Goal
Understand what WordPress is, why people keep recommending it, and why it is at the bottom of my list.
Audience
Anyone who has been told “just use WordPress” and wants to know if that advice is any good for them.
Process
Read this before you sink a weekend into it. Then probably pick something else.
Why this page exists
WordPress is on this list because somebody is going to tell you to use it, and you deserve to know why I am not recommending it. It is not a bad tool. It is a tool built for a different job than the one you have.
A Common Point of Confusion
There are two WordPresses, and mixing them up is the source of most WordPress misery.
WordPress.com is a hosted service, like Squarespace. You sign up, they run it, you pay for plans. The free tier is very limited and a custom domain costs money.
WordPress.org is free software that you have to install on hosting you rent and maintain yourself. It is free and yours, and it is a lot of work.
When someone says “WordPress is free,” they mean the second one, and they are quietly not counting hosting, updates, security, and the weekend you will lose.
Recommendation
I have used it. I always found it harder than it should be, and I checked before writing this: it has not gotten meaningfully easier. The block editor is better than it was. The rest of it, themes, plugins, updates, hosting, security, is still a part-time job.
Here is the thing: WordPress is built to manage lots of content that changes often. A blog with a thousand posts. A news site. A store. That is what all that machinery is for.
A design portfolio is eight projects that barely change. You are buying a freight train to carry a backpack. Everything you would fight WordPress to achieve, you could get faster from Adobe Portfolio, or Squarespace, or by building it yourself.
When WordPress actually is the right answer
- You want to write. A lot. Regularly. WordPress is still excellent at blogging, and a design blog is a real career asset.
- You are going into agency work where clients run WordPress and you will have to touch it anyway. Then learning it is career skill, not portfolio strategy. Learn it on someone else’s dime.
- You need something complicated: memberships, courses, a real store, multiple authors.
None of those describe a graduating design student building a portfolio. If one of them describes you, go for it, with clear eyes.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Enormously powerful. It can eventually do anything.
- Huge ecosystem of themes and plugins.
- A real, marketable professional skill. Agencies still run client sites on it.
- Self-hosted, it is truly yours. No platform can shut you off.
- Best-in-class for actual blogging.
Cons
- Two different products with the same name. Endless confusion.
- Themes, plugins, updates, hosting, and security all become your problem.
- Steep learning curve that buys you very little a portfolio needs.
- Custom domain costs money on WordPress.com.
- Plugin conflicts break sites, usually at the worst time.
- It is the wrong shape for the job. Too much machine for eight projects.
Resources
- wordpress.com · the hosted, paid one
- wordpress.org · the free software you host yourself
- Go back and pick something else · seriously, for a portfolio, almost anything here is a better fit
Platforms change their plans and their menus constantly. If a step here does not match what you see on screen, tell me and I will fix the page.