New Year, new themes! We’ve been hard at work developing new themes to help you kickstart 2025. Whether you are building your very first website or looking to refresh an existing site, these new options can help you achieve the design you want.
Also great for: Blogs, Digital Zines and Magazines, News, Advocacy
Dadaism pushed the boundaries of what was considered art with absurdism and flair – with Dadaist, you too can reject the boring linearity and blank spaces of common web design. Dadaist hearkens back to a different era of handmade collages, irregular lines, and bold color pairings, giving you a one-of-a-kind website that embraces the best of both digital and print design.
With posts organized into an assemblage-inspired feed, this theme is a great choice for sharing research collections or blog posts. You can add additional pages, like an About or Contact page, in the main header while the subheader is a perfect place to separate your content into multiple collections using tags. A boldly designed subscription block dominates the footer, making it easy for your followers to sign up to receive new content directly in their inbox.
Designed for: Non-Profits and Community-Driven Projects
Also great for: Political Campaigns, Advocacy Organizations
Put your mission front and center with Koinoia, a theme built to support NPOs through advocacy, community engagement, and donations. Koinonia is clean and modern, ensuring that your organization’s digital home feels both reputable and professional for visitors old and new. Use your homepage to share your value proposition, mission statement, and additional content to help visitors quickly understand who you serve and what you offer the community.
With high readability and easy navigation, supporters can find everything they need, whether they want to join your network of volunteers through a built-in form, browse your community’s service offerings, or make a well-deserved online donation (tip: many digital payment processors offer discounted rates for non-profits).
Also great for: Summer Camps, Sports and Hobby Leagues
At a busy institution, you need to handle questions and resources for a variety of stakeholders, from current staff and students to potential families. With Kentwood, you can ensure you are building a professional and reputable digital brand that meets a family’s needs, from their first visit through graduation.
With two layers of navigation, students and staff can quickly link out to academic resources without compromising space for in-depth information for current and prospective families. Your homepage highlights your brand with custom photography and blog updates while additional pages give you ample space for well-organized long-form content. No matter where they land, families will be impressed with your institution’s plethora of resources.
Professio allows private teachers and tutors to create a digital hub for current and potential students. With a simple but visually impactful two-tone theme available in three color waves, it’s you can quickly build a design-forward website for your teaching business. With Professio’s pre-built homepage blocks, you can quickly introduce your services, answer FAQs, and build credibility with downloadable materials, blog posts, and testimonials. Once prospective students are ready to book a course, they can sign up digitally via a form or email.
Whatever you need to grow your teaching business, Professio can scale beautifully so that you can focus on what matters most: your students.
Designed for: Gamers, Streamers, and Esports Personalities
Also great for: Bloggers, Podcasters
With black and neon color palettes and futuristic fonts, Streamer brings gamer vibes right out of the box. With Streamer, you control your content in one central location: share exclusive team updates, rep your sponsors, create custom content, or upload a complete library of your Videos On Demand directly on WordPress. Cross-platform fans can become subscribers to get your fully-branded content directly in their inbox.
Got merch? With WooCommerce for Spotify, you can sell personalized products directly on your Streamer website.
Also great for: Bakeries, Microbreweries, Product-Forward Brick & Mortars
When you’re a visual creator, you want your images to take center stage. With Veuo’s full-width image gallery, your homepage will feel like a bespoke, archival experience. A neutral color palette and unobtrusive text ensure that your artistic style, not the template, defines your website’s ultimate look and feel. When viewers click on an image, they can see it in higher resolution alongside any additional information you’d like to provide. Have multiple oeuvres or themes within your portfolio? Automatically create clickable subcollection pages with tags.
Add your bio or artist statement alongside social media links in your footer, making it easy for fans and potential collectors to follow along on your creative journey. Whatever your style, you can be sure that Vueo will let your work shine.
Ready to try out a new look for your website in 2025? You can explore these themes further by clicking on the Preview link and then clicking “Demo site” at the top of the page. There, you’ll be able to explore a clickable sample site to get a better sense of the theme’s appearance and feel.
Once you’ve found a theme you love, you can click the “Activate this Design” button to customize it. Any new blocks or features you add from WordPress’s suite of tools will be automatically adjusted to match your new theme’s style.
Premium themes from Automattic are available at no extra charge for customers on the Personal plan or above.
You can explore our extensive selection of free and third-party themes by navigating to the “Themes” page under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard. Third-party themes can be purchased for $99/year each on the Business plan and above.
We believe in the open web and interoperability between online publishing platforms. That’s why we’re excited about the Fediverse and are committed to shipping features that improve the way your site connects to the open web. Today, we’re introducing Likes, Reposts, and the Fediverse Reactions block, building on our commitment to decentralized publishing.
Introducing the Reactions Block
With the Reactions Block, likes and reposts from Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms are automatically added to the end of your posts (if you’re using the Site Editor). It’s even smart enough to hide itself on posts without Reactions. Here’s a look at Fediverse reactions in action:
To disable or customize its placement, click “Edit Site” in the admin bar, select the Content block, and adjust the settings:
For older themes, you can manually add the block to any post or page.
But wait, that’s not all
We’ve been working over the past several months to improve your experience with WordPress.com. Here are two other recent enhancements we’re excited to share with you:
Push and email notifications. Get notified instantly when your posts are Liked or Reposted via the Jetpack app, dashboard, or email.
Reply to comments, federated. When someone comments from the Fediverse, your replies federate back, keeping the conversation visible on both sides. Likes and Reposts are treated like comments, allowing you to manage them directly in the WordPress admin interface. This feature has been live since early 2024, but it’s worth sharing now.
Have you connected your WordPress.com site to the Fediverse?
Fediverse integration is available to all WordPress.com users—including free plans—and for WordPress.org users via the ActivityPub plugin. We want to ensure that our tools are accessible to creators of all sizes, so that your work is accessible to all of your followers, everywhere.
Start receiving Likes, Reposts, and showcasing engagement today. Get started with our Enter the Fediverse guide.
Making great software, great product that stands the test of time and not just survives but thrives through monumental technological shifts is incredibly hard. That challenge is part of the reason I love doing it. There is never a dull day, and the reward of seeing the code you wrote used by the most amazing creators in the world is an indescribable pleasure. When I see what people create with WordPress, some days I feel like I’m grinding pigment for Leonardo da Vinci or slitting a quill for Beethoven.
In open source, one thing that makes it even harder to ship great software is bringing together disparate groups of contributors who may have entirely different incentives or missions or philosophies about how to make great work. Working together on a team is such a delicate balance, and even one person rowing in the wrong direction can throw everyone else off.
That’s why periodically I think it is very healthy for open source projects to fork, it allows for people to try out and experiment with different forms of governance, leadership, decision-making, and technical approaches. As I’ve said, forking is beautiful, and forks have my full support and we’ll even link and promote them.
Karim leads a small WordPress agency called Crowd Favorite which counts clients such as Lexus and ABC and employs ~50 people.
Both are men I have shared meals with and consider of the highest integrity. I would trust them to watch any of my 15 godchildren for a day. These are good humans. Now go do the work. It probably won’t happen on day one, but Joost and Karim’s fork, which I’ll call JKPress until they come up with a better name, has a number of ideas they want to try out around governance and architecture. While Joost and Karim will be unilaterally in charge in the beginning, it sounds like they want to set up:
A non-profit foundation, with a broad board to control their new project.
A website owned by that foundation which hosts community resources like a plugin directory, forums, etc.
No more centralized and moderated plugin and theme directories with security guidelines or restrictions are what plugins are allowed to do like putting banners in your admin or gathering data, everything done in a federated/distributed manner.
The trademarks for their new project will either be public domain or held by their foundation.
“Modernization” of the technology stack, perhaps going a Laravel-like approach or changing how WordPress’ architecture works.
Teams and committees to make decisions for everything, so no single person has too much power or authority.
I'm ready to lead the next releases. I am sure plenty of people and companies are willing to help me and we've got plenty of ideas on what we should be doing.#WordPress
Now, as core committer Jb Audras (not employed by me or Automattic) points out, within WordPress we have a process in which people earn the right to lead a release:
Before leading any major release of WordPress, please start with leading a minor one @jdevalk. Then, apply to be Triage Lead or Coordination Lead Deputy for a major release. These are the steps everyone in our community should follow before claiming to run « the next releases ».
However in Joost and Karim’s new project, they don’t need to follow our process or put in the hours to prove their worth within the WordPress.org ecosystem, they can just lead by example by shipping code and product to people that they can use, evaluate, and test out for themselves. If they need financial or hosting support is sounds like WP Engine wants to support their fork:
We appreciate @jdevalk and @karimmarucchi thoughtful call for constructive conversation, change and evolved leadership within the WordPress community. Moments of disruption challenge all of us to reflect and to act.
WordPress’s success as the most widely used CMS is not the…
Awesome! (Maybe it’s so successful they rebrand as JK Engine in the future.) WP Engine, with its half a billion in revenue and 1,000+ employees, has more than enough resources to support and maintain a legitimate fork of WordPress. And they are welcome to use all the GPL code myself and others have created to do so, including many parts of WordPress.org that are open source released under the GPL, and Gutenberg which is GPL + MPL.
Joost also is a major investor (owner?) in Post Status (which he tried to sell to me a few months ago, and I declined to buy, perhaps kicking off his consternation with me), so they have a news media site and Slack instance already ready to go. He also is an investor in PatchStack and appears to be trying to create a new business around something called Progress Planner, both of which could be incorporated into the new non-profit project to give them some competitive distinctions from WordPress.
To make this easy and hopefully give this project the push it needs to get off the ground, I’m deactivating the .org accounts of Joost, Karim, Se Reed, Heather Burns, and Morten Rand-Hendriksen. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to try different leadership models or align with WP Engine to join up with their new effort.
In the meantime, on top of my day job running a 1,700+ person company with 25+ products, which I typically work 60-80 hours a week on, I’ll find time on nights and weekends to work on WordPress 6.8 and beyond. Myself and other “non-sponsored” contributors have been doing this a long time and while we may need to reduce scope a bit I think we can put out a solid release in March.
Joost and Karim have a number of bold and interesting ideas, and I’m genuinely curious to see how they work out. The beauty of open source is they can take all of the GPL code in WordPress and ship their vision. You don’t need permission, you can just do things. If they create something that’s awesome, we may even merge it back into WordPress, that ability for code and ideas to freely flow between projects is part of what makes open source such an engine for innovation. I propose that in a year we do a WordPress + JKPress summit, look at what we’ve shipped and learned in the process, which I’d be happy to host and sponsor in NYC next January 2026. The broader community will benefit greatly from this effort, as it’s giving us a true chance to try something different and see how it goes.
Want to make your blogging life easier with just one tool? Start using an editorial calendar. Let us show you how to create one.
It takes discipline to run a successful blog. Without something to organize your publishing schedule, it’s easy to waste time wondering what you should write about, and hard to hold yourself accountable for meeting deadlines. With a well-designed content calendar, you can burn less mental energy thinking about your blog, and focus more clearly on your writing.
The end result? You produce better content with less effort. It’s win-win.
Editorial calendars are easy to set up too, so there’s no excuse not to use one. In this post, we’ll cover the following (and more):
How to build one in under five minutes using a simple spreadsheet (with a free template you can copy).
How to establish a sustainable posting schedule for your blog.
How to generate tons of blog post ideas to keep your calendar full.
Plus, we’ll even get into some advanced tools and tactics you can use to level up your calendar and content planning game. A better blogging future awaits you.
An editorial calendar is a visual schedule of the content you will publish on your blog (or other channels). They document the topics you will cover, when you’ll publish each piece, and other important information. Typically, they are created using spreadsheets or dedicated software.
Bloggers and marketers have borrowed the concept of an editorial calendar from the journalism world, where writers and editors have been using calendars to keep organized for decades. No matter what type of content creator you are, you can benefit from using such a calendar too.
Why should you really use an editorial calendar?
The obvious reason to use a calendar is to get organized. But why does getting organized matter and how does that translate into being a more successful blogger? Here are a few ways that getting more organized is directly connected to better blogging results.
Destress your blogging life
Developing a consistent writing practice is challenging. Knowing what you will work on, before you sit down to write, can help you spend less time wondering what to write so you can focus on the words. If writing is less stressful and more satisfying, you’ll be more likely to stick with it.
Produce writing that you’re proud to publish
You’re more likely to produce writing you’re happy with if you aren’t mentally overwhelmed. Anything you can do to get control over your blog (whether by planning ahead, writing clear outlines, or anything else that helps you get organized) will help make you more successful.
Get better results from your blogging efforts
It’s easy to think that becoming a successful blogger is all about creativity. While creativity is important, the real foundation for success might actually be having strong processes in place. An editorial calendar can form the foundation for your blogging workflow, helping you plan what you will publish in advance, so you can flex your creativity without worrying about distractions.
How to create an editorial calendar in five minutes
There are many different tools you can use to create your calendar. Let’s start by building one with Google Sheets (though you can use any spreadsheet or similar tool you’d like, such as Airtable, Clickup, or Excel).
Create a new spreadsheet and add your top row
First, create a new spreadsheet, and add a top row with the following labels:
Date
Topic
Category (these should match your blog categories)
Status
Author (if your blog will have more than one author)
Published Link
It should look something like this:
Add rows for months under column A
Next, add some placeholder dates and columns for future months. This will help keep your calendar organized as the year progresses:
Add a dropdown selector under the Status column
If you’re using Google Sheets, click Insert, then click Dropdown. This is how we’ll add status selector options that will make it easy to see the progress you’re making on each post:
Add basic labels that outline your writing process. At a minimum, include Not Started, In Progress, and Published. You could also consider adding steps for Editing, Graphic Design (if you’ll be creating visual assets for your posts), or any other steps that may be specific to your workflow. Use the color selectors to color-code each status too:
Then, click the blue circle on the lower right corner of the cell, and drag it down to add the dropdown to each cell. Copy and paste works as well:
Start adding some ideas
Now you’re ready to start adding topics to your calendar. Here’s how things might look once you have a handful of post ideas lined up:
Or you can download this template
You can also use the button below to find a finished version of this editorial calendar template. Click the button, then click File > Make a Copy to create your own version:
Creating your calendar with a spreadsheet is the easiest way to get started. They are simple to set up and can be customized to suit your needs.
However, there are many more options for editorial calendar tools you can choose from. Let’s look at some options you can consider when you’re ready to upgrade from your spreadsheet.
Trello
Trello is a simple Kanban board-style project management tool. They offer a free plan and a couple different editorial calendar templates that can help you get set up in a few clicks. It’s used by publications like Wired and offers a lot of task management capabilities that you aren’t going to get with a spreadsheet.
Similar to Trello, Asana is another projectment management tool that can be used to create an editorial calendar. It’s a bit more robust than Trello but with a slightly higher learning curve. Their free plan offers all the capabilities that bloggers should need to manage your calendar and tasks.
Edit Flow is a long-running WordPress plugin for managing your editorial calendar and workflow directly within WordPress. It’s free, full-featured, and easy to use. As a WordPress.com user, you’ll need to choose a plugin-enabled plan to install it (Business and above):
Here is another WordPress plugin option, appropriately titled Editorial Calendar. This plugin is actively maintained and free to use. If you’re on a plugin-enabled WordPress.com plan, you can install it now here:
CoSchedule
CoSchedule’s Content Calendar offers a beautiful editorial calendar option that’s packed with powerful automation features so you can schedule all your blog publishing and social promotion in one tool. They also have a WordPress plugin available. Their free and lower-tier plans are suitable for bloggers, while their more advanced packages are built for marketing teams.
Establishing your publishing cadence
There is no right answer to how often you should post on your blog. With that said, sticking to a schedule will help you publish regularly, build discipline, and be a more successful blogger.
Determine how often you’ll publish
If there is a recommendation we can offer for determining how often to post, it’s this: you should publish as often as you have something worth sharing on your blog.
That’s not a very specific recommendation though. If you’re looking for some structure to follow, set a goal to publish one article in your first month. Continue adding another post each week, until you’re publishing something at least once a week.
There’s no science behind this. When you’re trying something new, starting small and working your way up can be a good way to build endurance, without immediately burning out.
Example of a basic blog publishing schedule
Month 1
Publish one post by the end of the month.
Month 2
Publish one post every two weeks.
Month 3
Publish one post every week and a half.
Month 4
Publish one post every week.
Determine what days you’ll publish on
From a technical standpoint, there are no specific days that are best for publishing blog posts.
With that said, publishing on specific days can help you develop discipline and hold yourself accountable. It can also help set expectations for readers, who may wonder when they should expect new content from you, especially if they subscribe to your blog via email.
Here are some general guidelines to help you choose which days to publish:
Web traffic is generally highest early in the week. It starts to decline on Fridays, and is lower on weekends. This is supported by Wise Owl Marketing; the author of this post has been blogging weekly since 2007.
