprietary ecommerce features and robust AI tools, such as Hostinger, Wix, and IONOS. But WordPress is still a solid choice if you want to blog or create a beautiful portfolio site.

WordPress prices and subscriptions

WordPress has reasonably priced tiers for personal and business use, ranging from $4.00-$45.00/mo. (WordPress also offers an Enterprise plan that starts at $25,000.00/yr, but you need to contact a sales rep for plan specifics.)

The free plan is a usable and low-cost option for creating blogs or starting a WordPress website. If you want more storage, you can upgrade to the Personal plan, which is still very affordable. Premium gets you a little bit more, but the Business and Commerce plans are necessary for entrepreneurs wishing to establish solid businesses.

Features	Free	Personal	Premium	Business	Commerce
Price	Free	$4.00/mo	$8.00/mo	$25.00/mo	$45.00/mo
Number of collaborators	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Storage space	1GB	6GB	13GB	50GB – 150GB	50GB – 150GB
Custom domain	No, custom subdomain only
Customized fonts and colors
Site analytics
Ecommerce tools
Install plugins
AI tools
24/7 support
Learn more	View plan	View plan	View plan	View plan	View plan

WordPress is reasonably priced and in line with the most popular website builders. The free plan offers a decent amount of features like blogging and the ability to upload images. It also includes an AI image creator that creates fairly realistic-looking images. If you’re looking to start a blog or a basic website that’s not heavily based on ecommerce, WordPress has some significant advantages based on its 20+ years of experience.

For bloggers and individuals who want a more text-based site and aren’t as concerned with ecommerce tools, we suggest the Personal plan. You get a year of a free custom domain name and low monthly hosting costs. If you’re an online business or are looking to start an ecommerce site, the Business plan is what we’d recommend.

WordPress features

The features WordPress offers are geared much more toward blogging than ecommerce. While plugins exist for ecommerce, affiliate marketing, accepting payments, and more, the proprietary features focus mostly on building a WordPress website. We created a test website for book reviews and recommendations, which fit into WordPress well. If you were looking to create a bustling online marketplace, however, you’d probably want to use a platform like Shopify or Squarespace for proprietary ecommerce features.

Free plan

We started with the free plan to see how usable it is and found it's actually one of the best free website builders. 

The free subdomain name isn’t as difficult to use as other web builders like Wix because it lists the name-of-your-site.wordpress.com as the URL. If you want to create a blog from scratch with little to no startup funds, this is a good way to do it.

Unfortunately, the free plan does put ads on your site (though this is common with any free web builder plan). We don’t feel they’re too intrusive, but the revenue won’t go to you. If you want to monetize your website, get SEO assistance, install ecommerce plugins, and more, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Building a website

Building a WordPress site was easy. We answered a few questions, and while there weren’t AI-building tools available, the templates offered were suggested based on our answers. The templates have descriptions so you can choose the best one for your site. If you decide later that the template doesn’t work, you can easily change it. Editing web pages is easy, and the design of the editing tools is clean and well-organized.

Using and editing media

Uploading media isn’t difficult, but there aren’t a ton of editing options available. For SEO purposes, we were able to put meta descriptions on our images. When it came to editing, however, we could only crop, rotate, and flip our images. For any additional editing, you’ll need to find separate software.

Widget library

There are only plugins available for your WordPress site, and the plugins are where you’re going to find the majority of your resources. There are actually so many WordPress plugins that you may need to do an internet search to figure out which are the best for you. Business plugins for SEO, marketing, ecommerce, monetization, affiliate marketing, and more are available through the plugins marketplace.

In fact, WordPress has 60,000+ plugins to choose from, plus even more WooCommerce extensions. However, WordPress.com restricts certain plugins that are not restricted on self-hosted WordPress.

Ecommerce tools

Some WordPress features are available only after you verify your email address. This isn’t unusual, but the problem was that the email verification took over 24 hours to complete. WordPress notifications are notorious for being flagged as spam, which is annoying but unavoidable.

Once verified, we found that all the ecommerce features are powered by a WooCommerce plugin. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that offers all the capabilities of a major ecommerce platform. 

You’ll be able to sell products, set up subscriptions, take payment for services, create a booking system, and so much more. However, only paid subscribers can access WooCommerce features. 

We used the WooCommerce plugin to set up our test store. We found that after a product page was created, it needed to be heavily edited to look aesthetic and professional.

SEO and blogging tools

As with most WordPress features, SEO tools are available via a plugin and are accessible only starting with the Premium plan. We used Jetpack, which offers basic SEO settings, such as editing your homepage meta description. Otherwise, you can download a dedicated SEO plugin like Yoast or RankMath for more specific SEO work.

The WordPress.com knowledge base has lots of SEO tutorials, articles, and even a course to help you increase your SEO. The Business and Commerce plans include additional SEO tools, such as auto-generation of metadata for a post directly inside the post. If you're on a lower plan, WordPress.com simply prompts you to upgrade to unlock the SEO features.

Luckily, the blogging tools are proprietary and robust. Since WordPress started as a simple blogging platform, it makes sense that the content creation tools are top-tier.

Marketing tools

All the marketing tools are third-party or accessible only through higher-priced tiers, but there is a library of options available. The marketing tools aren’t as robust as those of competitors like Squarespace, but you can still choose several options to help promote your site from WordPress.

