Dadaist

• Designed for: Research Projects and Archives
• Also great for: Blogs, Digital Zines and Magazines, News, Advocacy

Dadaism pushed the boundaries of what was considered art with absurdism and flair – with Dadaist, you too can reject the boring linearity and blank spaces of common web design. Dadaist hearkens back to a different era of handmade collages, irregular lines, and bold color pairings, giving you a one-of-a-kind website that embraces the best of both digital and print design. 

With posts organized into an assemblage-inspired feed, this theme is a great choice for sharing research collections or blog posts. You can add additional pages, like an About or Contact page, in the main header while the subheader is a perfect place to separate your content into multiple collections using tags. A boldly designed subscription block dominates the footer, making it easy for your followers to sign up to receive new content directly in their inbox.

Koinonia

• Designed for: Non-Profits and Community-Driven Projects
• Also great for: Political Campaigns, Advocacy Organizations

Put your mission front and center with Koinoia, a theme built to support NPOs through advocacy, community engagement, and donations. Koinonia is clean and modern, ensuring that your organization’s digital home feels both reputable and professional for visitors old and new. Use your homepage to share your value proposition, mission statement, and additional content to help visitors quickly understand who you serve and what you offer the community. 

With high readability and easy navigation, supporters can find everything they need, whether they want to join your network of volunteers through a built-in form, browse your community’s service offerings, or make a well-deserved online donation (tip: many digital payment processors offer discounted rates for non-profits).

Kentwood

• Designed for: Learning Institutions
• Also great for: Summer Camps, Sports and Hobby Leagues 

At a busy institution, you need to handle questions and resources for a variety of stakeholders, from current staff and students to potential families. With Kentwood, you can ensure you are building a professional and reputable digital brand that meets a family’s needs, from their first visit through graduation.

With two layers of navigation, students and staff can quickly link out to academic resources without compromising space for in-depth information for current and prospective families. Your homepage highlights your brand with custom photography and blog updates while additional pages give you ample space for well-organized long-form content. No matter where they land, families will be impressed with your institution’s plethora of resources.

Professio

• Designed for: Teachers and Tutors
• Also great for: Speakers, Coaches, City Guides

Professio allows private teachers and tutors to create a digital hub for current and potential students. With a simple but visually impactful two-tone theme available in three color waves, it’s you can quickly build a design-forward website for your teaching business. With Professio’s pre-built homepage blocks, you can quickly introduce your services, answer FAQs, and build credibility with downloadable materials, blog posts, and testimonials. Once prospective students are ready to book a course, they can sign up digitally via a form or email. 

Whatever you need to grow your teaching business, Professio can scale beautifully so that you can focus on what matters most: your students.

Streamer

• Designed for: Gamers, Streamers, and Esports Personalities
• Also great for: Bloggers, Podcasters

With black and neon color palettes and futuristic fonts, Streamer brings gamer vibes right out of the box. With Streamer, you control your content in one central location: share exclusive team updates, rep your sponsors, create custom content, or upload a complete library of your Videos On Demand directly on WordPress. Cross-platform fans can become subscribers to get your fully-branded content directly in their inbox.

Got merch? With WooCommerce for Spotify, you can sell personalized products directly on your Streamer website.

Vueo

• Designed for: Digital Portfolios
• Also great for: Bakeries, Microbreweries, Product-Forward Brick & Mortars

When you’re a visual creator, you want your images to take center stage. With Veuo’s full-width image gallery, your homepage will feel like a bespoke, archival experience. A neutral color palette and unobtrusive text ensure that your artistic style, not the template, defines your website’s ultimate look and feel. When viewers click on an image, they can see it in higher resolution alongside any additional information you’d like to provide. Have multiple oeuvres or themes within your portfolio? Automatically create clickable subcollection pages with tags. 

Add your bio or artist statement alongside social media links in your footer, making it easy for fans and potential collectors to follow along on your creative journey. Whatever your style, you can be sure that Vueo will let your work shine.

Ready to try out a new look for your website in 2025? You can explore these themes further by clicking on the Preview link and then clicking “Demo site” at the top of the page. There, you’ll be able to explore a clickable sample site to get a better sense of the theme’s appearance and feel. 