If you have email subscribers to your blog, consider publishing in the morning, so you can start the day at the top of your reader’s inbox.
Consider your own schedule and when it’s easiest for you to regularly write and publish.
How to keep your editorial calendar full, all year long
No matter which tool you use to build your calendar, you’ll need content ideas to keep it full. Let’s look at some reliable methods and processes you can follow to make sure you never run out of things to write about.
Write what you’re most passionate about
If you’re starting a blog, it’s likely you have something to say. Are there any burning issues you can’t wait to write about? Ideas that you’re desperate to share with the world? Stories that can’t wait to be told? Add them to your calendar and turn them into reality.
Brainstorm a month of blog post ideas in 30 minutes
Whenever I’m asked about blog post ideation, I always recommend this process. It’s one I picked up from a previous employer, and it’s time-tested because it works. Follow these steps:
Spend 10 minutes writing down as many ideas as you can. Don’t think about them too hard. Just get them written down, either in a doc, or on Post It notes.
Spend 10 minutes scoring each idea a 3, 2, or 1. 3’s are your best ideas, 2’s are ideas that need some work, and 1’s are duds. You will have ideas in all three buckets.
Spend 10 minutes sorting through your 3’s and add them to your calendar. These are your very best ideas, that you feel most strongly about.
Now, in just half an hour, you should have enough ideas to write about for at least a month.
See what people are talking about on Reddit
Find relevant sub-Reddits to the topics you write about and gather ideas. This guide from Better Web Movement has some tips on how to find subreddits that are relevant to your niche. Even better, be an active participant in Reddit communities that are relevant to the things you write about (though you’re probably doing this anyway if you’re passionate about what you cover).
Use an RSS reader to follow other blogs and publications
It’s safe to assume you follow publications and other blogs that are relevant to you on social media. If you’re not using an RSS feed to keep up with your industry or community too though, you might miss out on important stories or articles that could spark your own inspiration. RSS is great because it’s less noisy than social media; you just see the latest articles, without distractions.
Here are some options for RSS and news reader apps you can try:
Feedly: A popular option for a basic RSS feed reader.
Inoreader: Another great option for a basic RSS feed reader.
WordPress Reader: Built into your WordPress.com website. It follows all WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted WordPress sites that use Jetpack.
Use SparkToro to learn about your audience’s interests
SparkToro is an advanced tool used by marketers to conduct audience research. Even if you’re not a marketer, and can only afford their free account, it’s still useful for gathering insight about where your audience spends time online and what they might want to read about.
Conduct keyword research to uncover popular search topics
Google processes over eight billion searches per day. At least a few of those clicks should go to your site, right? If you blog about evergreen topics (meaning topics that are always relevant and not time-sensitive), then paying attention to SEO and keyword research is essential.
Here are a few basic keyword research tools you can use that will help you find the terms people search when they’re looking for information about the topics you cover:
Google Keyword Planner
Google’s free keyword research tool shows how often keywords trigger ads to appear in search results. It can be useful for SEO too, helping you understand how often potential readers search for specific information:
Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator
Ahrefs is a professional SEO tool that’s built primarily for marketers. Their free Keyword Generator tool is useful for bloggers to gather a quick list of basic ideas:
Answer the Public
Answer The Public makes it easy to enter a keyword or two, and then generate a large list of questions people ask related to that topic. It’s a quick way to turn one idea into dozens or hundreds of ideas:
Some common questions people ask about editorial calendars
Before we go, let’s go over a few final questions you might still have (or didn’t know to ask).
Is there a difference between an editorial calendar and a content calendar?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is that people sometimes use these terms in very slightly different contexts. When people say “editorial calendar” they’re often referring to blogging or news publishing, while the term “content calendar” is sometimes meant to include social media, video, and other content formats. Functionally though? They’re the same thing.
Is an editorial calendar the same thing as a content strategy?
An editorial calendar documents what content you will publish. A content strategy is much more complex and encompasses an overarching plan for the who, what, why, and where of all things content on a given website. An editorial calendar might visualize the execution of your strategy, but it’s not a strategy by itself.
How far in advance should you plan your calendar?
This is another area where there are no rules. Having at least three months worth of ideas will ensure you’re never wondering what you should write about. If you can reach a point where you have two to six weeks worth of content written and scheduled in advance, you’re in great shape.
If you can’t reach that level though, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. In fact, if your blog is focused on covering news or events as they happen (such as a sports blog or local news site), then planning too far ahead might not be possible or even desirable. This is a good reminder that not all blogging advice applies to everyone equally (not even the advice in this post). So, if something sounds like it’s not applicable to you, don’t worry about it.
Your blog + an editorial calendar = success
You now have the knowledge and tools to plan and organize your blog content like an expert editor. Your stress-free future of blogging success awaits!
Studio Sync makes it simple to publish your local WordPress site with powerful WordPress.com hosting. Here are a few of our favorite use cases:
Push and Pull with Ease: You can keep your local Studio sites connected to your WordPress.com site, so pushing or pulling will be as easy as clicking a button.
Flexible Syncing: Having complete freedom, you can connect a WordPress.com site to multiple Studio sites.
Team Collaboration: Multiple developers can connect a local Studio site to a shared WordPress.com site, making it easy to push and pull changes as a team.
Sync To and From Staging: If using staging sites are part of your development workflow, you can now easily push from your local Studio site to your WordPress.com staging site.
One-Click Bliss: No need to worry yourself with database dumps, manually syncing files over SFTP, or performing other monotonous manual steps. Synchronize your local and hosted sites at any time with just one click.
Connect your site
You can connect any of your WordPress.com sites on a Business plan or higher. Use built-in search to locate your site and quickly see if the site has a staging environment available.
Push and pull
Pull to synchronize your WordPress.com site changes with your local Studio site, or push to deploy your local Studio site changes to your WordPress.com site.
Launch your Studio site on WordPress.com
Ready to publish your local Studio site for all the world to see?
Simply click Connect site on the Sync tab, and then you’ll see an option to purchase a new hosting plan for your Studio site at WordPress.com.
Ready to get started with Studio Sync?
You can start taking advantage of this new Studio Sync feature in just a few steps:
The modern web has gradually shifted from a vibrant tapestry of personal expression to a landscape of identical designs, where millions of websites share not just similar structures, but identical visual language, spacing, and interaction patterns. As we collectively gravitate toward the same “proven” layouts and “conversion-optimized” designs, we’re not just losing visual diversity – we’re ceding control over how we present ourselves to the world. This matters because genuine self-expression online isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s about maintaining spaces where authentic voices can flourish.
When every blog has the same hero section, when every portfolio follows the same grid, when every restaurant site looks interchangeable, we create an echo chamber of sameness. The cost isn’t just visual monotony – it’s the slow erosion of the web’s ability to surprise, delight, and showcase truly individual perspectives. WordPress, with its emphasis on complete ownership and control, offers an opportunity to break free from this convergence of design, allowing creators to build digital spaces that truly reflect their unique voice and vision.
Think of WordPress themes like album covers. They should have personality and create an immediate visual impact. The web has become too sanitized, with everyone chasing the same minimal, “professional” look.
Great themes should:
Have a strong point of view – like how Kubrick (the classic WordPress theme) defined an era with its distinctive header gradient. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.
Embrace specific aesthetics boldly – whether that’s brutalist design, pixel art, hand-drawn elements, or distinctive typography. Create themes that excite people rather than just working for everyone.
Design for specific use cases – like a theme for photographers that’s all about full-bleed images or a theme for writers that treats typography as art or a theme for musicians that feels like an album cover.
Break some rules thoughtfully – because not every theme needs a hamburger menu. Not every theme needs to be mobile-first. Sometimes constraints create character.
We need more themes that make people say “Wow!” or “That’s different!” rather than “That’s clean and professional.” The web needs more personality, more risk-taking, more fun.
After spending countless hours digging through the WordPress theme repository, searching for designs that break the mold and spark excitement, I came up nearly empty-handed. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of well-built themes out there. But where’s the daring? The personality? The unexpected?
If you’ve got a wild theme idea burning in your mind – that portfolio theme that looks like a vintage trading card collection, that blog theme inspired by zine culture, that restaurant theme that feels like a hand-drawn menu – now’s the time to build it. WordPress desperately needs your creativity, your weird ideas, your willingness to break the visual rules. The future of the web shouldn’t be a monochrome landscape of identical layouts. Let’s make WordPress themes exciting again. Let’s make the web weird again.
So, you are considering creating a personal website. Congratulations! In my opinion, that’s one of the smartest decisions you can make.
Building a website for yourself allows you to claim your own little part of the Internet. A space you fully control and that nobody can take away from you. Where you make the rules, determine the look and feel, and express yourself in any way you want.
If that sounds worth pursuing, this post covers everything you need to know. It will talk about the nature and benefits of a personal website, then give you step-by-step instructions on how to build one using WordPress. From picking a website address and basic design to creating pages, adjusting design elements like fonts and colors, and adding extra functionality—it’s all here.
A personal website is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a website that belongs to you and allows you to represent who you are and what you do in whatever way you want.
You can control the design, content, functionality, and everything else about it.
Why would you want to build something like that for yourself?
Let’s talk about that for a minute.
Benefits of building your own website
Yes, there are other ways you can build a brand or profile online. For example, many people use social media as their main outlet. But, putting all your eggs into that particular basket is also risky.
There’s always a chance you can get banned or hit with an algorithm change that cuts your reach. Anybody who is old enough to remember when you could build an audience for your Facebook page without spending money on ads can tell you that much.
Or, just imagine, your favorite outlet gets bought by a person or company you don’t like and don’t want to support, so you feel compelled to start over on another platform. Sounds far-fetched, I know, but it could mean all your hard work is gone from one day to the next.
This can happen because you don’t actually own your social media account. The platform you are on does, including all the content you publish. And what’s not yours can be taken away from you.
In contrast to that, creating your own personal website, especially if you do it with a system like WordPress, means building something permanent. You fully own it and can take it with you wherever you want.
Plus, it allows you to do things that you can’t always do on social media, like:
Change the design
Publish detailed, long-form content
Sell goods and services
Tell people more about yourself
Get inbound traffic from search engines
Show off your portfolio
Build a central hub to consolidate all your online outlets
And much more…
Types of personal websites
So far, the definition of a personal website has been relatively broad. The reason for that is that it can take many forms depending on your purpose:
About Me website – Simply introduce yourself and who you are. It can work as an online resume, business card, or just a fun project.
Blog – If you are going the blogging route, you can dive deeply into a topic that interests you, grow a following, build expertise, and maybe even create a business.
Newsletter – You can also use a personal website to build a newsletter. This works well when combined with a blog. You can use content to attract an audience and then get them on the newsletter to stay in contact easily.
Portfolio – If you are an artist or any type of creative professional, a personal website is where you can show off your portfolio (also works for developers). It gives people an impression of what you can do and also allows them to get in touch with you directly, e.g. via a contact form.
Thankfully, as you will see below, the process of creating a personal website is also very flexible, so it can accommodate whatever you have in mind.
How to make a personal website
I’ve been building websites for more than ten years. If I were in your position and wanted to create a website for myself for the first time, here’s how I would do it.
1. Choose your hosting plan
Hosting basically means renting space on a computer that’s connected to the Internet. That’s where you save your website files so that others can access them with their browser.
With WordPress, you are free to choose your hosting provider since it runs on almost any server setup. WordPress.com is a great option because it’s managed hosting.
That means it takes care of a lot of the more technical parts of running a personal website, namely:
Installation – The website is automatically created for you. There’s no need to upload files to a server, create a database, or run an installation.
Ease of Use – Everything that has to do with managing the website happens in the same, beginner-friendly interface. You don’t need to switch back and forth between the hosting provider panel and the website; it’s all in the same place.
Speed – Performance is a very important topic for user experience. WordPress.com’s servers get the most out of the CMS and store copies of your website across 28+ data centers for super fast delivery.
Security – Jetpack is included on every WordPress.com site and provides daily security scans, automatic backups, brute-force protection, downtime monitoring, and more. Plus, you get encryption, firewalls, activity monitoring, DDoS protection, and automatic software updates with every plan.
While you can also implement the above manually, by choosing managed hosting, you can fully focus on the important parts of creating a personal website instead: its design, content, and growth.
If that sounds like the right choice for you, all you need to do is pick a WordPress.com plan.
The Personal and Premium plans are most suitable for simpler websites with fewer pages and for writing a blog. If you want to add extra functionality via plugins or even sell things on your personal site, Business or Commerce might be more your speed.
Each plan comes with unlimited visitors, posts, and pages. If you go for a yearly plan, you also get a free domain for one year. That brings us to the next point.
2. Pick a domain name
The domain name is what your visitors will type into their browser bar to reach your personal website.
An important aspect to pay attention to here is the domain ending or top-level domain (TLD). You know, the .com, .org, or .net part.
For example, if your site is for a particular country and language, it can make sense to use a country-specific domain ending like .de (for Germany) or .co.uk for the United Kingdom. Another example is that as a writer or artist, you could also use a .blog or .portfolio.
The main part of your domain, the name, is also important to think about. It should be easy to remember and convey trust. You can find more tips in this post and the video below.
Simply search for your desired name and hit enter. The tool will tell you if it’s available, the cost, and alternatives.
Select your choice and go through the purchasing process. As mentioned, if you host your website at WordPress.com, you get a free domain with an annual plan that can be automatically assigned to your site.
But don’t worry if you can’t make up your mind right now. You can skip this step in the beginning and settle on your domain name at a later time. Your website will live at a temporary address until then.
3. Select a theme
In WordPress, themes are what control the basic design. They are website blueprints that contain colors, fonts, layouts, and other design elements. As a consequence, you can alter your WordPress website’s look and feel—quite dramatically—by simply activating another theme.
Same website, different themes.
Another benefit is that there are themes specialized in building particular types of websites like restaurant sites, travel blogs, photography sites, and more. They come with features, layouts, and design elements specifically for these use cases, making getting started much easier.
In addition, themes are just starting points, not destinations. You can also still customize them completely later on as you’ll soon see.
Applying a theme to your personal website is super easy. You can check what’s available by going to the theme directory or Appearance > Themes in your WordPress.com admin interface.
Use the controls on top to search for a particular theme or filter by topics and plan. Click on any of them to learn more about it.
You’ll find a description and list of features as well as a preview on the right. Many themes come with style variations that apply different color schemes and fonts. You can try them out directly on this page.
In addition, you can see what your current website would look like with the new theme by clicking the Preview & Customize button. The editor that appears allows you to customize it further, e.g., try out style variations on your site.
You can save your changes and activate the theme immediately with a click on the button in the lower-left corner. Alternatively, do it from inside the theme menu.
4. Add a homepage and customize it
With the basic website in place, it’s time to learn how to create and customize pages, starting with your homepage.
Set up a new page
Navigate to Pages > Add New Page in your WordPress.com admin interface.
This will open the WordPress Page Editor. When creating a fresh page, you’ll be prompted with a collection of pre-defined layouts you can use to quickly populate it.
These layouts include categories such as About, Services, Contact, Blog, and more. If you find something you like, simply click it to insert the layout into the editor. Alternatively, you can start with a blank page and completely customize it yourself.
Add page elements
The WordPress Page Editor works with blocks, which are singular content elements of different types. For example, a paragraph block is automatically created when you write and press the Enter key. Other examples for blocks are:
Headings
Lists
Buttons
Images
Tables
Columns
Grids
You find a full list of available blocks when you click the big blue “+” button in the top left corner.
They are ordered by category, and you can also search for specific blocks. Clicking on any of them inserts it into the editor at the current position of your cursor.
In addition to individual blocks, the Patterns tab offers pre-designed collections of blocks, such as contact forms, galleries, team member sections, newsletter sign-ups, and more. These patterns can help you quickly create layouts without having to build everything from scratch. You insert them the same way.
Another method to add blocks is by clicking the small “+” button that appears when you place your cursor within the editor. It lets you search for a block by name and click it to insert.
Even easier, type a forward slash (“/”) in any empty line, start typing the block name, and select it using your mouse or keyboard.
To understand and manage the structure of your page, use the Document Overview tool in the top left corner.
Customize blocks
Clicking on a block brings up an options bar at the top and additional customization settings in the sidebar.
The options vary depending on the block type. For instance:
A paragraph block lets you adjust font size, color, text alignment, and more.
A button block allows you to customize alignment, style, color, dimensions, and shadows.
It takes some trying out to know what you can change for which type of block.
Be aware that these settings apply only to the specific block on the current page. For global design changes—like applying a new font to all headings—you’ll need to use the global Styles settings, covered later.
Once you’ve designed your homepage to your liking, save your changes and publish the page.
Set it as your front page
To make your newly created page your homepage, go to Settings > Reading in the WordPress.com admin dashboard. At the top, you’ll see two drop-down menus that allow you to define which page serves as your homepage and which one displays your blog posts.
