The cheapest real year in the category
A working website means your own domain and no advertising sold against your visitors. Priced that way, WordPress.com Personal is $48 for twelve months, and nothing else in our comparison comes close.
Framer is next at $120, two and a half times the money. Wix is $204. Shopify is $348. Personal includes a free custom domain for the first year and removes the advertising WordPress.com shows on free sites.
Read the billing toggle before you compare anything, because the same plan carries four rates. Personal is $9 a month billed monthly and $4 billed yearly, with two and three year terms cheaper again. Every figure on this site is the yearly rate.
It scores 8.2 under how we rate, the highest of the seven, and it is our Best Value pick rather than our overall one. The reason is in the fourth section.
The plugin rule most guides still get wrong
If you have read anything else about WordPress.com, you have read that plugins require the Business plan. That is $300 a year.
It is no longer true. The WordPress.com pricing page lists "Extend your site with WordPress plugins" as a feature of the Personal plan, and answers the question directly in its own FAQ. So the thing everybody treats as the reason to skip the cheap tiers is available on the $48 one, a difference of about two hundred and fifty dollars a year.
What Business still buys is SFTP and database access, meaning the ability to run your own code and work on the site the way a developer would. That is a real difference and it is not what most people are being sold the plan for.
WordPress.com is not WordPress, and it matters
Two things share a name and confuse everybody.
WordPress is free software. Anyone can download it and run it on any host. WordPress.com is Automattic running that software for you, on a subscription, with the awkward parts handled.
Why this matters more here than anywhere else on the page: it is the only platform in this comparison where outgrowing the product does not mean rebuilding. Export your content, install WordPress somewhere else, and the themes and plugins you were using still work. Wix offers no export at all. Squarespace offers a partial one that leaves the design behind. Webflow sells export as a second subscription and excludes your CMS content from it.
That is why it scores second of the seven on scalability, behind only Shopify, which scales in a completely different direction. Of the platforms here you would actually use to make a website, nothing else comes close, and it is worth more than any feature on this page.
The editor, which is what you are paying with
Now the reason this is not our overall pick.
The block editor is the hardest thing in this comparison for somebody who has never built a website. It is not drag-and-drop. Blocks stack, settings live in panels that change depending on what you selected, and getting a layout to look the way you pictured it takes longer than it does in Wix by a wide margin.
That is a real cost and we are not going to dress it up. If you want to drag a box across a page and be finished by lunchtime, Wix costs more than four times as much and is worth it. If you spend a weekend learning an editor instead, you save over a hundred and fifty dollars a year against Wix and get the largest theme and plugin ecosystem in existence.
The free plan, for completeness, puts you on a wordpress.com subdomain and shows WordPress.com advertising to your visitors. Like every free plan on this page, it is a way to try the editor rather than a way to have a website.
Who should buy it
Buy Personal at $48 if you want a real site cheaply and you are prepared to learn the editor. It is the best money on this page and the plugin change makes it better than most comparisons think.
Buy Business at $300 only if you need SFTP, SSH and Git, which is a developer's requirement and not a plugin one.
This is not a first drag-and-drop builder and it does not try to be. It is also not the place to run a shop: Commerce is $540 and Shopify does that job better for less. What it is, at forty eight dollars, is the most website anybody on this page will sell you for the money, and the only one that will still be yours if you leave.
Prices, plan contents and the plugin availability rule on this page were read from the vendor pricing page and support documentation on .