Once you’ve found a theme you love, you can click the “Activate this Design” button to customize it. Any new blocks or features you add from WordPress’s suite of tools will be automatically adjusted to match your new theme’s style.

Premium themes from Automattic are available at no extra charge for customers on the Personal plan or above. 

You can explore our extensive selection of free and third-party themes by navigating to the “Themes” page under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard. Third-party themes can be purchased for $99/year each on the Business plan and above. 

Introducing the Reactions Block

With the Reactions Block, likes and reposts from Mastodon and other Fediverse platforms are automatically added to the end of your posts (if you’re using the Site Editor). It’s even smart enough to hide itself on posts without Reactions. Here’s a look at Fediverse reactions in action:

To disable or customize its placement, click “Edit Site” in the admin bar, select the Content block, and adjust the settings:

For older themes, you can manually add the block to any post or page.

But wait, that’s not all

We’ve been working over the past several months to improve your experience with WordPress.com. Here are two other recent enhancements we’re excited to share with you:

• Push and email notifications. Get notified instantly when your posts are Liked or Reposted via the Jetpack app, dashboard, or email.
• Reply to comments, federated. When someone comments from the Fediverse, your replies federate back, keeping the conversation visible on both sides. Likes and Reposts are treated like comments, allowing you to manage them directly in the WordPress admin interface. This feature has been live since early 2024, but it’s worth sharing now.

Have you connected your WordPress.com site to the Fediverse?

Fediverse integration is available to all WordPress.com users—including free plans—and for WordPress.org users via the ActivityPub plugin. We want to ensure that our tools are accessible to creators of all sizes, so that your work is accessible to all of your followers, everywhere.

Start receiving Likes, Reposts, and showcasing engagement today. Get started with our Enter the Fediverse guide.

It takes discipline to run a successful blog. Without something to organize your publishing schedule, it’s easy to waste time wondering what you should write about, and hard to hold yourself accountable for meeting deadlines. With a well-designed content calendar, you can burn less mental energy thinking about your blog, and focus more clearly on your writing. 

The end result? You produce better content with less effort. It’s win-win.

Editorial calendars are easy to set up too, so there’s no excuse not to use one. In this post, we’ll cover the following (and more):

• How to build one in under five minutes using a simple spreadsheet (with a free template you can copy).
• How to establish a sustainable posting schedule for your blog.
• How to generate tons of blog post ideas to keep your calendar full.

Plus, we’ll even get into some advanced tools and tactics you can use to level up your calendar and content planning game. A better blogging future awaits you.

Start your “someday” project today. Build your blog with WordPress.com now.

What’s the purpose of an editorial calendar?

An editorial calendar is a visual schedule of the content you will publish on your blog (or other channels). They document the topics you will cover, when you’ll publish each piece, and other important information. Typically, they are created using spreadsheets or dedicated software.

Bloggers and marketers have borrowed the concept of an editorial calendar from the journalism world, where writers and editors have been using calendars to keep organized for decades. No matter what type of content creator you are, you can benefit from using such a calendar too.

Why should you really use an editorial calendar?

The obvious reason to use a calendar is to get organized. But why does getting organized matter and how does that translate into being a more successful blogger? Here are a few ways that getting more organized is directly connected to better blogging results.

Destress your blogging life

Developing a consistent writing practice is challenging. Knowing what you will work on, before you sit down to write, can help you spend less time wondering what to write so you can focus on the words. If writing is less stressful and more satisfying, you’ll be more likely to stick with it. 

Produce writing that you’re proud to publish

You’re more likely to produce writing you’re happy with if you aren’t mentally overwhelmed. Anything you can do to get control over your blog (whether by planning ahead, writing clear outlines, or anything else that helps you get organized) will help make you more successful.

Get better results from your blogging efforts

It’s easy to think that becoming a successful blogger is all about creativity. While creativity is important, the real foundation for success might actually be having strong processes in place. An editorial calendar can form the foundation for your blogging workflow, helping you plan what you will publish in advance, so you can flex your creativity without worrying about distractions. 

How to create an editorial calendar in five minutes

There are many different tools you can use to create your calendar. Let’s start by building one with Google Sheets (though you can use any spreadsheet or similar tool you’d like, such as Airtable, Clickup, or Excel). 