Select your new page under Your homepage displays and save the settings.
Your homepage is now live! For more information about pages in general, check the documentation.
5. Add more pages and a menu
You can use the same workflow as above to create additional must-have pages for your personal website, such as:
About page
Contact page
Services
After that, you’ll likely want to include them in a navigation menu so that your visitors can reach them easily.
Sitewide changes like this happen in the Site Editor. You can access it via Appearance > Editor. The Site Editor works similarly to the Page Editor but allows you to edit additional parts of your website.
In many cases, your theme already includes a navigation menu. In our example, it appears as part of the header. One way to edit it is to click Patterns and Header, though you might need to know the name of your header pattern to pick the right one.
Alternatively, click the header element in the main editing window and then choose Edit.
Either gets you to the editor below.
Here, select the Navigation block (again, Document Overview is your friend).
You can then add and subtract menu items and other elements, rename them, and also change some design options in the sidebar.
Make adjustments as needed, then save to make them appear on your website.
Note: In some themes you control menus in the Site Customizer instead. You can find more information here.
6. Customize fonts and colors
The Site Editor is also where you can make global design changes for your website. You’ll find these options in the Styles menu in the top right corner of the editor.
Here’s what you can change:
Browse styles – Switch between style variations, color palettes, and font combinations your theme ships with.
Typography – Make changes to the font family, size, appearance, line height, letter spacing, and more for body text, links, headings, buttons, and other text elements on your site. You can also change font size presets here.
Colors – Add colors and gradients to use in the editor, try out existing color palettes, and customize colors for text, backgrounds, links, buttons, headings, and more.
Background – Give your website a background image.
Shadows – Set up presets for drop shadows to use them in the editor.
Layout – Define basic layout settings such as content width, global padding, and block spacing.
Blocks – Make design changes to particular block types that apply sitewide.
A cool feature to preview changes in real-time, is the Style Book option in the Styles menu. It provides an overview of how your site’s design elements will look.
Let’s go over some use cases to help you understand all of this information
Change heading fonts
You change the font of your headings under Typography and then Headings. To make things easier, open the Text tab in the Style book to see all headings at once.
Pick which heading type to customize, then apply your changes. For example, if you want to prevent your H1 headings from turning into all caps, choose the “H1” option, then set Letter Case to None.
To change the background color of your website, go to Colors and then click Background.
Pick from the theme palette (you can choose a different one at top) or define a custom hue. That’s it.
Modify button shadow
To make changes to a single block, click Blocks.
Either scroll to the button block in the list or use the search functionality to find it. Click it.
Find the Border & Shadow option at the bottom. A click on Drop shadow allows you to apply different kinds of shadow effects to all of your buttons.
7. Edit page templates
Templates define the design and layout for certain content types across your website. To access them while in the Site Editor, click on the WordPress logo and then Templates.
You’ll see a list of all existing templates on your site such as single posts, pages, and archives. For example, you might want to adjust the layout of your blog posts. For that, click the Single Posts template, to start editing it.
Let’s say your goal is to switch the position of the post meta to appear under the title.
For that, simply choose the post-meta block and move it up.
When you now save, the changes apply to all blog posts on your website.
Plugins let you change and enhance the functionality of your personal website. If you are on a Business or Commerce plan, you can install them in the Plugins menu.
Plugins cover a wide range of features that they can contribute to your website, such as:
Improve search engine optimization (SEO)
Add an Instagram feed
Limit login attempts
Accept payments with different providers
Connect your website to Google Analytics
You can find plugins by using the search functionality at the top or browsing through categories. To learn more about a plugin, click on it. If you like what you see, click the big Install and Activate button.
Once the installation is finished, you can start using the plugin’s functionality right away.
Your personal website is your own piece of online real estate. It’s yours to do with as you please and, unlike other online profiles, can’t be taken from you.
Designing and developing websites is complex. User expectations rise alongside advancements in what is technically possible. As a consequence, the process has many moving parts you must keep in mind if you want to design and build web presences that provide a great user experience, rank well in search engines, and achieve client goals.
Even as an experienced freelance or agency developer, you might struggle to remember every item on the to-do list. The good news is, you don’t have to. By establishing a formalized web design process, you can create a roadmap to follow each time you build a new website.
Doing all the thinking beforehand ensures that you don’t forget anything crucial. It also frees up headspace for doing the actual work, avoids overwhelm, improves efficiency, and allows you to build better websites on repeat.
In this post, we’ll help you reap those benefits by establishing your own web design process. We’ll go through all the necessary steps and give you actionable advice on how to implement each and every one of them. This will give you a foundation to develop your own workflow and make life easier in the future.
How to use this information to develop your own process
We’ll go over the following steps (you can click on the links to jump directly to the part that most interests you):
Goal-setting
Scoping
Resourcing
Project management
Sitemap / wireframes
Copy / content creation
Staging site setup
Visual design
Testing
Launch
Site maintenance
Our goal is to cover each point as completely as possible to provide you with a blueprint for developing your own process. Take what’s useful and relevant to you and add any additional information you might need for your particular use cases, working style, industry, or else.
Be aware that a formalized web design process is a living document that you’ll likely change over time as you repeatedly go through it and as web design requirements change. That way, it always reflects your latest way of working and current level of technology.
To make getting started extra easy, we also created a customizable checklist template. To use it, just create a copy and adapt it to your needs as you go through the information below.
1. Determine website goals
The first thing you need is background information on the website you are about to build. The main objective is to understand its purpose, as this lays the groundwork for many decisions down the line.
For that, your first task is to understand who your client is. Their type of organization, industry, and audience make a big difference in the end product. Good questions to ask are:
What exactly does your business do?
What are the company’s vision, mission, and/or values?
How do you differ from the competition?
Which problems do you solve for your customers?
Which challenges, opportunities, and trends are shaping your industry?
What regulations or compliance requirements does your industry have?
Is there an existing brand identity?
Once you have a better picture of the client, the second step is to find out how the website fits into their business. This is a set of questions that will help you do so:
What’s the goal you hope to achieve with the site?
Who is the intended audience? What’s the first impression they should have when entering the website and what actions should they take on it?
What type of content are you planning to publish?
What are must-have features and functionality?
How should the site be different or the same as that of competitors?
What’s the budget and timeline?
Questions like this are important for several reasons. First of all, lots of industries have distinct conventions when it comes to website design. For example, you would use a very different color scheme for a children’s toy store compared to a corporate financial services website. The client might also already have existing branding that you have to take into account to preserve an established look and hit the right tone.
In addition, the type of site you will build also has a big influence on the web design process. A brochure website, blog, and online shop all have very different purposes and require unique approaches. There can even be legal requirements that you have to meet. For example, on real-estate websites, visitors might have to virtually sign a contract before they can view portfolio items.
Without being crystal clear about what you are making and for what purpose, you are almost certain to get off on the wrong foot, which can be costly and time-consuming to correct. Therefore, spend enough time on the discovery phase until you have a firm grasp of the client’s needs. Extensive contact with stakeholders, market research, audience personas, a design brief, and competitor analysis are all useful tools for this stage.
2. Scope the project
Once you know what you are tasked with designing, the next step in the web design process is to put together the project scope. This is where you determine the exact functionality and technical requirements for the site. It also helps you estimate how long the process will take, allowing you to agree on the exact work to be done (to prevent scope creep) as well as deadlines and milestones with your client.
Ask your client for these basic pieces of information:
How many pages does the site need?
What will they contain? Do you have to account for things like forms or e-commerce functionality?
What other features will be on the site?
What about content? Will the client provide it, or is that part of your duties?
Once you have collected key information, you can estimate how long the total project will take. Be sure to build in some buffer for when, not if, something unexpected happens.
A very useful tool for visualizing the timeline is a Gantt chart.
It shows the project timeline, key deliverables, and their expected completion times. You can easily create Gantt charts using existing Excel or Google Sheets templates.
3. Identify and allocate resources
After this, it’s time to deal with your resources, including money, workforce, and tools. Let’s go over them one by one.
An established scope makes it easier to calculate project costs. For example, it helps you see how many hours it will take and calculate the cost of labor. However, don’t just think about the time—also consider external costs, such as:
Be sure to calculate these beforehand for yourself and to provide an accurate estimate to your client. We have a checklist for website costs if you need a refresher. For hosting options, consider:
If you need a free tool for local development, check out Studio.
Another part of resourcing is determining who will do the work. If you’re a freelance full-stack developer, you might handle everything yourself. If you’re part of an agency, the work will likely be divided between the design and development teams. Either way, ensure there’s a clear plan and everyone knows what’s expected of them.
4. Prepare your project management platform
By now, you should have a good overview of the work that awaits you. It’s time to put it into order and make it more manageable.
The first step is to list all the phases and tasks the project will go through and add them to a project management tool. This also allows you to bring them into the correct order. Recommended tools include:
As mentioned earlier, you can also use the free checklist template included in this article.
Feel free to break the phases down into smaller chunks if that’s how you prefer to work. In addition, include all the resources you already have and attach them to their respective tasks. While you are at it, don’t forget to input the timings and milestones you determined earlier for each item. This will help you stay organized.
By the way, your planning should also include regular check-ins with clients for approvals and updates. This fosters collaboration and ensures everyone stays on the same page.
5. Create a sitemap and wireframes
From here, it’s time to start conceptualizing the end product and create a plan to follow along.
You’ve already determined the must-have pages for the website in the project scope. These often include the usual suspects (homepage, about page, contact page, legal pages, etc.), but you might also have less common ones depending on the project. The next step is to put them into relation to each other and plan the site structure. You can do so with a basic sitemap.
The way pages are arranged greatly influences a website’s navigation and user experience. For example, it determines how easy it is to find content and how often visitors have to click to reach it. A good structure also makes the site more crawlable, giving it an SEO boost.
Part of the site structure are also navigation and menus. They point out important pages and are often an initial entry point for visitors, so it’s important to consider them as well as other navigation elements like breadcrumbs.
Once you have the overall structure, the next task is to visualize individual pages. This is where you create layouts for each page and determine how elements will be arranged—a process also known as wireframing.
Wireframes let you map out the page structure before dealing with design considerations. They help you focus purely on usability and are a great tool to collect feedback from clients. Be sure to also map out your mobile layouts!
You can create wireframes using a variety of tools:
Graph paper – Go old school with pen and paper.
Google Docs – While not the best option, it still works. Tables are your friend.
Professional design tools – Options include Balsamiq or Figma. If you use Figma, consider using a wireframing kit like Johannes WP, which is specifically made for wireframing WordPress websites.
With the concept finished, you can start creating the visual parts of the website. Ideally, this doesn’t start with colors, fonts, and CSS but rather with written content.
While this might seem backward, it actually makes a lot of sense. Design should follow content, not the other way around. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you have a finished design but it can’t accommodate the intended text.
Writing copy doesn’t just mean crafting text for the main sections of the page wireframes you created earlier but also for navigational elements, buttons, forms, and other page elements.
There are several ways to handle this step:
Receive the content from the client
Draft the copy yourself (if that’s part of your agreement)
It’s important to be a bit flexible here. Content might still change and not everything has to be fully ready. It’s fine to use placeholders for some parts, like product descriptions.
However, you want at least a rough idea of what you need to accommodate in your page designs before you start creating them. This saves you from having to make time-consuming changes later.
7. Set up a staging site
Now that you’re ready to work on the actual website, it’s crucial to set up a development version. As a professional web developer, you know better than to do the design process on a live domain.
Once that’s ready, you can immediately start creating the raw structure of the site. This includes setting up all the pages you scoped earlier and creating navigation items pointing to them.
While you’re at it, you can also install any plugins included in your scope, implement features like forms, and insert written content into the appropriate places to create a rough version of the site.
8. Create the visual design
The next step is visual design. This is where you implement the structure from your wireframes and make it look good with fonts, colors, and other elements that create the website’s aesthetic.
This part of the process often happens in two phases: first creating a design mockup and then implementing it. In a WordPress website, the central element for that is the theme, which controls the website’s design.
Here, you can either go with an existing theme or create your own. If you have a WordPress.com Business plan, either is an option since you can upload any third-party theme you want.
Obviously, making a theme from scratch is more work though it gives you the possibility to create a bespoke solution. Going with an existing theme takes less effort, yet it might not have all the features you want or need.
The most time-friendly solution is often to take a hybrid approach. That means finding a theme that is very close to what you are looking for in terms of design and functionality, and then customize it according to your needs.
Thanks to block themes and the WordPress Site Editor, this has become simpler than ever. For example, you can adapt visual elements like colors easily using Styles and/or the WordPress Customizer.
In addition, the Site Editor gives you control over all typography available on your website. You can assign a multitude of fonts to any text elements on your website.
Finally, your website will likely also include visual page content, such as photos, icons, graphics, or videos. Depending on your contract, these might either come from the client or be something you create. Be aware that you have the possibility to source free images directly inside the WordPress.com editor.
First, there is the Jetpack AI image creator. Simply insert an Image block and choose Generate with AI.
Then, input your prompt in the panel that shows up.
You can also insert images from Openverse and Pexels.com by clicking the Block inserter button and choosing the Media tab.
Search for any image and click on a result you like to automatically add it to the editor, complete with the correct attribution.
9. Test the website thoroughly
Already done with the design? Alright hot shot, let’s move on then. Now it’s time to get to testing, which is one of the most crucial stages of the web design process. You don’t want to launch a website only to find parts or even the entire site not functioning correctly.
Testing should ideally happen on a staging site, especially one that uses the same environment as the eventual live website. This allows you to spot potential conflicts or problems that didn’t surface during development.
Here are the most important things to examine each page for:
Double check the content – Content is the main attraction of any website. Go through all pages to ensure there are no typos, missing images, or other errors that detract from the user experience.
Ensure all features work – Test all central functionality, such as web forms, shopping carts, and interactive elements. For example, see that form submissions reach the intended destination.
Verify all links – A well-planned site structure is only effective if users can actually use it. Make sure that links go to the correct destinations and are not broken. A tool like Screaming Frog lets you scan for broken links in bulk.
Check SEO – Make sure all pages have correct meta information, such as title tags and meta descriptions. Screaming Frog also allows you to scan for that.
Measure speed – Page speed is a major usability and ranking factor. Run all pages through tools like PageSpeed Insights to identify performance bottlenecks and fix them. You can also use WordPress.com’s free Site Profiler tool.
Test on different devices and browsers – Since most users access websites on mobile devices, ensure the site looks good on all screen sizes. Test the site on multiple browsers as well.
Validate accessibility – Modern web design must meet accessibility standards, such as WCAG guidelines. Check for sufficient color contrast, keyboard navigation, and compatibility with assistive technologies using tools like Lighthouse (which is also part of PageSpeed Insights) or WAVE.
Invite your clients or other stakeholders to get involved in testing as well. Fresh eyes can catch issues you might have missed. Plus, you’ll need client sign-off on the website before launching. User testing is also a possibility at this stage.
10. Launch
With testing complete and any problems resolved, it’s time to publish the website. Here, too, having a detailed launch checklist can be extremely helpful to ensure you don’t overlook anything.
After all, there are important things to do, such as connecting Google Analytics and Search Console, setting up security measures, creating user accounts, and configuring backups.
When you set a launch date, be sure that any promotional efforts, such as social media updates and email campaigns, are prepared in advance. This coordination ensures that your website makes a big splash as soon as it goes live.
11. Do regular site maintenance
While the website design process is mostly done after launch, it doesn’t mean your work is over. Websites are ongoing projects that require regular maintenance to stay functional, secure, and effective.
Here are some common maintenance tasks:
Addressing smaller bugs
Publishing and updating content
Creating new pages
Building traffic
Performing software updates
Conducting security audits
Running backups
Measuring KPIs through analytics
Smart developers have a plan for maintenance to continue creating value for clients—and revenue for themselves.
Of course, it’s best to automate as much of this work as possible. For example, WordPress.com automatically handles backups and updates, so you don’t have to do them manually or set up a separate solution.
You can find a full list of recommended maintenance tasks in this article.
Stay on top of things with your own web design process
Creating a website that meets today’s high standards for design, usability, and performance is no small feat. With countless moving parts to manage, having a structured web design process is essential to stay on track.
By following a plan beforehand, you can save time, reduce errors, and ensure that nothing important gets overlooked. It allows you to focus on delivering results that align with your client’s goals while making your workflow repeatable for future projects. The steps outlined in this article serve as a flexible foundation to help you put together a process that works for you.
Now it’s your turn: What strategies or tools have helped you master the web design process? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
No matter what type of website you want to build, WordPress.com has all the tools you need to build your online home.
Many of those features are powered by Jetpack, a versatile plugin that provides WordPress websites with a suite of essential tools for site security, performance, and more. It’s included with every WordPress.com website (even sites on our Free plan). For self-hosted sites, Jetpack tools are also available on a subscription basis, with bundled and ala carte options.
