WordPress.com

• Reputation
• Plan Options
• Analyzing Tools

Reputation

Wordpress.com is the standard for website publishing platforms, known by almost all on the web, and used by plenty more. Wordpress offers a few different options for plans, and the prices are pretty standard, about $24/monthly for their business plan.

Layered Technologies offers the hosting for the company, and the data centers are state-of-the-art. The average uptime is 99.88 percent, great for a company of its size. Over the past ten years WordPress has helped millions of people quickly build and publish their websites.

Plan options

One of the services that they many of their customers take advantage of is their free plan. This plan offers customers free hosting, a wordpress.com address (free sub-domain in other words), 3GB of storage, and access to all of the free and premium templates. This plan is a great start-up plan for any customer to use to quickly get their business on the internet.

It is fully possible for the customer to create a professional, modern-looking website that has many features their visitors would need or want through this free package.

Some customers may never need any other functions or services in the lifetime of their website, but others might expand enough that they need a little more from WordPress. This is easily fixed as the customer can upgrade to either of the other plans at any time.

These other plans allow the customers to add features like custom domains, more storage and eCommerce tools. These plans are also very affordable for the customers, with just a yearly fee of $99 or $299. That is a reasonable price for the services and support available to these members.

Analyzing tools

Many website building companies offer their customers access to Google Analytics to help them track the traffic to their website. This is an important function as the customer can see patterns from their visitors, like times of day or types of posts that drive more traffic, and then utilize that information to bring more business to their website.

WordPress offers these analyzing tools right on their dashboard for any member. When a customer logs into their account they can see trends in visitors over the course of the day, week, month or year. They can track which pages had visitors and even where the visitors came from. This is another feature that makes the WordPress free package so popular.

• Pricing
• Targeted
• Accessibility of Commerce Tools
• Limitations

Pricing

WordPress is efficient and effective, this is partly why there prices is a lot higher than most all website builders. Wordpress's high pricing is the companies biggest downfall in our ranking criteria in the overall picture.

They also are designed and built for more of the advanced web designers and users. Though, once you understand how to operate WordPress it is a good interface for almost all users.

Targeted

One of the greatest things about Wordpress in comparison to the other companies is its main target audience for bloggers and blog site building. But this also takes away from the well-rounded features that other web builders have for working with any business or personal website design.

Please note that with WordPress it can be designed for any type of work, hence one reason why they have the highest amount of sites powered on the web, but consumers need to know what they are doing.

Accessibility of commerce tools

One thing to point out is that the commerce tools that are offered are not as easily accessible as other website builders. WordPress does not offer any eCommerce tools exclusively through their platform. They have partnered with three third party plug-ins, (Shopifiy, Ecwid, and Gumroad), to bring these features to their customers.

While these plug-ins bring a good variety of tools, they come at an additional cost to the customer. It might also make things more complicated for the customer to have to go through another company for part of their website maintenance. At the moment, all email customer support is only available to the Premium and Business paying customers.

This has not always been the case but a backlog of support issues has made them reduce the number of customers who can use this feature in order to keep up better.

Limitations

Any customer can access their community forums and Frequently Asked Questions pages in order to try to find the answers they need. The community forum is filled with articles about common actions and questions, as well as discussion boards for members to help answer each others' questions.