Create a new spreadsheet and add your top row

First, create a new spreadsheet, and add a top row with the following labels:

1. Date
2. Topic
3. Category (these should match your blog categories)
4. Status
5. Author (if your blog will have more than one author)
6. Published Link

It should look something like this:

Add rows for months under column A

Next, add some placeholder dates and columns for future months. This will help keep your calendar organized as the year progresses:

Add a dropdown selector under the Status column

If you’re using Google Sheets, click Insert, then click Dropdown. This is how we’ll add status selector options that will make it easy to see the progress you’re making on each post:

Add basic labels that outline your writing process. At a minimum, include Not Started, In Progress, and Published. You could also consider adding steps for Editing, Graphic Design (if you’ll be creating visual assets for your posts), or any other steps that may be specific to your workflow. Use the color selectors to color-code each status too:

Then, click the blue circle on the lower right corner of the cell, and drag it down to add the dropdown to each cell. Copy and paste works as well:

Start adding some ideas

Now you’re ready to start adding topics to your calendar. Here’s how things might look once you have a handful of post ideas lined up:

Or you can download this template

You can also use the button below to find a finished version of this editorial calendar template. Click the button, then click File > Make a Copy to create your own version:

Leveling up your calendar

Creating your calendar with a spreadsheet is the easiest way to get started. They are simple to set up and can be customized to suit your needs.

However, there are many more options for editorial calendar tools you can choose from. Let’s look at some options you can consider when you’re ready to upgrade from your spreadsheet.

Trello

Trello is a simple Kanban board-style project management tool. They offer a free plan and a couple different editorial calendar templates that can help you get set up in a few clicks. It’s used by publications like Wired and offers a lot of task management capabilities that you aren’t going to get with a spreadsheet. 

Asana

Similar to Trello, Asana is another projectment management tool that can be used to create an editorial calendar. It’s a bit more robust than Trello but with a slightly higher learning curve. Their free plan offers all the capabilities that bloggers should need to manage your calendar and tasks.

Edit Flow

Edit Flow is a long-running WordPress plugin for managing your editorial calendar and workflow directly within WordPress. It’s free, full-featured, and easy to use. As a WordPress.com user, you’ll need to choose a plugin-enabled plan to install it (Business and above):

Editorial Calendar

Here is another WordPress plugin option, appropriately titled Editorial Calendar. This plugin is actively maintained and free to use. If you’re on a plugin-enabled WordPress.com plan, you can install it now here:

CoSchedule

CoSchedule’s Content Calendar offers a beautiful editorial calendar option that’s packed with powerful automation features so you can schedule all your blog publishing and social promotion in one tool. They also have a WordPress plugin available. Their free and lower-tier plans are suitable for bloggers, while their more advanced packages are built for marketing teams. 

Establishing your publishing cadence

There is no right answer to how often you should post on your blog. With that said, sticking to a schedule will help you publish regularly, build discipline, and be a more successful blogger.

Determine how often you’ll publish

If there is a recommendation we can offer for determining how often to post, it’s this: you should publish as often as you have something worth sharing on your blog.

That’s not a very specific recommendation though. If you’re looking for some structure to follow, set a goal to publish one article in your first month. Continue adding another post each week, until you’re publishing something at least once a week. 

There’s no science behind this. When you’re trying something new, starting small and working your way up can be a good way to build endurance, without immediately burning out.

Determine what days you’ll publish on

From a technical standpoint, there are no specific days that are best for publishing blog posts. 

With that said, publishing on specific days can help you develop discipline and hold yourself accountable. It can also help set expectations for readers, who may wonder when they should expect new content from you, especially if they subscribe to your blog via email.  

Here are some general guidelines to help you choose which days to publish:

• Web traffic is generally highest early in the week. It starts to decline on Fridays, and is lower on weekends. This is supported by Wise Owl Marketing; the author of this post has been blogging weekly since 2007. 
• If you have email subscribers to your blog, consider publishing in the morning, so you can start the day at the top of your reader’s inbox.
• Consider your own schedule and when it’s easiest for you to regularly write and publish.