Jetpack provides WordPress.com with tons of value. It makes sure your site performs well so you can build and create with confidence. But what exactly does Jetpack do and why should you care? Let’s look at just some of the ways Jetpack gives your WordPress.com site superpowers.
What’s inside the Jetpack toolbox?
Jetpack offers tools in four categories to meet your website’s needs: security, performance, growth, and management. Many of these tools are included with free WordPress.com websites, with additional tools unlocked on higher plan tiers.
Jetpack Stats: Understand what’s resonating with your readers
Free; more features unlocked on Personal and above
Use Jetpack Stats to see your website performance at a glance, including how many visitors are on your site and what content is performing best. Quickly see where your traffic is coming from to better optimize your marketing and partnership strategies. Jetpack is fully GDPR compliant so you can track your visitor metrics with confidence.
To access your free stats, navigate to the “Stats” tab in the WP Admin. For even more information on your website’s trends and insights to improve your website’s performance, upgrade to Premium.
Gone are the days of logging into every social platform to share your newest blog post with your followers. Jetpack Social lets you preview and share your content across major platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Mastodon, and Threads – with just one click from within the WordPress Editor.
Jetpack Social also enables you to automatically put quick share buttons on your posts, enabling your visitors to share their favorite content with their communities, expanding your content’s reach.
Free; additional features unlocked on Premium and above
With the Activity Log, you always have a high-level view of changes and actions taken across your site, from comments to new posts to downloads. Whether you have a large team of content creators or you’re trying to find the source of a pesky bug, the activity log offers transparency and accountability for every website change.
Free users have access to the 20 most recent website updates. Upgrade to a paid plan to view your complete site activity across your plan’s data retention period.
Free and above (limit 20 requests on Free plan, unlimited on paid plans)
With a suite of AI-assisted tools, creating engaging content for your website has never been easier. Jetpack’s AI Assistant can help you quickly generate text, lists, tables, and AI-generated images. AI can also help you edit existing content, highlight readability challenges, identify tonal shifts, and suggest word and image updates to optimize user engagement on every page.
Jetpack Blocks: Add tons of functionality to your site
Free and above
Blocks make it simple to build pages and add functionality to your site’s content. Jetpack provides WordPress.com websites with several blocks that allow you to embed content, add monetization options, customize forms, and much more. Here’s a glimpse at all the things you can do with Jetpack-powered blocks:
Spam can attack your site faster than you can say “where’s the firewall?” but Akismet Anti-spam offers professional-grade defenses. Using advanced machine learning, Akismet can filter out 99.99% of spam in user-submitted text, including spam comments, bot form responses, and fake leads, keeping your site and CRM looking pristine and professional.
Akismet Anti-spam can be found in the Jetpack section of the WP Admin. From there, you can monitor how much spam has been blocked across your site and choose whether you want to review or automatically delete potential spam messages.
You no longer need a separate platform to get your content into people’s inboxes: Jetpack Newsletter allows you to convert your blogs into emails right from your post-publish page. Jetpack offers tools to support your newsletter from start to finish, from collecting subscribers on your website to sending and tracking your newsletter’s performance – all from within WordPress.com. Already have a dedicated following? Simply import your existing subscriber list to get started.
Accidentally broke your site with a new plugin? Never fear: VaultPress Backup has you covered. With daily backups and additional backups created every time you make an edit, it ensures that your website is crisis-proof.
To enable backups, simply navigate to the Jetpack tab in your WordPress Admin and select “Backup.”
Once VaultPress Backup has been enabled, it will automatically create daily backups of your site and backups after every change, with multiple secure copies stored across the cloud. If you ever want to return to a previous version of your site, click the date arrows to navigate to the date you want to roll back to. Click the “Restore to this point” button to revert your site with just one click.
Do you have a large website with a lot of content? Help your visitors find what they’re looking for quickly by enabling Jetpack Search. You can turn on Jetpack Search and filtering with just one click in the Jetpack tab of WP Admin. Jetpack will automatically index all of your site content and offers flexible design options that match your brand.
For eCommerce sites, this is particularly valuable: research shows that people are 2x more likely to purchase something when they search versus standard browsing.
Help new users find your site with Search Engine Optimization, which helps your website climb up the ranks on popular search engines like Google. With the Jetpack SEO tools on WordPress.com Business plans and above, you can control your title tags and meta descriptions to ensure your site is optimized for search.
You don’t have to be an expert to use Jetpack SEO: Jetpack will notify you if your text exceeds the recommended character count limitations to ensure your metadata looks great in search engine results.
Business plan users and above can install additional plugins to their websites. Let’s look at two top-tier plugins the Jetpack team offers to further extend your site’s capabilities.
Jetpack Boost: Make the jump to lightspeed
Paid plugin
Speed matters: just a one-second delay in website loading times can cause a 20% drop in website conversions, with slow sites causing users to experience stress equivalent to watching a horror movie or taking a math test. With Jetpack Boost, you can get suggestions to optimize your website and give your website a relative speed score. Boost will also optimize your code for ultra-fast response times, no developer required.
For a fully integrated, simple CRM, try out Jetpack CRM (formerly known as Zero BS CRM). Jetpack CRM allows you to manage your customers and website visitors with ease, ensuring you never lose a contact or a sale. With integrations for WooCommerce, Paypal, Stripe, Gravity Forms, and more, you can ensure all your data and sales operations are at your fingertips. Unlike complex CRM platforms, Jetpack CRM keeps things simple so that you can run your business effortlessly.
With Jetpack built into every WordPress.com website, you get best-in-class tools to help build and grow your site, no matter which plan you choose. It’s that special ingredient that helps make WordPress.com the best place to host your website (in our biased opinion). Sign up to create your first website today or upgrade your existing plan to access everything Jetpack has to offer.
The internet is a treasure trove of visuals, overflowing with inspiration and information. Images are what draw us in, keep us engaged, and help us learn, and create. But imagine the internet without those visual cues—navigating it would be a real challenge.
Luckily, for people with visual impairments, those dealing with slower internet connections, and even the robots powering search engines, there’s a simple yet powerful solution: alt text (short for alternative text). This unsung hero of the digital world ensures that everyone can access and benefit from the images we often take for granted.
What is alt text?
Alt text is exactly what it sounds like—a description of an image that appears on the page. Simple, right? But there’s more to it than that. To write truly effective alt text, it’s important to understand why it matters, when an image needs an alt attribute (spoiler alert: not every image does!), and the best tools to help you make sure your images are covered. Let’s dive in and make your alt text work smarter, not harder!
Why alt text is important
Alt text isn’t just a box to check—it’s a powerful attribute that serves two important purposes: making your content inclusive and helping search engines understand your images.
Accessibility
Alt text provides a written description of an image for those who rely on screen readers or encounter issues loading images. It’s there to ensure that no matter the barrier—be it visual impairments or low-bandwidth connections—your content remains accessible and meaningful to all users.
Without proper alt text, you risk not only making your site inaccessible to visitors but also potentially violating accessibility laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which could result in fines or other legal consequences. Similar laws are found throughout the European Union, Canada, the Republic of Korea, and Australia—just to name a few. If you’re trying to make the case for an equitable online experience for your team, this is a great place to start.
Want to learn more about building an inclusive online community? Here are a few resources to get you started:
Search engine crawlers pull several key details from an image, including its file name, captions, title, and alt text. Among these, alt text is the most important for helping search engines understand the image’s subject within the page’s overall content. This information works alongside the other content on the page to enhance search engine algorithms, boost your rankings, and drive more traffic to your site.
When writing alt text, aim for clear, meaningful descriptions that fit naturally with the page’s content. Incorporate keywords thoughtfully, and most definitely resist the urge to overdo it—keyword stuffing not only disrupts the user experience but can also result in search engines penalizing your site as spam.
Not familiar with keyword stuffing? Keyword stuffing is all about cramming in as many keywords as possible in an attempt to boost rankings on search engine results pages. This doesn’t work and often backfires. Here’s an example:
alt=”Cute kitten playing with a ball of yarn, adorable kitten, fluffy kitten, playful kitten, cute kitten image, kitten for sale, kitten pictures.”
Well-written alt text can both enhances accessibility and support your SEO strategy. Use your commonsense and keep your (human) site visitors top of mind.
How to know which images need alt text and how to write it
After all that, you may be surprised to learn that not all images require alt text. In fact, it becomes an exhausting experience for some users with screenreaders to endure fluffy alt text applied to images that don’t provide any value. Luckily for us, the W3 has categorized web images and offered some tips about how to treat images within each category.
Here’s how to write the right kind of alt text depending on what your image is for:
Informative images: These are the most common images found on sites and include pictures, photos, or illustrations that represent concepts or information. Your alt text should give a short description that conveys the essential meaning of the image.
For example, this image illustrates all of the integrations available with Automattic’s P2, but those integrations are not named in the accompanying content. It’s important here that the alt text provides that information for visitors that may not be able to see or load the image. It should look something like this:
alt="Logos for available P2 integrations: Crowdsignal, Figma, Twitter, GitHub, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Calendar, and Loom"
Decorative images: If an image is just there to look nice and doesn’t add any important info, use a null alt attribute (alt=””). This tells assistive technologies to skip it.
Functional images: If an image works as a button or link, the alt text should explain what it does—not what it looks like.
For example, the alt text for a video icon might say “Watch this video about hibernating bees on Vimeo.”
Images of text: If the image contains readable text (like a graphic with a quote or a logo), the alt text should include the same words.
Complex images: Charts, graphs, or diagrams need more detailed alt text to describe the data or information they present. You might even link to a longer description.
Groups of images: If multiple images work together to convey one idea, the alt text for one of the images should cover the whole message. A good example of this would be process shots for a recipe or other how-to tutorial that includes steps.
Image maps: For images with clickable areas, provide alt text that explains the overall purpose of the image, and include alt text for each clickable section describing where it leads.
Not sure how to categorize an image? Check out the W3 Images Tutorial for help.
While there are no official length guidelines, it’s generally recommended to keep alt text under 140 characters. Longer descriptions can become tedious when read by screen readers. Be descriptive, but stay concise—this is not the place for creative flourishes.
The Alt Text Tools from the NerdPress team is a free, light-weight plugin that generates a CSV file of the images used in your content, along with their alt attributes.
Once the scan is complete (it’s very fast!), you can open the CSV file in the spreadsheet application of your choice. There you can quickly identify images that have missing alt attributes and scan for any that may need some improvement. The file also includes links to edit the posts where the images appear, making it quick and easy to update their alt attributes.
This freemium WordPress plugin from Equalize Digital goes beyond alt text to ensure your site is accessible to a wide range of visitors. If you and your team are committed to making your content accessible, this is a great resource.
Equalize Digital also runs a Facebook Group and hosts a monthly virtual meet up for WordPress developers, designers, and users interested in learning more about creating accessible websites that can be used by people of all abilities.
Alt text may seem like a small detail, but it plays a big role in making the internet more inclusive and user-friendly. By writing thoughtful, descriptive alt text, you’re not just improving accessibility—you’re also optimizing your content for search engines and enhancing the overall user experience. With the right approach and tools, adding alt text can be an easy step toward a more accessible and SEO-friendly site.
Choose the plan that works best for your business, and let us manage the rest. With any WordPress.com plan, you get all the benefits of fast, secure managed WordPress hosting.
In order to give myself and the many tired volunteers around WordPress.org a break for the holidays, we’re going to be pausing a few of the free services currently offered:
New account registrations on WordPress.org (clarifying so press doesn’t confuse this: people can still make their own WordPress installs and accounts)
I hope to find the time, energy, and money to reopen all of this sometime in the new year. Right now much of the time I would spend making WordPress better is being taken up defending against WP Engine’s legal attacks. Their attacks are against Automattic, but also me individually as the owner of WordPress.org, which means if they win I can be personally liable for millions of dollars of damages.
On a memorable evening in Tokyo, State of the Word 2024 brought together WordPress enthusiasts from around the world—hundreds in person and millions more online. This event marked the first time State of the Word was hosted in Asia, reflecting the platform’s growing global reach. The setting couldn’t have been more fitting: a city where tradition and technology coexist in seamless harmony. Tokyo, much like WordPress itself, reflects a powerful blend of legacy and innovation, craftsmanship and technology, and moments of vast scale balanced by serene stillness.
Tokyo is a city you feel.
Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Cofounder
During the event, the concept of kansei engineering emerged as a central theme. This Japanese design philosophy seeks to create experiences that go beyond function and aesthetics, focusing on how something feels. As highlighted during the keynote, this principle has quietly influenced WordPress’s development, shaping its design and user experience in ways that resonate on an instinctive level.
The evening also celebrated Japan’s deep-rooted connection to WordPress. Nearly 21 years ago, Japan became the first country to localize WordPress, long before a formal translation framework existed. It all started with a single forum post from a user named Otsukare, launching a translation project that helped WordPress become a truly global platform. Seeing how far the Japanese WordPress community has come—both in market share and cultural influence—was a powerful reminder of what shared purpose can achieve.
Wapuu, WordPress’s beloved mascot, was also born in Japan. What began as a simple idea for a fun and friendly representation of WordPress evolved into a global phenomenon. Thanks to Kazuko Kaneuchi’s generous open-source contribution, Wapuu has been reimagined by WordPress communities worldwide, each version infused with local character. This uniquely Japanese creation has helped make WordPress more welcoming, approachable, and fun wherever it appears.
WordPress Growth in 2024
WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg highlighted significant achievements that underscored WordPress’s growth, resilience, and expanding global presence in 2024. He shared that WordPress now powers 43.6% of all websites globally. In Japan, WordPress’s influence is even more pronounced, powering 58.5% of all websites. This remarkable statistic reinforces the platform’s enduring role as a cornerstone of the open web and accentuates Japan’s deep-rooted commitment to the WordPress ecosystem and its developers’ significant contributions.
WordPress sites using languages other than English are expected to surpass English-language sites by 2025. German recently overtook Japanese as the third-most-used language, though Japanese remained close behind. Meanwhile, emerging languages like Farsi experienced rapid adoption, reflecting the platform’s expanding multilingual ecosystem. In Southeast Asia, languages such as Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai saw substantial year-over-year growth, signaling broader adoption across diverse regions.
Core downloads surged to nearly half a billion annually, with the notable releases of WordPress 6.5, 6.6, and 6.7.
WordPress’s design and development ecosystem flourished as well. Over 1,700 new themes were uploaded in 2024, bringing more than 1,000 block themes to the official repository and reflecting increased interest in modern, flexible site design.
The plugin ecosystem also saw record-breaking activity this year. Plugin downloads surged toward 2.35 billion, representing a 20% year-over-year increase. Plugin updates exceeded 3 billion and are on track to surpass 3.5 billion by year’s end. Notably, the Plugin Review Team made transformative improvements, drastically reducing the average review wait time. Their efficiency gains were complemented by the launch of the Plugin Check tool, which reduced submission issues by 41% while enabling the team to approve 138% more plugins each week.
These accomplishments showcase WordPress’s resilience, adaptability, and ever-expanding influence. As the platform continues to evolve, its global community remains at the heart of its success, driving innovation and ensuring that WordPress thrives as the leading tool for building the open web.
Help shape the future of WordPress: Join a contributor team today!
WordPress lead architect, Matías Ventura, highlighted WordPress’s evolution through the lenses of writing, design, building, and development, demoing various pieces of new and forthcoming enhancements.
Writing
The writing experience in WordPress saw notable advancements this year, with an improved distraction-free mode that helps users to focus on content creation without interface distractions. Now you can directly select the image itself to drag and drop it where you want, even enabling on-the-fly gallery creation when you drop images next to each other.
Additionally, the introduction of block-level comments in the editor, currently an experimental feature, promises to reshape collaborative workflows by enabling teams to leave notes directly on blocks.
These enhancements all work together to make writing, composing, and editing in WordPress feel more fluid, personal, and pleasant than ever.
Design
Along with new default theme Twenty Twenty-Five, more than 1,000 block themes offer tailored starting points for different site types, including portfolios, blogs, and business sites. Designers can also utilize the improved Style Book for a comprehensive view of their site’s appearance, ensuring a smooth design process.
Design work isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s also about creating the right environment and guardrails. It’s important that users can interact with their site, add content, replace media, and choose sections without needing to know the layout details. We’re implementing better default experiences to help you focus exclusively on the content or on the design, depending on your needs at the moment.
This all works seamlessly with the zoom-out view, where users can compose content using patterns without having to set up every individual block. Having a bird’s-eye view of your site can really help you gain a different perspective.
These design capabilities scale with you as your WordPress projects grow. WordPress’s approach to design is systematic: blocks combine to form patterns, patterns form templates, and templates help separate content from presentation.