Bonus features

Jetpack AI Assistant 

This includes an AI image generator and an AI logo maker. Jetpack also includes a text tool that lets you take various actions, such as correcting spelling and grammar, summarizing, simplifying, expanding, shortening, changing tone, and translating into several languages. It will also generate alt text and captions for your images, create title options for your page/post, generate a featured image, and generate feedback on the text of the post/page.

However, the AI image generator (which includes the logo maker) was subpar, and I would not use it for anything other than simple images. It uses older-generation technology and produces poor results because it adds text, and the text is almost always spelled wrong. If you're lucky and try several times, you may get a decent result, but it’s easier to use ChatGPT to generate a better image for free. 

As for the text, it didn’t take instructions very well either. I asked it several times to write a description of a cookie baking service from scratch, but it kept trying to rewrite the placeholder text instead. So basically, it kept a lot of the original sentences but just substituted keywords related to cookie baking. This made the text's context completely off, and I had to manually adjust it myself. It happened twice more in two other sections. Overall, I would only use it sparingly, if at all.

WordPress.com web hosting

For small business owners new to WordPress, WordPress.com offers a more beginner-friendly introduction than self-hosted WordPress (WordPress.org). It augments the core software with a setup wizard and pre-installed plugins to help you get started. However, some features normally accessible in self-hosted WordPress are paywalled on WordPress.com, available only to higher-tier plans.

Overall, it's good for easing into WordPress, but eventually you'll likely want to switch to a self-hosted solution.

Web hosting features

WordPress.com isn't the cheapest, but the premium plan pays for convenience and functionality. All paid plans include a free domain in the first year, unrestricted bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and a CDN. WordPress.com also pre-installs the Jetpack plugin, which provides security, backups, social sharing, forms, and more.

Business plans also include:

• Free staging site
• 0% transaction fee for standard WooCommerce payment features
• Advanced SEO and analytics tools (via Jetpack)
• SFTP/SSH, WP-CLI

Web hosting test results

To assess our WordPress.com site, we began with a speed test using dotcom-tools.com. The site scored 82/100 for performance across three separate locations.

On the positive side, the site maintained a 100% uptime during the testing period. It also performed well in our stress test. We sent 250 visitors to the site in one minute, and the site reported no errors during the traffic surge.

Uptime and response

	Uptime	Avg response time	Minimum response time	Maximum response time
WordPress.com web hosting	100%	28 ms	5 ms	113 ms

Speed test

First contentful paint (FCP), which measures how fast the first element on a page loads, was excellent, and well below Google's max threshold of 1.8 seconds.

Unfortunately, the largest contentful paint (LCP), which measures how quickly the largest element on a page loads, exceeded Google's max threshold of 2.5 seconds.

	Performance score	FCP	LCP
WordPress.com web hosting average	82	0.3 secs	3.1 secs

Stress test

• WordPress.com passed the stress test with no HTTP failures.

Security and bandwidth

WordPress offers a range of top-notch security features across plans, including the free tier. There are also multiple paid and free plugins you can install for security.

All WordPress plans include:

• Free SSL certificate for privacy and security
• Brute-force protection
• DDoS protection and mitigation
• Malware detection and removal
• Web application firewall (WAF)
• Spam protection with Akismet (via Jetpack)
• Site activity log (via Jetpack)
• 2FA

In addition, the Business and Commerce plans provide isolated site infrastructure. Backup tools are available on all paid plans via Jetpack. As long as your site has a paid plan, you can restore backups up to 6 months old. If your plan expires, backups are kept for 30 days after the expiration date.

Create a free cookie policy for your ecommerce business

As a business owner, you need a cookie policy to disclose how you use user data. You also need privacy policies, a refund policy, and others. With TermsFeed, you can quickly create legal provisions for GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, and more.

WordPress customer support

Support type	WP support
Email or live chat
Phone
Online guides or forums

We didn’t have great success with WordPress customer support. There is an AI assistant chatbox, but it couldn’t answer our question and tried rerouting us to the forums. There are also online guides, but we didn’t find those helpful either. If you require WordPress support, you’ll probably spend a lot of time looking for answers and may inevitably turn to Reddit for WordPress help.

Top alternatives

WordPress has a lot of positive features for blogging, but it might not be what you’re looking for in a hosting provider. If you want more proprietary ecommerce features or AI assistance, our other tested choices below may have what you need.

FAQs

Bottom line: Is WordPress good?

WordPress.com is good for blogging because it doesn’t require much technical knowledge to get started. However, WordPress isn’t our top choice for ecommerce because other WordPress website builders, including Bluehost, DreamHost, and Hostinger, integrate AI tools and are much easier to set up and use. 

Bloggers will enjoy the free and Personal plans, which let you get started at a relatively low cost. Even the Premium plan is less than most streaming services and gives anyone building a portfolio 13GB of space. The Business and Commerce plans may be geared toward ecommerce but have a lot of extra setup steps, such as choosing and installing plugins.

Overall, we feel like WordPress does blogging and portfolio management well, but it isn’t as easy to use as other website builders like Wix or Squarespace for ecommerce. The best web-building platform depends on your individual goals, but we think bloggers will love WordPress while entrepreneurs might find success elsewhere.

See how WordPress compares to other top website builders for ecommerce:

• WordPress vs. Wix
• WordPress vs. Squarespace