WordPress.com

WordPress.com is a managed hosting service and website creation platform owned and operated by Automattic, and founded in 2005 by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg. It provides a hosted alternative to self-installing WordPress, enabling users — including individuals, small businesses, agencies, and nonprofit organizations — to build blogs, portfolios, business sites, and online stores without managing server infrastructure.

Although WordPress.com and the self-hosted WordPress.org software use the same underlying codebase, they differ in hosting model. WordPress.org provides software for independent hosting, while WordPress.com delivers a managed service.

WordPress.com offers tiered plans, from a free entry option to paid subscriptions, with features such as custom domains, ecommerce tools, plugin and theme access, developer interfaces (including SFTP, SSH, and GitHub integration), design customization, and an AI website builder. The platform manages hosting, performance optimization, security, backups, and software updates, and operates on a global network of data centers with content delivery, automated scaling, redundancy, malware scanning, and DDoS protection. The service hosts millions of sites and receives over 409 million unique visitors per month across more than 20 billion page views.

History

WordPress.com was launched in 2005 as part of Automattic’s effort to make WordPress accessible to a wider audience by providing a fully hosted option. The initial release offered basic blogging tools, with later expansions introducing custom domains, premium themes, ecommerce functionality, and developer features. Over time, WordPress.com evolved from a blogging platform into a multi-purpose website builder and powerful hosting solution, supporting a broad range of site types and user needs.