How to keep your editorial calendar full, all year long

No matter which tool you use to build your calendar, you’ll need content ideas to keep it full. Let’s look at some reliable methods and processes you can follow to make sure you never run out of things to write about. 

Write what you’re most passionate about 

If you’re starting a blog, it’s likely you have something to say. Are there any burning issues you can’t wait to write about? Ideas that you’re desperate to share with the world? Stories that can’t wait to be told? Add them to your calendar and turn them into reality.

Brainstorm a month of blog post ideas in 30 minutes

Whenever I’m asked about blog post ideation, I always recommend this process. It’s one I picked up from a previous employer, and it’s time-tested because it works. Follow these steps:

1. Spend 10 minutes writing down as many ideas as you can. Don’t think about them too hard. Just get them written down, either in a doc, or on Post It notes.
2. Spend 10 minutes scoring each idea a 3, 2, or 1. 3’s are your best ideas, 2’s are ideas that need some work, and 1’s are duds. You will have ideas in all three buckets.
3. Spend 10 minutes sorting through your 3’s and add them to your calendar. These are your very best ideas, that you feel most strongly about.

Now, in just half an hour, you should have enough ideas to write about for at least a month. 

See what people are talking about on Reddit

Find relevant sub-Reddits to the topics you write about and gather ideas. This guide from Better Web Movement has some tips on how to find subreddits that are relevant to your niche. Even better, be an active participant in Reddit communities that are relevant to the things you write about (though you’re probably doing this anyway if you’re passionate about what you cover).

Use an RSS reader to follow other blogs and publications

It’s safe to assume you follow publications and other blogs that are relevant to you on social media. If you’re not using an RSS feed to keep up with your industry or community too though, you might miss out on important stories or articles that could spark your own inspiration. RSS is great because it’s less noisy than social media; you just see the latest articles, without distractions.

Here are some options for RSS and news reader apps you can try:

• Feedly: A popular option for a basic RSS feed reader.
• Inoreader: Another great option for a basic RSS feed reader.
• Flipboard: Magazine-style news reader app.
• WordPress Reader: Built into your WordPress.com website. It follows all WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted WordPress sites that use Jetpack.

Use SparkToro to learn about your audience’s interests

SparkToro is an advanced tool used by marketers to conduct audience research. Even if you’re not a marketer, and can only afford their free account, it’s still useful for gathering insight about where your audience spends time online and what they might want to read about.

Conduct keyword research to uncover popular search topics

Google processes over eight billion searches per day. At least a few of those clicks should go to your site, right? If you blog about evergreen topics (meaning topics that are always relevant and not time-sensitive), then paying attention to SEO and keyword research is essential. 

Here are a few basic keyword research tools you can use that will help you find the terms people search when they’re looking for information about the topics you cover:

Google Keyword Planner

Google’s free keyword research tool shows how often keywords trigger ads to appear in search results. It can be useful for SEO too, helping you understand how often potential readers search for specific information:

Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator

Ahrefs is a professional SEO tool that’s built primarily for marketers. Their free Keyword Generator tool is useful for bloggers to gather a quick list of basic ideas:

Answer the Public

Answer The Public makes it easy to enter a keyword or two, and then generate a large list of questions people ask related to that topic. It’s a quick way to turn one idea into dozens or hundreds of ideas:

Some common questions people ask about editorial calendars

Before we go, let’s go over a few final questions you might still have (or didn’t know to ask). 

Is there a difference between an editorial calendar and a content calendar?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that people sometimes use these terms in very slightly different contexts. When people say “editorial calendar” they’re often referring to blogging or news publishing, while the term “content calendar” is sometimes meant to include social media, video, and other content formats. Functionally though? They’re the same thing.

Is an editorial calendar the same thing as a content strategy?

An editorial calendar documents what content you will publish. A content strategy is much more complex and encompasses an overarching plan for the who, what, why, and where of all things content on a given website. An editorial calendar might visualize the execution of your strategy, but it’s not a strategy by itself.

How far in advance should you plan your calendar?

This is another area where there are no rules. Having at least three months worth of ideas will ensure you’re never wondering what you should write about. If you can reach a point where you have two to six weeks worth of content written and scheduled in advance, you’re in great shape. 