Building
WordPress’s content management capabilities allow working at scale and across teams. Central to this is the introduction of Block Bindings, which merge the flexibility of blocks with the structured power of meta fields. This feature allows block attributes to be directly linked to data sources like post meta, reducing the need for custom blocks while creating deeper, more dynamic content relationships. The familiar block interface remains intact, making complex data management feel seamless. This connects naturally with our broader work on Data Views for post types and meta fields.
These updates reinforce WordPress’s role as a powerful content management system by connecting its core primitives—blocks, post types, taxonomies, and meta fields—more intuitively.
Development
Lastly, Matías showcased a range of groundbreaking tools that empower WordPress developers and streamline their workflows. One of the highlights was the new Templates API, which has simplified the process of registering and managing custom templates. Future updates to the API will allow users to register and activate templates seamlessly, enabling dynamic site customizations such as scheduling different homepage templates for special events or swapping category archives during campaigns. This flexible approach offers developers greater creative control in a standardized way.
The session also explored the Interactivity API, designed to deliver fast, seamless website experiences by enabling server-rendered interactivity within WordPress. Unlike JavaScript-heavy frameworks, this technology keeps everything within WordPress’s existing ecosystem, bridging the gap between developers and content creators. Attendees saw live demos showcasing instant search, pagination, and commenting—all without page reloads—while maintaining a perfect performance score of 100 on Lighthouse. In addition, it was announced that responsive controls will receive significant attention, with new features being explored, like block visibility by breakpoint and adding min/max controls to the columns block.
The WordPress Playground also emerged as a game-changer, allowing users to spin up WordPress sites directly in their browsers, experiment with Blueprints, and manage projects offline. With improved GitHub integration and expanded documentation, WordPress developers now have a more accessible and powerful toolkit than ever before.
An AI Future
Returning to the stage, Matt noted that Gutenberg’s evolution is paving the way for AI-powered site building while keeping creative control in users’ hands. A recent speed building challenge on WordPress’s YouTube channel showcased this potential, with Nick Diego using AI-assisted tools and Ryan Welcher building manually. While the AI-assisted approach won, the key takeaway was that AI isn’t here to replace developers but to enhance creativity and efficiency.
Community Impact and Global Reach
When WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard took the stage, she emphasized WordPress’s commitment to its open-source mission and the power of its global community. Mary shared her passion for defending WordPress’s principles, reaffirming that when users choose WordPress, they should receive the authentic, community-driven experience that the platform stands for. This commitment to clarity, trust, and open-source integrity is central to ensuring WordPress’s long-term sustainability and success.
Mary Hubbard, WordPress Executive Director
In 2024, WordPress’s global influence surged through expanded educational programs, developer contributions, and grassroots initiatives. The platform’s social media following grew to 2.3 million, while major events like WordCamps and live-streamed gatherings attracted millions of attendees and viewers, connecting people worldwide.
Learn WordPress introduced Structured Learning Pathways, offering tailored tracks for beginners and developers, fostering a growing network of creators eager to learn and contribute. Grassroots programs flourished, with WP Campus Connect bringing WordPress education to Indian colleges and innovation competitions in Uganda empowering young creators. In Latin America, the Community Reactivation Project reignited meetups across nine cities, fostering a network of over 150 active members and setting the stage for three new WordCamps in 2025.
WordPress’s efforts also advanced through Openverse, which expanded its free content library to 884 million images and 4.2 million audio files, serving millions of creators worldwide and supporting WordPress’s broader mission of democratizing publishing.
Whether through educational platforms, developer-driven innovation, or community-led projects, WordPress’s ecosystem continues to nurture shared learning, creativity, and collaboration, ensuring its growth and relevance for future generations.
Japanese Community Highlights
Junko Fukui Nukaga—Community Team rep, program manager, and WordCamp organizer—noted that WordPress’s prominence in Japan contributes to an economy now estimated to exceed 100 billion yen.
In October of 2024, the Japanese WordPress community celebrated DigitalCube’s IPO on the Tokyo PRO Market, marking a milestone for the local WordPress ecosystem. Major contributors like Takayuki Miyoshi’s Contact Form 7 plugin surpassed 10 million active users, while companies like Sakura Internet and XServer built specialized WordPress infrastructure.
Community events in Japan have also flourished, with 189 local meetups held throughout the year, fueled by dedicated volunteers and organizers. Translation Night gatherings have ensured WordPress remains accessible to Japanese users, reflecting a thriving collaborative spirit.
Matt gave special recognition to Japan’s standout contributor, Aki Hamano, a Core Committer whose exceptional efforts elevated WordPress development over the past year. Hamano-san made an impressive 774 contributions to WordPress core, earning 162 props for WordPress 6.5, rising to 274 props for 6.6 as the second-highest contributor, and securing the top spot with 338 props for 6.7.Other notable Japanese contributors included Akira Tachibana, an active Docs Team member, and Nukaga, recognized for her exceptional community organizing efforts. Additionally, 13 Japanese contributors supported 5.4% of WordPress 6.6 development, showcasing the country’s growing influence in the WordPress ecosystem.
Data Liberation
Reflecting on the progress since the initiative’s launch last year, the focus remained on ensuring that WordPress not only becomes more powerful but also embodies freedom in its deepest sense—the freedom to move content anywhere, collaborate without limits, and create without constraints. This vision extends beyond individual sites to a broader web where content flows seamlessly across platforms, enabling unrestricted creativity and innovation.
One compelling example demonstrated how easily ePub files could be imported into a WordPress site, integrating seamlessly with existing designs. This represents the initiative’s broader goal: making content migration and integration effortless. WordPress Playground plays a critical role in this vision by enabling easy site migration through a simple browser extension. With Playground as a staging area, migrating and adapting sites becomes intuitive and accessible.
Q&A
The floor was opened to questions in both Japanese and English.
Questions from the audience, including Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein, covered the future of blogging, WordPress performance, the impact of AI search, and what democratizing publishing means today. Matt shared his excitement for more open platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as his recommendations for optimizing your site for both humans and AI. A common thread throughout was that a personal website is an important part of your digital identity, and WordPress allows you to express yourself in fun and unique ways.
Panels
After attendees enjoyed a special performance by the pianist, Takai-san, industry leaders, creators, and innovators took the stage for panel discussions about the present and future of WordPress, moderated by Mary Hubbard.
Publishing in the Open
Featuring:
Mieko Kawakami, Japanese Author and Poet
Craig Mod, Author of Things Become Other Things
Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Cofounder and Automattic CEO
This first panel explored the transformative power of open-source publishing. Panelists shared insights into how open publishing has influenced their creative journeys, expanded audience engagement, and shaped storytelling across cultural boundaries.
Publishing in the open has defined what I’ve done. All the best connections I’ve made in live have been the result of publishing in the open. – Craig Mod
Publishing in the open, like WordPress, is about building community, mutual connections, and putting power back into the hands of creators.
The Future of WordPress in Japan and Beyond
Featuring:
Hajime Ogushi, mgn CEO
Genki Taniguchi, SAKURA internet Inc. Senior Director
Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Cofounder and Automattic CEO
The second discussion highlighted WordPress’s remarkable growth in Japan and its broader global impact. The discussion covered the drivers behind Japan’s adoption of WordPress, its thriving ecosystem of WordPress-based businesses, and emerging trends in web development.
Compared to other CMSs the WordPress Japanese is much easier to use. – Hajime Ogushi
The group discussed plugins such as Contact Form 7, the affordability of hosting WordPress, and local meetups and events
Closing
Thank you to all the guests who joined us on stage, those who ventured to Tokyo, and everyone who tuned in from around the world. Today’s event showcased how a free and infinitely flexible platform, an active global community, open innovation, and a commitment to a fully democratized web make us better at being who we are.
From Tokyo, Arigatou Gozaimashita!
For those interested in exploring past State of the Word keynotes, WordPress has curated a comprehensive YouTube playlist featuring keynotes from previous years. Watch them all here: State of the Word YouTube Playlist. Be sure to mark your calendars for major WordPress events in 2025: WordCamp Asia (Manila, Philippines), WordCamp Europe (Basel, Switzerland), and WordCamp US (Portland, Oregon, USA).
If you need a little push to start writing this winter, in the comfort of your familiar editor, here it is! You can now use the Block Editor to create electronic books and other documents—all completely offline. What a full circle moment for Gutenberg!
The Block Editor contains so many features I miss when writing in other editors. It produces clean, semantic markup. You can paste in content from anywhere and the editor will clean it up for you, or paste a link onto selected text to auto-link. The List View and Outline panels allow you to easily navigate and inspect the content. And we’re constantly iterating on the Block Editor: more features and improvements are on the way, such as refined drag and drop interactions coming in early 2025.
All this inspired me to wrap our editor in an app that can read and write local files—just as other document editors do. It turns out that EPUB is the best file format to store the content, because EPUB is an open standard for e-books that is essentially a ZIP file containing HTML and media—HTML like your WordPress posts!
And just like that, the WordPress Block Editor can also be used to write books! The cool thing about EPUB files is that any e-book app, such as Kindle and Apple Books, can open it. So even if someone doesn’t have this editor, they can still easily read the content, which makes the files it produces portable.
The editor allows you to create a cover, so you can easily distinguish between the books or documents you write. It will also treat each heading as a chapter so you can easily navigate content when opened in an e-book reader.
The term “book” should be taken broadly. While the file that the Block Editor produces is primarily used for e-books, you can create any document with it. It’s possible to export your document to a DOCX file in case you need it, though the more complex blocks are not supported yet.
It is still very much a nascent project. There’s many features left to be added, such as revisions and the ability to open any externally created EPUB files, or even DOCX files, so keep an eye out for these in the coming weeks and months! If you’re interested in this editor, it’s all open source, and I welcome any kind of help.
For now, the demo editor is installable as a Progressive Web App (PWA) in Chrome. While it’s totally usable without installation, it does give you some nice benefits such as allowing you to open the EPUB files directly from your OS. In the future we might wrap it in proper native apps. Your feedback is welcome on GitHub!
On Dec. 16, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Lead Architect Matías Ventura, and Executive Director Mary Hubbard were joined by WordPress community member Junko Nukaga to reflect on all things WordPress at Tokyo Node Hall in Tokyo, Japan. The venue provided the perfect location for the annual event, which was held for the second time outside of the United States.
After delivering the evening’s keynote, Matt, Matias, and Mary were joined by distinguished guests including author and poet Mieko Kawakami, Things Become Other Things author Craig Mod, mgn CEO Hajime Ogushi, and SAKURA Internet Inc. Senior Director Genki Taniguchi. The talented pianist Aiko Takei also performed during the introduction and intermission.
If you missed the livestream, you can watch the full event below:
Highlights from 2024
2024 was a busy year for the WordPress project. Here are some particularly noteworthy moments and milestones that Matt, Matias, and Mary reflected upon from the event stage:
WordPress is growing in Japan (and beyond). Our favorite open-source CMS currently powers 43.6% of all websites around the world, and has a CMS share of 62.3%. In Japan, it powers 58.5% of all websites and maintains a 83% CMS share.
The global community is growing too. WordPress sites using languages other than English are expected to surpass English language sites by 2025.
It’s all about extensibility. WordPress users downloaded plugins 2.35 billion times in 2024. Users can install plugins on the Business plan and above.
Writing and designing with WordPress has never been easier. An improved distraction-free mode provides a cleaner experience when writing in the editor. Thanks to the new zoom-out view, you can use patterns without setting up each single block.
Enhancements for builders and developers. The Templates API streamlines registering and managing custom templates, while WordPress Playground became even more useful thanks to an improved Github integration.
Even more free-to-use visual and audio content. Openverse, a free tool that makes it easy to find open-licensed and public domain works, grew to 884 million images and 4.2 million audio files. Learn how to use Openverse directly in WordPress.com.
WordPress in Japan
WordPress is flourishing all around the world, thanks in part to the generous support and contributions of the Japanese WordPress community. Here are a few key highlights and fun facts:
Japan was the first country to localize WordPress, thanks to a forum post from the user Otsukare.
Wapuu, WordPress’s lovable mascot, was created by web designer and illustrator Kazuko Kaneuchi. You can learn all about Wapuu (and even buy Wapuu merchandise) at wapu.us.
The popular forms plugin Contact Form 7, created by Japanese developer Takayuki Miyoshi, reached 10 million downloads in 2024. You can follow Miyoshi’s blog (which is hosted on WordPress.com) at ideasilo.wordpress.com.
It wouldn’t be State of the Word without a question-and-answer segment. Audience members (including Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein) sparked engaging conversations around topics that included:
What open social platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon mean for web publishers.
How will AI continue to impact search engine optimization in the future.
Why websites are still relevant (and why it’s important to own your online home)
And much more. You can watch the full session below:
As the last days of 2024 wind down, we’re inviting WordPress.com bloggers to kick off the new year by doing what we love most: sharing our stories.
Reflecting on the past 12 months and looking forward to the New Year is a natural part of the season, but blogging about those thoughts? That’s a modern twist that turns personal contemplation into community inspiration.
This January, we’re challenging you to write about the turning of the year – from your experiences during 2024, to your hopes, dreams, and goals for 2025, to everything that’s in between. We can’t wait to read what you come up with!
How to participate in the #2025-new-year-challenge
Participating is easy:
Write your post: Craft a heartfelt, honest, or even humorous post about what comes up for you as we enter the new year. Dream big, get specific, or keep it wonderfully vague – it’s your story.
Tag it right: Add the #2025-new-year-challenge tag to your post. This is your ticket to others seeing and interacting with your post.
Get the word out: Blog about the challenge or share this post with others. Let’s get as many stories as we can!
Discover and connect
Want to see what others created? Starting January 1st, visit wordpress.com/tag/2025-new-year-challenge to explore a world of reflections, aspirations, dreams, and more.
You might find a haiku encapsulating the past year, a fitness enthusiast planning their marathon, or someone simply resolving to be kinder to themselves. Every story matters, and every reflection is a step towards a new beginning.
Make it yours with the Personal plan
Ready to make your online presence more personalized? Our Personal plan is the perfect companion for your blogging journey this new year. Get a custom domain (first year included) and transform your blog from a generic URL to your very own corner of the internet.
Imagine telling people, “Check out my resolution progress at [yourname].com” – pretty cool, right?
Let’s make 2025 remarkable
Whether you’re nostalgic for 2024 or excited to learn a language, read more books, or simply smile more this upcoming year – we want to hear about it. Your post might just inspire someone else on their own journey.
So grab your laptop, warm up those typing fingers, and let’s welcome 2025 with stories of growth, hope, and possibility.
One of the areas where WordPress shines is content management. This is also corroborated by the fact that it is the world’s leading Content Management System, or CMS, by numbers.
The most popular way of displaying the content hosted by WordPress is through a frontend, like through blog posts and pages. That is wonderful for human visitors but there are other ways of consuming that content –– for example, web APIs.
In this article, we’ll explore how we can leverage WordPress in order to power a central API for projects like phone apps, browser extensions, or the frontends of other WordPress sites!
Following along
All the steps described in this article were made in WordPress Playground. If you want to see the end result and maybe sometimes skip ahead as we go, download this ZIP file, and perform these steps:
API stands for Application Programming Interface and it’s a way for software applications to communicate with each other in a standardized fashion. A web API is simply one that is accessed through “the internet” –– for example, by entering a certain URL in your web browser.
There are multiple types of web APIs, and one common way to group them is the protocol they use. In this article, we’ll be implementing two APIs, one based on the REST protocol, and another based on the GraphQL protocol. Other protocols you might have heard of include SOAP, RPC, or gRPC.
By the end of this article, we’ll have built a WordPress site that allows users to login in order to add/update/delete data entries which will be queryable both via REST routes and a GraphQL endpoint.
The data entries will collectively represent a company’s organizational chart –– things like employees, teams, and offices. While a little bland, the concepts can be applied to absolutely anything else.
Optional: Trimming down the frontend
While an optional step, it makes a lot of sense to do this if your site won’t be serving any content via pages but exclusively through APIs.
Once you have a hosted WordPress website, you can start by installing a minimalist WordPress theme like Blank Canvas and deleting every single demo post and page on your site. Continue by using the site editor to include information on the homepage for visitors who find it unintentionally.
For example, add your business’ name and logo, and tell them that they probably landed there in error. You can also include a button linking to the admin area for maintainers of the content. Something along the lines of:
One way to prevent your site from being found in search engine results is by checking the Discourage search engines from indexing this site in your site’s settings.
If you would rather fully lock down the frontend and not even have the homepage described above, you can add the following code snippet either to a plugin like Code Snippets or to your child theme’s functions.php file:
/**
* Disables the frontend for non-logged-in users.
