What is WordPress? At its core, WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog. In fact, WordPress powers over half of all the websites on the Internet.

On a slightly more technical level, WordPress is an open-source content management system licensed under GPLv2, which means that anyone can use or modify the WordPress software for free. A content management system is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website – like content – without needing to know anything about programming. The end result is that WordPress makes building a website accessible to anyone – even people who aren’t developers.

What Kinds Of Websites Can WordPress Make?

Many years ago, WordPress was primarily a tool to create a blog, rather than more traditional websites. That hasn’t been true for a long time, though. Nowadays, thanks to changes to the core code, as well as WordPress’ massive ecosystem of plugins and themes, you can create any type of website with WordPress. For example, not only does WordPress power a huge number of business sites and blogs, it’s also the most popular way to create an eCommerce store as well! With WordPress, you can create:

• Business websites
• eCommerce stores
• Blogs
• Portfolios
• Resumes
• Forums
• Social networks
• Membership sites
• …pretty much anything else you can dream up.

What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? 

• WordPress.org, often called self-hosted WordPress, is the free, open-source WordPress software that you can install on your own web host to create a website that’s 100% your own.
• WordPress.com is a for-profit, paid service that is powered by the WordPress.org software. It’s simple to use, but you lose much of the flexibility of the self-hosted WordPress.

Most of the time, when people say “WordPress”, they mean the self-hosted WordPress available at WordPress.org. If you want to truly own your website, self-hosted WordPress.org is almost always the best option.

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a ‘software as a service’ (‘SaaS’) website builder — you pay a monthly fee to use it, but everything you need to build and maintain your site is provided as part of that, including

• templates
• a content management system (CMS)
• hosting
• e-commerce features
• support
• a domain name (if needed).

Recently, a built-in email marketing tool, ‘Squarespace Email Campaigns’ was also added to the feature set, further emphasising this ‘all-in-one’ approach. The main idea behind Squarespace is that it’s a ‘code-free’ solution that makes it possible to construct and edit a website without needing to go near any CSS or HTML.

Who are Squarespace and WordPress aimed at?

It’s probably fair to say that Squarespace’s core audience is comprised of users without web development skills. As mentioned above, the key idea behind Squarespace is that anyone can use the platform to make their own website, without needing to code at all. This leads to a ‘walled garden’ approach, where everything is very tightly locked down in order to:

• create a user-friendly interface
• avoid scenarios where Squarespace users manage to ‘break’ an aspect of their site
• preserve the quality of the templates.
• Like Squarespace, WordPress can also cater for users without web development skills — it is certainly possible to create and maintain a WordPress site without resorting to coding.

In many cases, more configuration of WordPress is needed before you can publish a website —  setting up a WordPress site involves a steeper learning curve. Due to its open-source nature, WordPress is also geared towards another audience: users who wish to use the platform to create an extensively-customised website with significantly more functionality that is available from Squarespace.