If you can’t reach that level though, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. In fact, if your blog is focused on covering news or events as they happen (such as a sports blog or local news site), then planning too far ahead might not be possible or even desirable. This is a good reminder that not all blogging advice applies to everyone equally (not even the advice in this post). So, if something sounds like it’s not applicable to you, don’t worry about it.

Your blog + an editorial calendar = success

You now have the knowledge and tools to plan and organize your blog content like an expert editor. Your stress-free future of blogging success awaits!

Host your blog on the best managed WordPress hosting service available. Start a new blog with WordPress.com today.

Our new Studio Sync feature provides Studio users with a fast, simple way to:

1. Synchronize their local sites with their WordPress.com-hosted sites for easy development and deployments; and,
2. Take a local site live with a WordPress.com hosting plan in just a few clicks.

With Studio Sync, taking your WordPress site from local development to production has never been more streamlined.

Seamless syncing between local and prod

Studio Sync makes it simple to publish your local WordPress site with powerful WordPress.com hosting. Here are a few of our favorite use cases:

• Push and Pull with Ease: You can keep your local Studio sites connected to your WordPress.com site, so pushing or pulling will be as easy as clicking a button.
• Flexible Syncing: Having complete freedom, you can connect a WordPress.com site to multiple Studio sites.
• Team Collaboration: Multiple developers can connect a local Studio site to a shared WordPress.com site, making it easy to push and pull changes as a team.
• Sync To and From Staging: If using staging sites are part of your development workflow, you can now easily push from your local Studio site to your WordPress.com staging site.
• One-Click Bliss: No need to worry yourself with database dumps, manually syncing files over SFTP, or performing other monotonous manual steps. Synchronize your local and hosted sites at any time with just one click.

Connect your site

You can connect any of your WordPress.com sites on a Business plan or higher. Use built-in search to locate your site and quickly see if the site has a staging environment available.

Push and pull

Pull to synchronize your WordPress.com site changes with your local Studio site, or push to deploy your local Studio site changes to your WordPress.com site.

Launch your Studio site on WordPress.com

Ready to publish your local Studio site for all the world to see?

Simply click Connect site on the Sync tab, and then you’ll see an option to purchase a new hosting plan for your Studio site at WordPress.com.

Ready to get started with Studio Sync?

You can start taking advantage of this new Studio Sync feature in just a few steps:

1. Download and install Studio––for free on Windows and Mac.
2. Login with your WordPress.com account.
3. Create a new Studio site.
4. Click on the Sync tab.
5. Connect your site.
6. Push changes to production or pull production to the Studio app.

Let us know what you think

We’d love to hear how you think this new Studio Sync feature will speed up your local development work. 

As a reminder, Studio is a free, open source tool, so we welcome any and all feedback in GitHub. Explore other Issues and create your own here.

You can also explore the documentation for more tips on using this new Sync feature.

Building a website for yourself allows you to claim your own little part of the Internet. A space you fully control and that nobody can take away from you. Where you make the rules, determine the look and feel, and express yourself in any way you want.

If that sounds worth pursuing, this post covers everything you need to know. It will talk about the nature and benefits of a personal website, then give you step-by-step instructions on how to build one using WordPress. From picking a website address and basic design to creating pages, adjusting design elements like fonts and colors, and adding extra functionality—it’s all here.

Ready to build your online home today? Get started with WordPress.com here.

What exactly is a personal website?

A personal website is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a website that belongs to you and allows you to represent who you are and what you do in whatever way you want.

You can control the design, content, functionality, and everything else about it.

Why would you want to build something like that for yourself?

Let’s talk about that for a minute.

Benefits of building your own website

Yes, there are other ways you can build a brand or profile online. For example, many people use social media as their main outlet. But, putting all your eggs into that particular basket is also risky.

There’s always a chance you can get banned or hit with an algorithm change that cuts your reach. Anybody who is old enough to remember when you could build an audience for your Facebook page without spending money on ads can tell you that much.

Or, just imagine, your favorite outlet gets bought by a person or company you don’t like and don’t want to support, so you feel compelled to start over on another platform. Sounds far-fetched, I know, but it could mean all your hard work is gone from one day to the next.

