(Originally Posted in February 2023)

WordPress started as a blogging tool in 2004, and has since evolved into a website builder used by at least 40% of all websites today. WordPress comes in two forms. The original tool, WordPress.org, is open source and allows maximum customizability. The commercial tool, WordPress.com, is not as customizable but is easier to use. Both are widely used today. In the present post, I will review the original tool, WordPress.org.

Using WordPress.org feels like operating the control room of a large ship. When adding content to a WordPress website, you first enter the URL for your site and then add an extra extension to it. Next, it will prompt you for your login credentials and, after entering them, you are presented with an editable form of your site. In this editable form, there is a dashboard. With this dashboard, you can create pages and make blog posts, install plugins, and improve your SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization), which helps make a website appealing to search engines.

I had some rough material for tutoring calculus that I wrote in LaTeX (a typesetting program wildly popular with academics). With some powerful plugins, I was able to turn that material into a polished website. One of these plugins enabled me to use LaTeX. Another of these plugins arranged my website according to a preset layout and provided a search bar to make navigating my website easier.

Some setup is required to use WordPress.org; this requirement can be quite challenging. I had to learn about hosting services and domain names before setting up my calculus tutorial website. WordPress.org does not have a hosting service, so I had to find one that supported WordPress. I ended up choosing DreamHost as my hosting service and the domain name came free. However, not all hosting services give you a free domain name. In such a case, you must use domain name registrars to get one.

My experience without WordPress was very different. Before I used WordPress, I built another website from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JS, which took around a month. I controlled almost every detail of the site layout, from how buttons were placed to how to control page transitions. I even wrote JS code to add scrollbars that generated text.

But, compared to using WordPress, adding content to the non-WordPress website was also very time consuming. I would watch myself add more and more code to my CSS file as I made my website layout more responsive to different screen sizes. I would repeatedly experiment with and tweak my files to make the page transitions between pages as smooth as possible.

There was also the task of displaying the math formulas. My non-WordPress website is a math tutorial website for developers. So I wanted to use LaTeX. To achieve this, I wrote HTML and JS code, with the help of MathJax tools and some MathJax documentation, to properly display and render these math formulas and make them responsive to different screen sizes.

And I had to host my non-WordPress website. To do this, I used GitHub pages, a free hosting service that works very well with static non-WordPress sites. Using this service requires using a GitHub repository, so I used Git techniques whenever I needed to make changes of any kind to my website.

Having made the above comparison, I find that WordPress is an efficient tool with many very useful standardized features. I think WordPress is great for users. Compared to using HTML, CSS, and JS, using wordpress.org gives users more opportunities to focus on writing content while retaining control over the website’s general setup (such as choosing a hosting service).