If you have a website or are planning to create one, you have probably already heard the word WordPress. And it is no accident – WordPress powers 43.5 percent of all websites on the internet (W3Techs, 2026). That is approximately 605 million sites – from personal blogs to corporate portals of BBC, Bloomberg and TechCrunch. With a 62.7 percent share of the CMS platform market, WordPress is the undisputed leader – almost ten times larger than the second one (Shopify with 6.4 percent).
WordPress is a free open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and working with MySQL/MariaDB databases. The platform was created in 2003 and is developed by a global community of developers under GPLv2 license. This means anyone can use, modify and distribute it for free. WordPress is not just a blogging tool – today it builds corporate websites, online stores, portfolios, landing pages, educational platforms, forums and web applications.
In this article we will explain what WordPress is in simple terms, how it works, what it can be used for, how much it costs, what are its advantages and disadvantages and why it is the preferred choice for businesses of all sizes.