This can happen because you don’t actually own your social media account. The platform you are on does, including all the content you publish. And what’s not yours can be taken away from you.

In contrast to that, creating your own personal website, especially if you do it with a system like WordPress, means building something permanent. You fully own it and can take it with you wherever you want.

Plus, it allows you to do things that you can’t always do on social media, like:

• Change the design
• Publish detailed, long-form content
• Sell goods and services
• Tell people more about yourself
• Get inbound traffic from search engines
• Show off your portfolio
• Build a central hub to consolidate all your online outlets

And much more…

Types of personal websites

So far, the definition of a personal website has been relatively broad. The reason for that is that it can take many forms depending on your purpose:

• About Me website – Simply introduce yourself and who you are. It can work as an online resume, business card, or just a fun project.
• Blog – If you are going the blogging route, you can dive deeply into a topic that interests you, grow a following, build expertise, and maybe even create a business.
• Newsletter – You can also use a personal website to build a newsletter. This works well when combined with a blog. You can use content to attract an audience and then get them on the newsletter to stay in contact easily.
• Portfolio – If you are an artist or any type of creative professional, a personal website is where you can show off your portfolio (also works for developers). It gives people an impression of what you can do and also allows them to get in touch with you directly, e.g. via a contact form.

Thankfully, as you will see below, the process of creating a personal website is also very flexible, so it can accommodate whatever you have in mind.

How to make a personal website

I’ve been building websites for more than ten years. If I were in your position and wanted to create a website for myself for the first time, here’s how I would do it.

1. Choose your hosting plan

Hosting basically means renting space on a computer that’s connected to the Internet. That’s where you save your website files so that others can access them with their browser.

With WordPress, you are free to choose your hosting provider since it runs on almost any server setup. WordPress.com is a great option because it’s managed hosting.

That means it takes care of a lot of the more technical parts of running a personal website, namely:

• Installation – The website is automatically created for you. There’s no need to upload files to a server, create a database, or run an installation.
• Ease of Use – Everything that has to do with managing the website happens in the same, beginner-friendly interface. You don’t need to switch back and forth between the hosting provider panel and the website; it’s all in the same place.
• Speed – Performance is a very important topic for user experience. WordPress.com’s servers get the most out of the CMS and store copies of your website across 28+ data centers for super fast delivery.
• Security – Jetpack is included on every WordPress.com site and provides daily security scans, automatic backups, brute-force protection, downtime monitoring, and more. Plus, you get encryption, firewalls, activity monitoring, DDoS protection, and automatic software updates with every plan.

While you can also implement the above manually, by choosing managed hosting, you can fully focus on the important parts of creating a personal website instead: its design, content, and growth.

If that sounds like the right choice for you, all you need to do is pick a WordPress.com plan.

The Personal and Premium plans are most suitable for simpler websites with fewer pages and for writing a blog. If you want to add extra functionality via plugins or even sell things on your personal site, Business or Commerce might be more your speed.

Each plan comes with unlimited visitors, posts, and pages. If you go for a yearly plan, you also get a free domain for one year. That brings us to the next point.

2. Pick a domain name

The domain name is what your visitors will type into their browser bar to reach your personal website.

An important aspect to pay attention to here is the domain ending or top-level domain (TLD). You know, the .com, .org, or .net  part.

For example, if your site is for a particular country and language, it can make sense to use a country-specific domain ending like .de (for Germany) or .co.uk for the United Kingdom. Another example is that as a writer or artist, you could also use a .blog or .portfolio.

The main part of your domain, the name, is also important to think about. It should be easy to remember and convey trust. You can find more tips in this post and the video below.

Domains are also available at WordPress.com.

Simply search for your desired name and hit enter. The tool will tell you if it’s available, the cost, and alternatives.

Select your choice and go through the purchasing process. As mentioned, if you host your website at WordPress.com, you get a free domain with an annual plan that can be automatically assigned to your site.

But don’t worry if you can’t make up your mind right now. You can skip this step in the beginning and settle on your domain name at a later time. Your website will live at a temporary address until then.

3. Select a theme

In WordPress, themes are what control the basic design. They are website blueprints that contain colors, fonts, layouts, and other design elements. As a consequence, you can alter your WordPress website’s look and feel—quite dramatically—by simply activating another theme.