*/
add_action(
'template_redirect',
static function (): void {
$authorization_required_code = \WP_Http::UNAUTHORIZED; // 401
if ( ! is_user_logged_in() ) {
\status_header( $authorization_required_code );
die( \get_status_header_desc( $authorization_required_code ) ); // phpcs:ignore WordPress.Security.EscapeOutput.OutputNotEscaped
}
}
Custom post types and taxonomies
Now it’s time to focus on the website’s admin area and the data modeling part of this tutorial. The most straightforward way of compartmentalizing your data is by using WordPress’ built-in functionality of custom post types and custom taxonomies.
While there are many ways to do this, for the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll organize our data like this:
An employee custom post type
A team custom taxonomy
An office custom post type
In order to create these custom data types, you can either add custom code to your site, or use a plugin (like in this video). A very popular plugin for creating custom post types and taxonomies using the admin interface is Custom Post Type UI – and that is what we’ll be using in this tutorial.
Here is the JSON configuration for importing the data into your installation:
For custom post types
{"employee":{"name":"employee","label":"Employees","singular_label":"Employee","description":"","public":"false","publicly_queryable":"false","show_ui":"true","show_in_nav_menus":"false","delete_with_user":"false","show_in_rest":"false","rest_base":"","rest_controller_class":"","rest_namespace":"","has_archive":"false","has_archive_string":"","exclude_from_search":"true","capability_type":"post","hierarchical":"false","can_export":"true","rewrite":"false","rewrite_slug":"","rewrite_withfront":"true","query_var":"false","query_var_slug":"","menu_position":"","show_in_menu":"true","show_in_menu_string":"","menu_icon":"dashicons-id","register_meta_box_cb":null,"supports":["title","thumbnail","excerpt","revisions"],"taxonomies":[],"labels":{"menu_name":"Employees","all_items":"All Employees","add_new":"Add new","add_new_item":"Add new Employee","edit_item":"Edit Employee","new_item":"New Employee","view_item":"View Employee","view_items":"View Employees","search_items":"Search Employees","not_found":"No Employees found","not_found_in_trash":"No Employees found in trash","parent":"Parent Employee:","featured_image":"Profile image for this Employee","set_featured_image":"Set profile image for this Employee","remove_featured_image":"Remove profile image for this Employee","use_featured_image":"Use as profile image for this Employee","archives":"Employee archives","insert_into_item":"Insert into Employee","uploaded_to_this_item":"Upload to this Employee","filter_items_list":"Filter Employees list","items_list_navigation":"Employees list navigation","items_list":"Employees list","attributes":"Employees attributes","name_admin_bar":"Employee","item_published":"Employee published","item_published_privately":"Employee published privately.","item_reverted_to_draft":"Employee reverted to draft.","item_trashed":"Employee trashed.","item_scheduled":"Employee scheduled","item_updated":"Employee updated.","parent_item_colon":"Parent Employee:"},"custom_supports":"","enter_title_here":"First and Last Names","show_in_graphql":"1","graphql_single_name":"Employee","graphql_plural_name":"Employees"},"office":{"name":"office","label":"Offices","singular_label":"Office","description":"","public":"false","publicly_queryable":"false","show_ui":"true","show_in_nav_menus":"false","delete_with_user":"false","show_in_rest":"false","rest_base":"","rest_controller_class":"","rest_namespace":"","has_archive":"false","has_archive_string":"","exclude_from_search":"true","capability_type":"post","hierarchical":"false","can_export":"false","rewrite":"false","rewrite_slug":"","rewrite_withfront":"true","query_var":"true","query_var_slug":"","menu_position":"","show_in_menu":"true","show_in_menu_string":"","menu_icon":"dashicons-admin-home","register_meta_box_cb":null,"supports":["title","thumbnail","revisions"],"taxonomies":[],"labels":{"menu_name":"Offices","all_items":"All Offices","add_new":"Add new","add_new_item":"Add new Office","edit_item":"Edit Office","new_item":"New Office","view_item":"View Office","view_items":"View Offices","search_items":"Search Offices","not_found":"No Offices found","not_found_in_trash":"No Offices found in trash","parent":"Parent Office:","featured_image":"Featured image for this Office","set_featured_image":"Set featured image for this Office","remove_featured_image":"Remove featured image for this Office","use_featured_image":"Use as featured image for this Office","archives":"Office archives","insert_into_item":"Insert into Office","uploaded_to_this_item":"Upload to this Office","filter_items_list":"Filter Offices list","items_list_navigation":"Offices list navigation","items_list":"Offices list","attributes":"Offices attributes","name_admin_bar":"Office","item_published":"Office published","item_published_privately":"Office published privately.","item_reverted_to_draft":"Office reverted to draft.","item_trashed":"Office trashed.","item_scheduled":"Office scheduled","item_updated":"Office updated.","parent_item_colon":"Parent Office:"},"custom_supports":"","enter_title_here":"Add Office","show_in_graphql":"1","graphql_single_name":"Office","graphql_plural_name":"Offices"}}
For custom taxonomies
{"team":{"name":"team","label":"Teams","singular_label":"Team","description":"","public":"false","publicly_queryable":"false","hierarchical":"false","show_ui":"true","show_in_menu":"true","show_in_nav_menus":"false","query_var":"false","query_var_slug":"","rewrite":"false","rewrite_slug":"","rewrite_withfront":"0","rewrite_hierarchical":"0","show_admin_column":"true","show_in_rest":"false","show_tagcloud":"false","sort":"false","show_in_quick_edit":"","rest_base":"","rest_controller_class":"","rest_namespace":"","labels":{"menu_name":"Teams","all_items":"All Teams","edit_item":"Edit Team","view_item":"View Team","update_item":"Update Team name","add_new_item":"Add new Team","new_item_name":"New Team name","parent_item":"Parent Team","parent_item_colon":"Parent Team:","search_items":"Search Teams","popular_items":"Popular Teams","separate_items_with_commas":"Separate Teams with commas","add_or_remove_items":"Add or remove Teams","choose_from_most_used":"Choose from the most used Teams","not_found":"No Teams found","no_terms":"No Teams","items_list_navigation":"Teams list navigation","items_list":"Teams list","back_to_items":"Back to Teams","name_field_description":"The name is how it appears on your site.","parent_field_description":"Assign a parent term to create a hierarchy. The term Jazz, for example, would be the parent of Bebop and Big Band.","slug_field_description":"The slug is the URL-friendly version of the name. It is usually all lowercase and contains only letters, numbers, and hyphens.","desc_field_description":"The description is not prominent by default; however, some themes may show it."},"meta_box_cb":"","default_term":"","object_types":["employee"],"show_in_graphql":"1","graphql_single_name":"Team","graphql_plural_name":"Teams"}}
At this point, your WordPress admin interface might look something like this:
To Gutenberg or not to Gutenberg
The Gutenberg block editor is functional, adaptable, and easy to use, and you should be using it to edit your traditional WordPress posts and pages. However, when it comes to CPTs without a frontend, there might not be any content to warrant the use of a performant editor like Gutenberg.
If you are positive that all of the information you need is not HTML-based, then it might make sense to disable Gutenberg for these CPTs and default back to the classic post editor that was the standard before WordPress 5.0.
The simplest way to disable Gutenberg support for a CPT is to set the show_in_rest argument to false when registering it (as we’ve done above).
Alternatively, if you want to keep the built-in REST routes that WordPress provides for every CPT, you can add this code to your child theme:
Now that we have our basic data types in place, we need to start populating them with entries. Before we do that, we need to ensure that we can record all the necessary data on each entry, and for that we will need to build custom fields.
The easiest way to add custom fields to your custom post types is to register them with custom-fields support. When you then edit a post, it will include a metabox like this:
While this type of “key-value” interface can be enough, you might want to build a more user-friendly interface with fields like checkboxes, dropdowns, media selectors, and so on.
A popular way to add those types of custom fields is the Meta Box plugin, which, as mentioned above, is what we’ll be using in this tutorial. Using their online custom fields generator, we got the PHP code needed to register the fields we wanted and then added them to Code Snippets.
Using a fake data generator, we populated the custom post types with a bit of seed data:
Other UI customizations
While we won’t explore any further UI customization options in this tutorial, we wanted to note that it’s possible to use various WordPress filters to tweak things like:
The default Add title placeholder on new posts (e.g., to First and Last Names)
The columns hidden or visible by default on the CPT list table view
Various other labels and messages throughout the admin interface
Access control
Before we start looking into making the data available via API, it’s time to think about who should have access to it.
The custom post types and taxonomies mentioned above were registered in such a way that any logged-in user with the ability to edit regular WordPress blog posts will also have the ability to edit these. However, it’s possible to make that much more granular.
You can create custom user roles with custom capabilities in order to ensure that the UI is as clean-as-possible in order to promote focused-work for the users doing the data maintenance. This is particularly important if you anticipate a very high number of entries, especially on an ongoing basis.
While it is possible to control this entirely with custom code, a way to maintain a simpler overview of access management is provided by Access Policies implemented by the Advanced Access Manager plugin.
For example, you can create a separate access policy for each CPT you create. Then you may assign the policy either to a role or to individual users in order to maintain full control over who may add new Employee entries or even just edit existing ones. Deleting entries can be a capability reserved only for administrators.
Here is an example of how a policy named Employees CPT – Full Control and assigned only to Administrator users can look like:
Here is an example of what the admin interface can look like for a dummy operator user that has the Data Entry Operator user roles (cloned from the Subscriber role) with two AAM Access Policies attached – one for each custom CPT:
Notice how the lack of most menu items makes it easier to focus solely on the data-entry aspect. The policies can be made more granular, for example, to also restrict who may delete an entry or create new ones.
Custom REST routes
While WordPress will automatically create REST routes for every CPT as long as it is registered with the show_in_rest argument set to true, you can also create your own custom rest routes that are better suited for serving the CPT content in a way that makes more sense to your use-case.
You can choose to have your routes publicly accessible if the permission_callback argument is set to the __return_true function or you can choose to lock down calls using any permission scheme you want.
The recommended way of locking down access is behind a capability check, i.e. a call to current_user_can. You can use the AAM Access Policies mentioned above to grant or withdraw permission from individual roles or users, and you can use WordPress’ application passwords to authenticate API requests.
Hint: even if you decide that GET (read) requests should/can be publicly available, we still recommend that any POST // PUT // DELETE (create, update, delete) requests always be guarded by a current_user_can check.
Here is a REST controller that we added to Code Snippets in order to be able to list the employees on the site and fetch them by ID:
Your custom REST routes will be available under <your-domain>/wp-json/<route_namespace>/<route>. For example, the path for retrieving the list of employees could look like this:
Hint: the team query added there will be parsed by WordPress and made available in the controller; you can then choose to either ignore it or filter the results by it – anything you want!
The easiest way to test your endpoints, especially if they will require an application password to access, is to use a tool like Postman which lets you test APIs in a very user-friendly manner. Publicly available GET requests can also be tested by simply visiting the URL endpoint in your browser!
Querying via GraphQL
Now that we are able to fetch the data via REST routes, let’s explore how we might be able to fetch it using GraphQL as well.
If you’re unfamiliar with GraphQL, what you need to know is that it’s actually a querying language just like SQL but for APIs. You can read more about it on the official website over at https://graphql.org/.
The simplest way to add GraphQL support to our site is by installing the newly-canonical plugin WPGraphQL. It also has a documentation page where you can learn more about what it provides out-of-the-box, and also examples of how to handle much more complex scenarios.
If you’ve been paying attention to the JSON configuration of the custom post types shared above, you might’ve already noticed a key named show_in_graphql set to 1 (true/active). That is all we need in order to allow the custom post types we added to be queries using GraphQL.
Here is an example of a GraphQL query that can be used to list Employees which you can test in the built-in GraphQL IDE bundled with the plugin:
If this sounds like something you want to build for your own business, you can work on it on your own computer using Studio by WordPress.com. You can even share your work with colleagues (for free!) using a demo site, and when you’re ready, any WordPress.com Business plan or higher will be able to host and manage your site.
State of the Word 2024 is just around the corner! Join us for this live stream event on Monday, Dec. 16th at 18:00 JST / 09:00 UTC.
State of the Word is the annual keynote address delivered by the WordPress project’s co-founder and Automattic CEO, Matt Mullenweg. Every year, the event celebrates the open source project’s progress and offers a glimpse into its future.
State of the Word 2024 will be held in Tokyo, Japan, at Tokyo Node Hall. This will mark the first year the event has ever been held in Japan, where WordPress powers 58.5% of all websites. This year’s edition promises to deliver insight from Matt, Lead Architect Matías Ventura, and General Manager Mary Hubbard, as well as a lineup of guest panelists, from acclaimed authors to leaders in the Japanese WordPress community.
Openverse.org, the vibrant platform for openly licensed media, has introduced a sleek and modern Dark Mode feature. This new site theme is designed to enhance users’ comfort and style as they explore the extensive library of creative resources. Whether for late-night browsing or simply a preference for darker aesthetics, Dark Mode makes engaging with Openverse easier on the eyes and more personalized than ever.
By reducing screen brightness in low-light settings, Dark Mode offers a more relaxed viewing experience, helping to minimize eye strain. It also caters to users with light sensitivity, creating a more inclusive browsing environment. This thoughtful addition underscores Openverse’s commitment to delivering tools that are as functional as they are visually appealing.
The release of Dark Mode is part of Openverse’s broader effort to innovate and adapt to the needs of its growing community. From the thoughtful interface design to the careful attention to accessibility, every detail was crafted to reflect Openverse’s mission of empowering creativity. By embracing modern frontend implementations like Dark Mode without compromising usability or accessibility, Openverse continues to grow while honoring the brand’s essence. In addition, this update lays the groundwork for future developments aimed at providing even more customization options and improved user experiences.
“Dark Mode marks an exciting step forward for Openverse. We designed and implemented a new user interface that keeps the brand’s essence while providing the same search experience. We’re thrilled to see how this feature fits within users’ preferences and enhances the creative journey.” – Francisco Vera. Designer
Ready to explore Openverse in a whole new light? Head to Openverse.org today and look for the Dark Mode toggle in the site footer.
Every great journey starts with a single step—and yours starts today.
You’ve had the idea. You’ve imagined the possibilities. Whether it’s a blog, a business, or a creative project, the dream has always been there, waiting. But here’s the truth: dreams can’t grow until you take action. And right now is the perfect time to start.
At WordPress.com, we’re here to help you bring your vision to life. With our year-end promotion, you’ll get 25% off any new annual plan—plus a free domain for your first year—to make starting even easier.
Use coupon code DREAM25 at checkout and start building today.
Design your dream. Choose from stunning, customizable themes that make your site uniquely yours.
Be seen effortlessly. Built-in SEO tools help grow your audience and expand your reach.
Turn passion into profit. Accept payments, offer subscriptions, and much more.
Get expert help, 24/7. Our team is always available to support your success.
And that’s just the beginning. From intuitive tools to seamless performance, we’ve built the platform to help you succeed—whether you’re starting your first blog, scaling your business, or taking your passion to the next level.
But here’s the thing: your dream won’t wait forever, and neither will this offer. This exclusive 25% discount ends on December 31st, 2024. Use coupon code DREAM25 at checkout and start building today.
The future you’ve been imagining? It’s closer than you think. Dream it. Build it. Grow it—with WordPress.com.
Bringing back a frosty feature (plus more improvements for WordPress.com users)
About 17 years ago we added an option called “Show falling snow on my blog” to WordPress.com. The name said it all: it added falling snow to your blog. Then, one day, it disappeared. It wasn’t because spring came and melted the snow away. We were cleaning up code, juggling lots of different priorities, and the snow was shoveled away.
When we first announced this bit of fun in 2007, we were inspired because WordPress co-founder and our CEO Matt Mullenweg was missing out on a White Christmas in his hometown of Houston. Ever since it went away, some of you have let us know you’ve also been missing out on snow — on WordPress.com. Thanks to everyone who reminded us, we’re bringing back this frosty feature today, available now for every WordPress.com user.
Want to join the fun? Log into your WordPress.com account and visit Settings in the left-hand sidebar. There, you’ll find an option to add some fresh powder to your site:
Your personal snow machine, free for all WordPress.com users.
Voilà! With one click, your visitors can enjoy a wintry surprise, no matter where they are in the world:
We like to think of it as a fun gift for a time of year when so many people around the world will be sharing gifts — whether or not it’s snowing where you’re writing on your blog.
Now, we know not everyone appreciates snow as much as we do. So, we’ve been working hard on a flurry of other gifts over the past few months too, adding tons of improvements to WordPress.com. Until now, we just haven’t told you about them on our blog! This seems like a great time to recognize all those other small features, improvements, and wishlist items that make the WordPress.com world just a little bit nicer:
We added over 65 themes to our Free, Personal, and Premium plans in the last half of the year. If you haven’t taken a look at our new themes lately, take a moment and browse around now. If you’re on the Business plan and above, you can use any theme — even custom ones — but we’re always trying to make sure you have a great, curated list of high-quality options on our less expensive plans too.
