WordPress is the most popular content management system on the planet, with over 35.2% of websites running on it.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system, or CMS for short, that helps bloggers and webmasters edit content on a regular basis without the need to use a traditional HTML editor software, for example, Dreamweaver or Frontpage. If you don’t even know what are those, consider yourself lucky.

WordPress itself is an open source software licensed under GPLv2 which means it’s free to use and free to modify. WordPress.org is the self-hosted version, that you can run on your own servers or purchase a hosting package from one of the numerous web hosting companies.

The benefit of a self-hosted blog is that webmasters have access to the code behind their site, as well as the roughly 56,000 free plugins and 2,500 themes that are listed on the official repository (WordPress.org) – and even more from commercial sources.