Another benefit is that there are themes specialized in building particular types of websites like restaurant sites, travel blogs, photography sites, and more. They come with features, layouts, and design elements specifically for these use cases, making getting started much easier.

In addition, themes are just starting points, not destinations. You can also still customize them completely later on as you’ll soon see.

Applying a theme to your personal website is super easy. You can check what’s available by going to the theme directory or Appearance > Themes in your WordPress.com admin interface.

Use the controls on top to search for a particular theme or filter by topics and plan. Click on any of them to learn more about it.

You’ll find a description and list of features as well as a preview on the right. Many themes come with style variations that apply different color schemes and fonts. You can try them out directly on this page.

In addition, you can see what your current website would look like with the new theme by clicking the Preview & Customize button. The editor that appears allows you to customize it further, e.g., try out style variations on your site.

You can save your changes and activate the theme immediately with a click on the button in the lower-left corner. Alternatively, do it from inside the theme menu.

4. Add a homepage and customize it

With the basic website in place, it’s time to learn how to create and customize pages, starting with your homepage.

Set up a new page

Navigate to Pages > Add New Page in your WordPress.com admin interface.

This will open the WordPress Page Editor. When creating a fresh page, you’ll be prompted with a collection of pre-defined layouts you can use to quickly populate it.

These layouts include categories such as About, Services, Contact, Blog, and more. If you find something you like, simply click it to insert the layout into the editor. Alternatively, you can start with a blank page and completely customize it yourself.

Add page elements

The WordPress Page Editor works with blocks, which are singular content elements of different types. For example, a paragraph block is automatically created when you write and press the Enter key. Other examples for blocks are:

• Headings
• Lists
• Buttons
• Images
• Tables
• Columns
• Grids

You find a full list of available blocks when you click the big blue “+” button in the top left corner.

They are ordered by category, and you can also search for specific blocks. Clicking on any of them inserts it into the editor at the current position of your cursor.

In addition to individual blocks, the Patterns tab offers pre-designed collections of blocks, such as contact forms, galleries, team member sections, newsletter sign-ups, and more. These patterns can help you quickly create layouts without having to build everything from scratch. You insert them the same way.

Another method to add blocks is by clicking the small “+” button that appears when you place your cursor within the editor. It lets you search for a block by name and click it to insert.

Even easier, type a forward slash (“/”) in any empty line, start typing the block name, and select it using your mouse or keyboard.

To understand and manage the structure of your page, use the Document Overview tool in the top left corner.

Customize blocks

Clicking on a block brings up an options bar at the top and additional customization settings in the sidebar.

The options vary depending on the block type. For instance:

• A paragraph block lets you adjust font size, color, text alignment, and more.
• A button block allows you to customize alignment, style, color, dimensions, and shadows.

It takes some trying out to know what you can change for which type of block.

Be aware that these settings apply only to the specific block on the current page. For global design changes—like applying a new font to all headings—you’ll need to use the global Styles settings, covered later.

Once you’ve designed your homepage to your liking, save your changes and publish the page.

Set it as your front page

To make your newly created page your homepage, go to Settings > Reading in the WordPress.com admin dashboard. At the top, you’ll see two drop-down menus that allow you to define which page serves as your homepage and which one displays your blog posts.

Select your new page under Your homepage displays and save the settings.

Your homepage is now live! For more information about pages in general, check the documentation.

5. Add more pages and a menu

You can use the same workflow as above to create additional must-have pages for your personal website, such as:

• About page
• Contact page
• Services

After that, you’ll likely want to include them in a navigation menu so that your visitors can reach them easily.

Sitewide changes like this happen in the Site Editor. You can access it via Appearance > Editor. The Site Editor works similarly to the Page Editor but allows you to edit additional parts of your website.

In many cases, your theme already includes a navigation menu. In our example, it appears as part of the header.  One way to edit it is to click Patterns and Header, though you might need to know the name of your header pattern to pick the right one.

Alternatively, click the header element in the main editing window and then choose Edit.

Either gets you to the editor below.

Here, select the Navigation block (again, Document Overview is your friend).

You can then add and subtract menu items and other elements, rename them, and also change some design options in the sidebar.

