How to Choose the Right Free WordPress Hosting Service
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) that’s been around for more than a decade and continues to grow in popularity every year. The system is extremely flexible and can be used to create almost any type of website you might want. Thanks to its active community and countless plugins available, there are no limits to what you can do with WordPress. If you’re looking for a free blogging platform, you’ve come to the right place.
The Pros And Cons Of Free WordPress Hosting
While WordPress is a fantastic choice when it comes to blogging, it is important to understand the limitations and consequences of using the platform. First, let’s talk about the pros:
- It’s free
- It’s incredibly easy to use
- It’s highly customisable
- There’s a large community supporting it
On the other hand, WordPress has its disadvantages, which include:
- It’s not as secure as some of the more advanced CMSs
- The performance can be quite low
- It doesn’t come with a lot of pre-installed features
- There are limits to how much you can customise it
If you’re looking for a simple self-hosted blogging platform that you can simply update yourself, WordPress is a great choice. However, if you want a more sophisticated platform that offers a lot of features, you might want to consider going with a premium plan.
Security And Performance Issues
One of the big selling points of WordPress is how easy it is to install and set up. Regardless of whether you’re doing it yourself or hiring a web developer, the setup process usually only takes a couple of hours. And thanks to its incredibly active community, there are hundreds of people available to help you at any time with any issue you might have.
On the security front, WordPress sites are usually very secure because the CMS takes care of most of the heavy lifting when it comes to securing your content. Thanks to its popularity, there are already a lot of good plugins that handle all the security for you, so it’s just a matter of installing them and configuring them properly. The flipside is that while WordPress is a very secure platform, it’s also one of the most popular ones, meaning there’s always the risk that your site might get hacked. And when that happens, your content is at risk of being leaked or changed without permission.
Features
One of the things that make WordPress so popular is how much it can do. If you have a specific feature in mind that you’d like to see on your blog, there’s a good chance that it already exists and you can simply download it and use it on your site. Thanks to the platform’s modular design and huge community, new features are being added all the time and existing ones are being enhanced and expanded upon.
For instance, WordPress 5.0 introduced text shaping features that allow you to experiment with different fonts, sizes, and colours for your content. With the 5.0 release, WordPress grew its markdown editing feature from rudimentary to sophisticated, enabling you to use more complex formatting and ensure that your posts and pages are easy to read and navigate.
Additionally, WordPress has always offered a very basic social media integration feature, enabling you to link social media accounts (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, and Google+) to your site. Now, with the release of WordPress 5.0, this integration has been improved upon, with the addition of new features like Instagram posts, video embeds, and more.
Updates
As we’ve already covered, WordPress is an open-source project that, like most other projects of its kind, is constantly being updated and improved upon by the developers that create it. In fact, as this project belongs to the community, anyone can contribute, meaning that new features and fixes are being added all the time and the entire community is helping to keep things running smoothly. This way, if you have an account with WordPress, you’re always guaranteed to be running the latest version of the software and all the updates that come with it.
Advantages
Although it has some disadvantages, we should point out that WordPress has several advantages. One of the biggest is that it’s exceptionally easy to use. As we’ve already discussed, WordPress is very well suited for newcomers to the web, as it makes setting up a basic blog extremely easy and accessible. More experienced webmasters can use the software to create incredibly sophisticated websites with all the bells and whistles imaginable.
Disadvantages
As we discussed above, there are several disadvantages to using WordPress. One of the biggest is that it doesn’t come with a lot of features. While we’d all like to see a fully fledged CRM integrated into our blogging platforms, the reality is that many people simply don’t need all of that functionality. For these people, WordPress is still a good option, as it’s free, but it might lack the features that they’re looking for.
Another disadvantage of WordPress is that it doesn’t offer a lot of security. Since it’s such a popular platform and since it’s open source, it’s always a target for hackers and malware writers who want to make money off of unsuspecting users. As we’ve already seen, although WordPress is a very secure platform, it’s not exactly bullet-proof when it comes to security. This is mainly due to the fact that the platform lacks many features that could have made it more secure.
Recommendations
Based on everything we’ve discussed above, it’s easy to see why WordPress is one of the best free WordPress hosting services available. It’s extremely popular, easy to use, and gives you full control over your content. While it doesn’t have all the features that some people might be looking for, it’s still a good option for those who don’t need all of that functionality.