What is a WordPress?
Updated March 2025
At its core, WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog. In fact, as of 2025, WordPress powers over 43.6% of all the websites on the Internet or 62% of all custom-coded content management system (CMS) sites. Yes! more than one in four websites that you visit are likely powered by WordPress.
A content management system is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website – like content – without needing to know anything about programming.
Lots of well-known entities use WordPress including:
On a slightly more technical level, WordPress is an open-source content management system licensed under GPLv2, which means that anyone can use or modify the WordPress software for free.
Many years ago, WordPress was primarily a tool to create a blog, rather than more traditional websites. That hasn’t been true for a long time, though. Nowadays, thanks to changes to the core code, as well as WordPress’ massive ecosystem of plugins and themes, you can create any type of website with WordPress. With WordPress, you can create:
- Business websites
- eCommerce stores
- Blogs
- Portfolios sites
- Resumes
- Forums
- Social networks
- Membership sites
WordPress.org vs WordPress.com
WordPress was created as a standalone open source project all the way back in 2003, by a collaboration between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Since then, Matt Mullenweg has largely become the face of WordPress and was the founder of Automattic, which is the company behind the for-profit WordPress.com service
- WordPress.org, often called self-hosted WordPress, is the free, open-source WordPress software that you can install on your own web host to create a website that’s 100% your own.
- WordPress.com is a for-profit, paid service that is powered by the WordPress.org software. It’s simple to use, but you lose much of the flexibility of the self-hosted WordPress.
Most of the time, when people say “WordPress”, they mean the self-hosted WordPress available at WordPress.org. If you want to truly own your website, self-hosted WordPress.org is almost always the best option.
WordPress is that is Extensible
If you aren’t a developer, you can easily modify your website thanks to WordPress’ huge ecosystem of themes and plugins:
- Plugins – these primarily change how your website functions.
- Themes – these primarily change how your website looks.
Popular Websites Powered by WordPress
These examples show that WordPress isn’t just for small blogs—it’s powerful enough for large, high-traffic websites used by global organizations. At the same time, it remains simple enough for beginners, which is why it’s the most widely used CMS in the world.
| Website Name | Industry / Category | Website Link |
| The White House | Government | whitehouse.gov |
| NASA | Science & Space | nasa.gov |
| The Walt Disney Company | Entertainment | thewaltdisneycompany.com |
| Sony Music | Music & Media | sonymusic.com |
| TechCrunch | Technology News | techcrunch.com |
| Rolling Stone | Culture & Music | rollingstone.com |
| PlayStation Blog | Gaming News | blog.playstation.com |
| Harvard University | Education | harvard.edu |
| Vogue | Fashion & Lifestyle | vogue.com |
| Microsoft News | Corporate News | news.microsoft.com |
| Spotify Newsroom | Music Streaming News | newsroom.spotify.com |
| TED Blog | Ideas & Education | blog.ted.com |
| Angry Birds | Gaming & Apps | angrybirds.com |
| The New York Post | News & Media | nypost.com |
| Mercedes-Benz | Automotive | mercedes-benz.com |