We also brought back Bulk Plugin Management, so Business and Commerce plan users can efficiently manage and update plugins across all your WordPress.com sites. If you’re managing multiple sites, this will save you a lot of time, so you can spend more time doing what you love.
The WordPress core development team created a new component for managing data called Data Views. We’re using this functionality in our Hosting Dashboard, improving the experience of managing your sites and domains.
Developers know that PHP — a programming language that’s near and dear to our hearts — is the backbone of the web (and WordPress itself). Never heard of it? Not to worry. Just think of PHP as the magic that makes your WordPress website possible. WordPress.com upgraded to PHP 8.1 this year, ensuring your sites maintain top-tier performance and compatibility with your favorite themes and plugins.
With all these new features and improvements, there’s snow time like the present to build your websites with WordPress.com. Feeling the giving spirit too? It’s easy to share WordPress.com with a gift subscription. No pressure, of course. Enjoy the snow, and look for even more enhancements and features to come in 2025!
Another month means another fresh batch of excellent themes for WordPress.com. Let’s look at some of the latest additions to the WordPress.com themes gallery, with great options for content creators, small businesses, event organizers, and personal sites. Preview each one below (and maybe try taking one for a spin).
Also great for: Consultants, thought leaders, speakers, and content creators with paid course offerings
With a clean, single-hued design, minimal photography, and approachable fonts, CoachAva is built for professional coaches looking to highlight their core offerings and showcase their expertise.
Whether you’re a seasoned executive coach, a life coach, or a subject matter expert looking to sell digital or in-person services, CoachAva can help you establish trust with potential clients by putting your thought leadership front and center. Blocks make it easy to share blog posts, podcasts, and/or customer testimonials on your homepage. The flexible design makes it easy to define, package, and showcase your different offerings, connecting clients to the perfect programs.
Also great for: Bloggers, serial content creators, news sites with limited photography
Ideal for podcasters building their first site, Castcore features bold, attention-grabbing titles and a minimalist aesthetic that keeps your listeners focused on what matters most – your content.
With a simple homepage design, this template makes it easy for listeners to scroll through your recent content to find the right episode. Castcore is a great option for podcasters who want to build their subscriber base. The Podcast Player block makes it super easy to create an embedded mini-player for your episodes: simply copy your podcast’s RSS URL to engage listeners right on your page. Choose a grey and black color combo for a classic design or go young and bold with bright yellow.
Also great for: Thought leaders, speakers, and content creators with paid course offerings
CoachBen’s dark theme with bright accents offers a bold and professional design that perfectly reflects a coach at the top of their game. Striking and to the point, this theme allows professional coaches to quickly articulate their value proposition and define their services.
With pre-designed blocks for displaying company logos of past clients, a calendar of speaking events, and a blog subscription, there are plenty of ways to show potential clients your expertise and experience. When they’re ready to dig in, they can learn more about specific offerings on your courses page or reach out to schedule a call.
Also Great for: Brick and mortars, Restaurants, Personal care providers, Digital portfolios, visual artists, photographers
Greenseed is a beautifully simple, highly adaptable theme that makes it easy for businesses to take their brick-and-mortar brands online. Designed with full-site editing in mind, Greenseed can be customized to match any brand style, but its open spaces and bold visuals make it a particularly great choice for businesses looking to establish a streamlined online presence that embraces custom photography.
This minimal, approachable layout gives your photos space to breathe while providing key business information like address, phone number, and store hours. Link to your reservations page or provide visitors with a contact form to make it easy for potential customers to make an appointment or plan a visit.
Also great for: Eco-conscious consumer brands, wedding suppliers
Like the jewelry and accessory brands it was built for, Aether embodies modern elegance. With delicate fonts and natural-toned color palettes, this product-focused template offers a tasteful design that allows artisan accessories and jewelry to truly sparkle.
With social media integrations and the ability to highlight products on your homepage, Aether creates a flexible hub for your digital brand. You can allow your customers to purchase products directly through WordPress’s e-commerce plugins or you can link your website to an existing storefront. With Aether, you can be sure your customers will understand your brand’s commitment to quality and design.
Also great for: Writer portfolios, speakers, brand consultants
With a bold split-page design and minimalist elements, Miko keeps your brand center stage. Best for individuals, creators, or service providers who want to make a lasting visual impact, this template allows visitors to navigate through all of the pages of your site on the left side without ever navigating away from the image and title anchored on the right.
Featuring a variety of hyper-modern font options and cool color combos, Miko can lean sweet and delicate or bold and artistic, effortlessly complimenting a huge range of personal and professional website identities. Regardless of the style you choose, Miko is the perfect theme for anyone who wants to present themselves as a modern, polished professional with an eye for design.
The best way to market your upcoming conference is with a sleek custom website. Conference is a flexible template that helps conference planners create a credible online presence.
The Conference template can support both marketing and event logistics: You can highlight your speakers, sponsors, and conference news to draw in new attendees via the signup form. Once attendees register, the site acts as a home base for key information, providing pages for the conference location, daily schedules, and lists of attendees to help your participants connect in advance. Whether you are hosting a multi-day affair or an intimate workshop, Conference can scale to meet the needs of your event.
Ready to give your site a makeover? You can explore these themes by clicking the “Demo” button on each theme page. Whether you’re starting a coaching business or looking to improve your professional online presence, you might just find the perfect jumping-off point for your future website.
Most premium themes are available to use at no extra charge for customers on the Personal plan or above. Partner themes are third-party products that can be purchased for $99/year each on the Business or Commerce plans, so if you haven’t found what you’re looking for today, there are plenty of alternatives available.
You can explore all of our themes by navigating to the “Themes” page, which is under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard, or by clicking the button below:
Spam bots and denial-of-service attacks are a reality for many website owners. Depending on timing and scale, they can be an annoyance or a detriment to your business’s bottom line. Services like Cloudflare, Fastly, and Vercel are popular choices for mitigating these attacks with sophisticated techniques beyond the firewall rules many hosts (WordPress.com included) employ to examine and potentially block incoming traffic.
WordPress.com’s defensive mode introduces similar, sophisticated DDoS protection that further enhances your site’s security. It works by issuing proof-of-work challenges to browsers visiting the site. Legitimate users will briefly see a challenge page while their browser completes the work before accessing the site. The feature is powered by our global edge network, but it can still be enabled independently of our global edge cache feature.
What is defensive mode?
If you notice an inordinate amount of traffic to your website that is slowing it down, this setting filters spam traffic by requesting that they complete a proof-of-work challenge. When visitors come to your website for the first time, they will see the following screen:
This proof-of-work challenge page has a unique random puzzle embedded in it, along with JavaScript that can solve the puzzle. The puzzles are designed to take a typical CPU a few seconds to solve, and they deter botnets, which are not able to run the scripts to solve the puzzles.
Visit your Sites page by clicking on the WordPress logo in the upper left corner of your dashboard.
Click on your site title.
Click on the “Server Settings” tab on the site overview page.
Scroll down to the Defensive mode section.
Select a duration and click the “Enable defensive mode” button
Note that WordPress.com staff may proactively enable defensive mode on your behalf, regardless of what hosting plan you have, if your site is attacked.
Get it all on WordPress.com
Many hosts charge extra for capabilities like this, or they require integration with a third-party provider. On WordPress.com, defensive mode is included on every plan and can be managed manually on Business and Commerce plans.
This is just one more reason why WordPress.com stands out as the premier managed host for WordPress sites. With staging sites, SSH and WP-CLI access, or GitHub deployments, we’re always working on new tools to make WordPress.com an essential component of your development workflow.
What other features would you like to see on WordPress.com? How can we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Let us know in the comments below.
Managing multiple subscriptions for WordPress themes and plugins can be both costly and complex.
WordPress lifetime deals offer a streamlined solution by providing lifetime access to premium tools for a single payment.
These deals eliminate recurring fees while ensuring you receive all future updates and ongoing support.
In this roundup, we present the top WordPress lifetime deals available today. Whether you’re a developer, business owner, or new to WordPress, these offers enable you to enhance your website’s functionality without exceeding your budget.
Explore these opportunities to optimize your site with premium tools and achieve significant cost savings.
With so many exclusive offers and discounts available, finding the perfect WordPress tools can feel overwhelming.
To make it easier, we’ve curated a list of must-have WordPress lifetime deals you don’t want to miss!
With so many exclusive offers and discounts available, finding the perfect WordPress tools can feel overwhelming.
To make it easier, we’ve curated a list of must-have WordPress lifetime deals you don’t want to miss!
Astra – Up to 50% Off
Transform your WordPress website without writing a single line of code!
Astra Pro enhances the capabilities of the Astra theme, providing you with advanced features and customization options to create stunning websites effortlessly. Whether you’re building a site for yourself or crafting one for a client, Astra Pro empowers you to design fast, responsive, and beautiful websites with ease.
Key Features:
Easily customize headers, footers, and page layouts without coding.
Build modern WooCommerce stores with flexible product display options.
Premium support to swiftly resolve any questions or issues you encounter.
Elevate Your WordPress Site with Advanced Gutenberg Blocks!
Spectra is a powerful WordPress plugin that enhances the Gutenberg editor by adding a suite of advanced blocks and features. Whether you’re a blogger, entrepreneur, or web designer, Spectra empowers you to create visually stunning and highly functional websites without writing a single line of code.
Key Features:
Advanced Custom Blocks: Access a variety of unique blocks like Post Grid, Masonry Layout, and Advanced Columns to build dynamic page layouts effortlessly.
Pre-built Starter Templates: Kickstart your website design with a library of professionally crafted templates that are easy to customize.
Responsive Design Controls: Optimize your site for all devices with intuitive responsive settings and styling options.
Seamless Integration: Works flawlessly with popular themes and plugins, ensuring a smooth website-building experience.
Ultimate Addons for Elementor – Exclusive Lifetime Deal
Elevate Your Elementor Experience with Advanced Widgets and Features!
Ultimate Addons for Elementor is a powerful plugin that extends the capabilities of the Elementor page builder. Ideal for designers, developers, and marketers, it offers a wide array of creative widgets and templates to help you build professional and dynamic websites effortlessly.
Key Features:
50+ Innovative Widgets: Unlock unique widgets like Advanced Heading, Content Toggle, and Marketing Button to enhance your site’s functionality and user engagement.
Pre-designed Starter Templates: Access a vast library of ready-to-use templates that can be customized to match your brand’s identity.
Seamless Integration: Works flawlessly with Elementor and other WordPress plugins, ensuring a smooth website-building experience.
White Labeling Options: Rebrand the plugin under your own name when creating websites for clients, adding a professional touch to your services.
Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder – Exclusive Lifetime Deal
Enhance Your Beaver Builder Experience with Advanced Modules and Templates!
Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder is a feature-rich plugin that takes your Beaver Builder page builder to the next level. Perfect for designers, developers, and agencies, it offers a wide array of creative modules and templates to help you build professional and dynamic websites effortlessly. With this tool, you can create stunning websites faster and more efficiently, without writing a single line of code.
Key Features:
50+ Modules: Enhance your site with advanced features.
200+ Templates: Kickstart designs with ready-made layouts.
White Labeling: Rebrand the plugin for client projects.
Smooth Integration: Works seamlessly with Beaver Builder.
Boost Your Conversions with Advanced Opt-in Forms and Popups!
Convert Pro is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to help you create high-converting opt-in forms and pop-ups effortlessly. Ideal for marketers, bloggers, and businesses, it provides advanced targeting and triggering options to capture leads and grow your email list effectively.
Key Features:
Drag & Drop Editor: Design stunning opt-in forms without coding.
Advanced Targeting: Show personalized messages based on user behavior.
Exit Intent Technology: Engage visitors right before they leave your site.
Seamless Integrations: Connect with popular email marketing services easily.
Schema Pro is a powerful WordPress plugin that simplifies the process of adding schema markup to your website. Perfect for bloggers, businesses, and developers, it helps search engines understand your content better, boosting your site’s visibility and click-through rates without any coding required.
Key Features:
Easy Setup: Implement schema markup without technical expertise.
20+ Schema Types: Support for articles, reviews, recipes, and more.
Automatic Mapping: Map existing content to schema fields effortlessly.
Boost SEO: Improve search engine rankings and rich snippets.
Build and Manage Your Online Store with a Powerful, User-Friendly Solution!
SureCart is a comprehensive e-commerce plugin for WordPress that supports unlimited products, flexible payment options, and powerful marketing tools—all without slowing down your website. It offers an intuitive design with drag-and-drop form builders, customizable templates, and seamless integration with other apps and services. Plus, SureCart ensures data safety with automated backups and security protocols, performing all the heavy lifting on its servers to maintain your site’s speed.
Key Features:
Comprehensive E-commerce Solution: Supports unlimited products and flexible payment options without slowing down your site.
User-Friendly Design: Intuitive drag-and-drop builders and customizable templates.
Security and Performance: Automated backups and advanced security protocols.
Positive User Feedback: Highly rated for ease of use and excellent support.
Enhance Your Knowledge Base with a Powerful Documentation Plugin!
BetterDocs is a robust WordPress plugin designed to help you create and manage a comprehensive knowledge base or documentation for your products and services. Ideal for businesses, support teams, and developers, it offers advanced features like instant AJAX search, customizable templates, and analytics to improve user experience and reduce support queries. With BetterDocs, you can efficiently organize your content, making it easy for users to find the information they need quickly.
Key Features:
Instant AJAX Search: Help users find answers faster with live search results.
Customizable Templates: Design your knowledge base to match your brand.
Analytics & Insights: Monitor user behavior to improve your documentation.
Responsive Design: Ensure your knowledge base looks great on all devices.
Upgrade Your WordPress Videos with the Ultimate Video Player!
Presto Player is a powerful video player plugin for WordPress that enhances your website’s video experience. Ideal for content creators, educators, and marketers, it offers advanced features like customizable video players, video analytics, and seamless integration with popular video hosting platforms. With Presto Player, you can engage your audience more effectively and deliver high-quality video content without any technical hassle.
Key Features:
Customizable Players: Tailor the video player to match your brand.
Hosting Integrations: Supports YouTube, Vimeo, and self-hosted videos.
Advanced Analytics: Track viewer engagement and performance.
Marketing Tools: Add calls-to-action and email captures within videos.
Transform your WordPress website without writing a single line of code!
Astra Pro unlocks advanced features and customization options for the Astra theme, enabling effortless creation of stunning, responsive websites. Perfect for personal projects or client work, it ensures fast and beautiful designs.
Build Lightning-Fast, Highly Customizable WordPress Sites with Ease!
Blocksy is a modern, lightweight, and highly customizable WordPress theme designed to help you create stunning websites effortlessly. Ideal for bloggers, businesses, and developers, it offers an intuitive interface with advanced customization options, seamless integration with popular page builders, and a variety of starter sites to kickstart your project. With Blocksy, you can build responsive, SEO-friendly websites that perform exceptionally well in terms of speed and user experience.
Key Features:
Lightning-Fast Performance: Enjoy optimal site speed with a theme built for efficiency.
Advanced Customization: Personalize every aspect of your site without any coding skills.
Seamless Integrations: Works flawlessly with Gutenberg, Elementor, and other page builders.
Pre-built Starter Sites: Access a library of ready-made templates to jumpstart your design.
Design Beautiful Websites with the Ultimate WordPress Theme and Visual Page Builder!
Divi is a powerful WordPress theme and visual page builder that empowers you to create stunning websites with ease. Ideal for designers, developers, and businesses, it offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, a vast library of pre-made templates, and advanced customization options. With Divi, you can build responsive, SEO-friendly websites without writing a single line of code.
Key Features:
Drag & Drop Builder: Easily create custom layouts with a visual editor.
Pre-made Templates: Access hundreds of professionally designed templates to jumpstart your projects.
Responsive Design: Ensure your website looks great on all devices with built-in responsive editing.
Advanced Customization: Customize every aspect of your site with extensive styling options.
Elevate Your WordPress Site with Advanced Gutenberg Blocks!
Spectra is a powerful WordPress plugin that enhances the Gutenberg editor by adding a suite of advanced blocks and features. Whether you’re a blogger, entrepreneur, or web designer, Spectra empowers you to create visually stunning and highly functional websites without writing a single line of code.
Key Features:
Advanced Custom Blocks: Access a variety of unique blocks like Post Grid, Masonry Layout, and Advanced Columns to build dynamic page layouts effortlessly.
Pre-built Starter Templates: Kickstart your website design with a library of professionally crafted templates that are easy to customize.
Responsive Design Controls: Optimize your site for all devices with intuitive responsive settings and styling options.
Seamless Integration: Works flawlessly with popular themes and plugins, ensuring a smooth website-building experience.
Design Stunning WordPress Websites with an Intuitive Drag-and-Drop Builder!
Visual Composer is a powerful WordPress page builder that enables you to create beautiful, responsive websites without any coding skills. Ideal for designers, developers, and business owners, it offers an easy-to-use interface with a vast library of elements and templates to help you build professional websites effortlessly. With Visual Composer, you can customize every aspect of your site to match your brand and vision.
