WordPress.com

WordPress.com suits bloggers, publishers and small businesses that want WordPress itself, with its block editor, themes and plugins, but not the job of running hosting. Plugins and third-party themes install on every paid plan, Personal included. The export file is the standard WordPress format, which WordPress and many other platforms can read, so a site's posts and pages aren't tied to Automattic. Business adds SFTP, SSH, WP-CLI, GitHub Deployments, a staging site, real-time backups and a choice of US or EU data center.

Much of what other builders include comes from plugins here. Manual redirects need one, since the built-in smart redirects only catch mistyped URLs, and so do custom content types and multilingual sites, unless each language gets a site of its own. Installing the first plugin moves the free address to .wpcomstaging.com, which search engines don't index until a custom domain is connected or robots.txt is changed. Layouts sit in rows, stacks and grids, and elements can't be placed freely on the page.

Yearly prices are introductory, so budget on the renewal. For most sites the plan to price is Premium: $18 a month, or $8 a month for the first year on a yearly plan ($96 upfront), renewing at $9. It adds SEO tools, Google Analytics and payment buttons, whose payments carry a 4% WordPress.com fee plus Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30. A WooCommerce store should price Business, at $40 a month or $25 a month for the first year billed yearly, renewing at $28: standard WooCommerce payment features carry no WordPress.com fee there, only the processor's standard fees. Commerce, at $70 a month or $45 for the first year, renewing at $50, preinstalls WooCommerce with store extensions and takes no fee on payment blocks either. If a plan lapses, the fee on payments rises to 10%.

Choose WordPress.com for a blog, a publication or a WooCommerce store that should stay portable. Owners who want selling built in and nothing to install should look at Squarespace, whose Core plan costs $29 a month billed yearly and charges no Squarespace fee on store sales. Designers who want CSS control at every breakpoint and a CMS with typed fields are better served by Webflow, whose Premium site plan costs $25 a month billed yearly.