Key Features:
Drag & Drop Editor: Build complex layouts with an intuitive interface.
Premium Templates & Elements: Access a vast library of pre-designed templates and content elements.
Responsive Design: Ensure your website looks great on all devices.
SEO-Friendly: Optimize your site for search engines to improve visibility.
Supercharge Your WordPress Site with Advanced Elementor Add-ons!
Crocoblock is an all-in-one toolkit for Elementor that offers a comprehensive suite of plugins to enhance your WordPress website. Ideal for developers, designers, and agencies, it provides powerful widgets, dynamic content features, and customizable templates to help you build professional, feature-rich websites without coding. With Crocoblock, you can create complex websites effortlessly, from e-commerce stores to dynamic listings.
Key Features:
JetPlugins Suite: Access 20+ powerful plugins to extend Elementor’s functionality.
Dynamic Content: Create advanced websites with custom post types and listings.
Pre-designed Templates: Utilize hundreds of ready-to-use templates and blocks.
Theme Builder: Customize every part of your site, from headers to footers.
SureCart is a comprehensive e-commerce plugin for WordPress, offering features like unlimited products, flexible payment options, and robust marketing tools, all designed to maintain optimal website performance. Its user-friendly interface includes a drag-and-drop form builder, customizable templates, and seamless integration with various apps and services. To ensure data safety, SureCart provides automated backups and security protocols, handling intensive processes on its servers to preserve your site’s speed.
Build Your Own Multi-Vendor Marketplace Effortlessly!
Dokan is a powerful WordPress plugin that enables you to create your own multi-vendor marketplace, similar to Amazon or eBay. Ideal for entrepreneurs, businesses, and developers, it offers a user-friendly interface with robust features to manage vendors, products, and commissions. With Dokan, you can set up a fully functional marketplace quickly and efficiently, without any coding knowledge.
Key Features:
Multi-Vendor Support: Allow multiple vendors to sell products on your site.
Frontend Vendor Dashboard: Vendors can manage products, orders, and earnings from an intuitive dashboard.
Flexible Commission System: Set global, vendor-specific, or product-specific commission rates.
Seamless WooCommerce Integration: Built on WooCommerce for maximum compatibility and functionality.
Create and Sell Online Courses with a Powerful LMS Plugin!
Tutor LMS is a comprehensive WordPress plugin that enables you to create, manage, and sell online courses effortlessly. Ideal for educators, entrepreneurs, and businesses, it offers a complete set of features including an intuitive course builder, advanced quizzes, assignments, and monetization options. With Tutor LMS, you can build a fully functional e-learning platform without any coding knowledge.
Key Features:
Intuitive Course Builder: Create engaging courses with an easy drag-and-drop interface.
Advanced Quiz Creator: Design interactive quizzes to assess learners effectively.
Monetization Options: Sell courses using WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and more.
Reporting & Analytics: Track students’ progress and performance with detailed reports.
Showcase Your Work with Stunning Portfolios Effortlessly!
WP Portfolio is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to help creatives, freelancers, agencies, and businesses display their work in beautiful, responsive portfolios. Whether you’re showcasing images, videos, or websites, WP Portfolio offers an easy-to-use interface with advanced customization options to make your portfolio stand out. Impress potential clients and customers by presenting your projects in the best light—all without writing a single line of code.
Key Features:
Diverse Portfolio Types: Showcase images, videos, and even website portfolios seamlessly.
Ready-to-Use Templates: Access a library of professionally designed templates to get started quickly.
Advanced Customization: Personalize your portfolios with intuitive settings and styling options.
Responsive Design: Ensure your portfolios look great on all devices, from desktops to mobiles.
Create and Manage Your Membership Site Effortlessly!
SureMembers is a powerful WordPress plugin that enables you to build and control membership sites with ease. Ideal for content creators, educators, and businesses, it offers advanced features like content restriction, user management, and seamless integration with popular plugins and payment gateways. With SureMembers, you can monetize your content and foster a thriving online community without any coding skills.
Key Features:
Easy Content Restriction: Protect your valuable content by restricting access to pages, posts, and custom post types with just a few clicks.
Flexible Membership Levels: Create unlimited membership tiers with customizable access rules to suit your business model.
Seamless Integrations: Works smoothly with popular plugins like WooCommerce, Elementor, and various LMS platforms.
Secure Payments: Integrate with multiple payment gateways to handle subscriptions and one-time payments securely.
SureFeedback is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to help you gather valuable insights from your audience effortlessly. Ideal for businesses, bloggers, and developers, it offers advanced features like customizable feedback forms, real-time analytics, and seamless integrations. With SureFeedback, you can understand your users better, improve your products or services, and enhance overall customer satisfaction—all without writing a single line of code.
Key Features:
Customizable Feedback Forms: Create engaging forms with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder to collect the exact information you need.
Real-Time Analytics: Gain immediate insights into user feedback to make data-driven decisions quickly.
Seamless Integrations: Connect with popular tools like email marketing services, CRM systems, and project management apps.
Automated Responses: Set up automatic replies to acknowledge feedback and keep your audience engaged.
Build and Manage Powerful Forms on Your WordPress Site Effortlessly!
SureForms is an intuitive WordPress plugin designed to help you create and manage forms with ease. Ideal for businesses, bloggers, and developers, it offers advanced features like a drag-and-drop form builder, customizable templates, and seamless integrations. With SureForms, you can build contact forms, surveys, registration forms, and more—all without writing a single line of code.
Key Features:
Drag & Drop Form Builder: Design complex forms with an intuitive interface.
Customizable Templates: Start quickly with a variety of pre-built form templates.
Advanced Form Fields: Utilize conditional logic, file uploads, and multi-step forms.
Seamless Integrations: Connect with popular email marketing services and CRM tools.
Manage All Your WordPress Sites from One Central Dashboard Effortlessly!
MainWP is a powerful WordPress management plugin that allows you to control multiple WordPress sites from a single, secure dashboard. Ideal for developers, agencies, and businesses managing numerous websites, it offers advanced features like plugin and theme management, backup scheduling, security scans, and more. With MainWP, you can save time, enhance security, and streamline your workflow without any hassle.
Key Features:
Centralized Management: Control all your WordPress sites from one intuitive dashboard.
Automated Updates: Easily update WordPress core, plugins, and themes across all sites.
Scheduled Backups: Secure your data with automated backup schedules for all your websites.
Security Monitoring: Keep your sites safe with vulnerability checks and security scans.
Simplify Appointment Scheduling with an Intuitive Booking Plugin!
LatePoint is a powerful WordPress appointment booking plugin designed to streamline your scheduling process. Ideal for businesses like salons, spas, clinics, and consultants, it offers a user-friendly interface with advanced features such as automated notifications, calendar integrations, and online payments. With LatePoint, you can manage appointments effortlessly, enhance customer satisfaction, and grow your business—all without any coding skills.
Key Features:
Easy Setup Wizard: Get started quickly with a simple and intuitive setup process.
Online Payments: Accept payments seamlessly through popular gateways like PayPal and Stripe.
Agent Management: Assign appointments to staff members and manage their schedules efficiently.
Customizable Booking Forms: Tailor the booking experience to match your brand and services.
Create Beautiful, Responsive Tables for Your WordPress Site Effortlessly!
Ninja Tables is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to help you build and manage dynamic, responsive tables with ease. Ideal for bloggers, businesses, and developers, it offers an intuitive interface with advanced features like drag-and-drop table building, front-end editing, and seamless integration with popular plugins. With Ninja Tables, you can display your data in a clean, organized manner—all without writing a single line of code.
Key Features:
Easy Table Creation: Build tables quickly with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.
Responsive Design: Ensure your tables look great on all devices, from desktops to mobiles.
Advanced Customization: Customize table styles, colors, and features to match your brand.
Seamless Integrations: Connect with Google Sheets, WooCommerce, and other popular plugins.
Boost Your Affiliate Earnings with the Ultimate Amazon Affiliate Plugin!
AAWP is a powerful WordPress plugin designed specifically for Amazon affiliates. Ideal for bloggers, marketers, and niche website owners, it helps you showcase Amazon products on your site effectively, increasing click-through rates and boosting commissions. With AAWP, you can create product boxes, bestseller lists, and comparison tables—all automatically updated and customizable to match your site’s design.
Key Features:
Dynamic Product Displays: Showcase Amazon products with customizable product boxes and lists.
Automatic Updates: Keep product information up-to-date automatically, including prices and discounts.
Geotargeting Support: Redirect visitors to their local Amazon store to maximize conversions.
Responsive Design: Ensure product displays look great on all devices, from desktops to mobiles.
SureTriggers is a powerful automation plugin for WordPress that connects your favorite apps and plugins to streamline your workflows. Ideal for bloggers, entrepreneurs, and developers, it allows you to create complex automations without writing a single line of code. With SureTriggers, you can save time, boost productivity, and focus on what matters most—growing your business.
Key Features:
Easy Automation Builder: Set up workflows with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
Extensive Integrations: Connect with popular plugins and external apps seamlessly.
Real-time Triggers: Automate tasks instantly as events occur on your site.
Detailed Analytics: Monitor and optimize your automations with comprehensive reports.
Enhance Your WordPress Videos with a Powerful, User-Friendly Player!
Presto Player is an innovative video plugin for WordPress that elevates your website’s video experience. Perfect for content creators, educators, and marketers, it offers advanced features like customizable video players, engagement analytics, and seamless integration with popular video hosting platforms. With Presto Player, you can deliver high-quality video content and engage your audience more effectively without any technical hassle.
Key Features:
Customizable Player: Personalize the video player to match your brand.
Seamless Integrations: Supports YouTube, Vimeo, and self-hosted videos effortlessly.
Engagement Analytics: Monitor viewer interactions and video performance.
Marketing Tools: Add calls-to-action and email opt-ins directly within videos.
Having a well-designed, functional website helps you reach a broader audience, build credibility, and connect meaningfully with customers or followers. In today’s digital-first world, your website is often the first impression you make, and right now is the time to make it count.
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There are many reasons a website is important. Let’s take a look at three that impact the relationship you can build with your audience:
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User experience
Your WordPress.com website gives you full control over how people experience your brand. A well-organized site not only sets the right tone but also makes it easy for visitors to find what they need, continuing to build trust and showing your commitment to a positive experience.
Accessibility and convenience
The internet never closes or sleeps. With a website, your audience has 24/7 access to everything you offer—any time, from anywhere.
Putting your audience first is essential to your success.
This is why our Black Friday sale is about so much more than the 25% savings you’ll receive on the first year of any new, annual hosting plan.
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What’s possible on WordPress.com
WordPress is a powerful and flexible website building platform, and WordPress.com gives you that functionality alongside powerful, secure, and scalable managed hosting. Whether you want a simple blog, a complex eCommerce store, or anything in-between, WordPress.com is the right hosting platform for you.
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How to unlock powerful WordPress hosting
Ready to get started with WordPress.com? We thought you might be.
Click the button below to learn more about each of our plans, choose the right plan for you, and purchase your discounted hosting plan. Your 25% off discount will apply automatically at checkout.
For sure. You can transfer or connect your domain and we can guide you on the steps as needed.
Can I migrate an existing site?
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Is this offer available on renewals or upgrades?
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How do renewals work?
Our Black Friday offer gives you a 25% discount off the first year of your hosting plan. Our annual plans automatically renew 30-days prior to your expiry date at the regular full price.
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When you’re building a WordPress website, there are some essential elements you likely want to include, such as a contact form. However, limiting your use of forms to your contact page is a missed opportunity to increase leads, boost engagement, and enhance the overall user experience (UX) on your site.
There are many ways you can use forms on your WordPress site beyond providing visitors with a contact method. From collecting user feedback to generating leads and expanding your mailing list, forms offer dynamic and convenient ways to drive conversions.
In this post, we’ll start by discussing the role forms play in WordPress and how they can help you collect valuable information. Then we’ll introduce you to eight creative ways to use them on your site with some tips for making them effective.
Note: We’ve saved the most surprising ways for the end, so keep reading!
An introduction to using forms on your WordPress site
When most people think of website forms, they likely think of contact forms. These simple, embedded features let your visitors enter basic information to get in touch with you:
However, the use of online forms extends far beyond contact points. These documents allow you to easily and conveniently collect a wide variety of information from users and visitors directly from your website. You can also use them across other channels such as email and social media.
Website forms are beneficial because they provide straightforward ways of collecting lead-generating data that you can store and use in the future. Therefore, forms are essential tools to help you with marketing, sales, and promotions.
Another benefit of using forms on your WordPress site is that creating and embedding them is quick and easy. There are several plugins you can use to build forms if you require different functionality.
Six creative examples of forms you can create right now
Now that we understand more about the role forms play in websites, let’s look at their different use cases. Below are six creative ways to use forms on your WordPress site, aside from your contact page.
1. Run fun contests and giveaways
Running contests and giveaways on your website is an excellent way to boost engagement. Giving away freebies can help promote your brand and spread awareness about specific products and offerings.
To make it as simple as possible for your customers to enter the contest, you can use an embedded or pop-up form to collect their information, such as names and email addresses:
This form provides you with customer contact information that you can use for future campaigns. People will be more likely to hand over their details when they know they have a chance to win something in return.
2. Register users for memberships and events
If you run a membership site or host events, you can use website forms to make user registration a breeze:
You can also utilize them for event registration, such as an upcoming webinar. Like a giveaway, this can be an effective lead-generation technique because you’re giving users something in exchange for their contact details.
3. Conduct user and reader surveys
Curious to know what your readers or customers think about a topic? Use a questionnaire and find out! You can easily create a poll or survey using Crowdsignal, our service for creating surveys and polls. Get started with a free account and learn how to set it up:
You can also effortlessly capture insights from your audience by creating a simple poll using the Poll block:
4. Let users sign up for your mailing list
Email marketing is a powerful way to grow your audience, expand brand awareness, and increase engagement. However, figuring out how to grow your subscriber list can be challenging.
One way to expand your subscriber list is by embedding a newsletter signup form on your website. It lets you easily capture the email addresses of your visitors:
One of the benefits of signup forms is that there are so many different areas you can place them. For example, you can insert them in the header or footer of your website. This placement ensures the forms are easily accessible no matter which pages your users are on.
You can also use forms as exit-intent pop-ups. For example, as visitors are about to leave your website, you can have the signup form appear with a convenient Call To Action (CTA).
5. Enable applicants to apply for jobs
Recruiting and hiring new talent is a staple in any successful business. However, the application process you use can influence the number of applicants and the quality.
Today, many job seekers want a quick and convenient way to apply to jobs they’re interested in. To make the process as convenient as possible for your prospects, you can add a form on your website that enables potential employees to apply to open positions:
You can embed these forms directly below the job descriptions. Plus, you can enable applicants to attach documents, such as resumes and cover letters. This feature eliminates the number of steps users must complete to submit their information for different positions.
Using a form also helps you keep all the necessary information of applicants in one place for easy access. This can streamline the vetting process and, ultimately, help you find the most qualified applicants.
6. “Name It!” campaign – involve users in product decisions
Raise your hand if you’ve ever eagerly suggested a name for someone’s new puppy, or your local zoo’s newborn giraffe. Users love feeling useful, so give them a fun job. Create a form that allows visitors to suggest a name for your latest product or mascot. An entire viral campaign can sometimes emerge simply from a “name this” campaign.
Be forewarned that if you let your audience name something, the results might get a little bit silly. Source: BBC
A few simple tips for creating effective website forms
Once you decide to create a particular type of website form, the next step is to build it. As we mentioned earlier, there are various tools you can use to do so.
However, regardless of which plugin you use to create your forms, there are some essential tips to keep in mind to ensure effectiveness. For example:
Keep things simple. Only include the necessary information to keep the forms as brief and concise as possible. Otherwise, you risk overwhelming users and reducing the likelihood of completing the form.
Minimize the amount of typing involved. In most cases, your customers won’t want to spend considerable time filling out lengthy responses to form questions. Therefore, it’s a smart idea to include multiple choice answers when possible (and where applicable).
Provide clear instructions. To make your forms as effective as possible, it’s vital to ensure that users understand what you’re asking and how to complete the fields correctly. You might consider adding example answers to demonstrate the type of responses you’re looking for.
Best practices for creating website forms vary based on the type you’re building and what your end goal is. However, it’s crucial to prioritize the UX to make the data collection process quick and effortless for your customers.
What will you do with forms next?
Most website owners understand the importance of including contact forms on their websites. However, many overlook the various ways that forms can help drive conversions and generate leads.
As discussed in this post, you can use plenty of strategies to get creative with your forms. For example, you can use them to register users for events, conduct user surveys, let visitors sign up for your mailing list, and offer a seamless way to apply for jobs.
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