Make adjustments as needed, then save to make them appear on your website.

You can also use this workflow to make other adjustments to your header like adding a search block. It also works for changing your footer.

Note: In some themes you control menus in the Site Customizer instead. You can find more information here.

6. Customize fonts and colors

The Site Editor is also where you can make global design changes for your website. You’ll find these options in the Styles menu in the top right corner of the editor.

Here’s what you can change:

• Browse styles – Switch between style variations, color palettes, and font combinations your theme ships with.
• Typography – Make changes to the font family, size, appearance, line height, letter spacing, and more for body text, links, headings, buttons, and other text elements on your site. You can also change font size presets here.
• Colors – Add colors and gradients to use in the editor, try out existing color palettes, and customize colors for text, backgrounds, links, buttons, headings, and more.
• Background – Give your website a background image.
• Shadows – Set up presets for drop shadows to use them in the editor.
• Layout – Define basic layout settings such as content width, global padding, and block spacing.
• Blocks – Make design changes to particular block types that apply sitewide.

A cool feature to preview changes in real-time, is the Style Book option in the Styles menu. It provides an overview of how your site’s design elements will look.

Let’s go over some use cases to help you understand all of this information

Change heading fonts

You change the font of your headings under Typography and then Headings. To make things easier, open the Text tab in the Style book to see all headings at once.

Pick which heading type to customize, then apply your changes. For example, if you want to prevent your H1 headings from turning into all caps, choose the “H1” option, then set Letter Case to None.

You can consult the documentation to learn more about custom fonts.

Set a website background color

To change the background color of your website, go to Colors and then click Background.

Pick from the theme palette (you can choose a different one at top) or define a custom hue. That’s it.

Modify button shadow

To make changes to a single block, click Blocks.

Either scroll to the button block in the list or use the search functionality to find it. Click it.

Find the Border & Shadow option at the bottom. A click on Drop shadow allows you to apply different kinds of shadow effects to all of your buttons.

7. Edit page templates

Templates define the design and layout for certain content types across your website. To access them while in the Site Editor, click on the WordPress logo and then Templates.

You’ll see a list of all existing templates on your site such as single posts, pages, and archives. For example, you might want to adjust the layout of your blog posts. For that, click the Single Posts template, to start editing it.

Let’s say your goal is to switch the position of the post meta to appear under the title.

For that, simply choose the post-meta block and move it up.

When you now save, the changes apply to all blog posts on your website.

You can do the same for all other types of content. More information about templates here.

8. Install plugins

Plugins let you change and enhance the functionality of your personal website. If you are on a Business or Commerce plan, you can install them in the Plugins menu.

Plugins cover a wide range of features that they can contribute to your website, such as:

• Improve search engine optimization (SEO)
• Add an Instagram feed
• Limit login attempts
• Accept payments with different providers
• Connect your website to Google Analytics

You can find plugins by using the search functionality at the top or browsing through categories. To learn more about a plugin, click on it. If you like what you see, click the big Install and Activate button.

Once the installation is finished, you can start using the plugin’s functionality right away.

For inspiration on what plugins to install, check the most popular ones. You can also find help on this topic in the documentation.

It’s time to build your online home

Your personal website is your own piece of online real estate. It’s yours to do with as you please and, unlike other online profiles, can’t be taken from you.

Follow the step-by-step instructions above to create your personal site and start building your presence online today.

Even as an experienced freelance or agency developer, you might struggle to remember every item on the to-do list. The good news is, you don’t have to. By establishing a formalized web design process, you can create a roadmap to follow each time you build a new website.

Doing all the thinking beforehand ensures that you don’t forget anything crucial. It also frees up headspace for doing the actual work, avoids overwhelm, improves efficiency, and allows you to build better websites on repeat.

In this post, we’ll help you reap those benefits by establishing your own web design process. We’ll go through all the necessary steps and give you actionable advice on how to implement each and every one of them. This will give you a foundation to develop your own workflow and make life easier in the future.

How to use this information to develop your own process

We’ll go over the following steps (you can click on the links to jump directly to the part that most interests you):

1. Goal-setting
2. Scoping
3. Resourcing
4. Project management
5. Sitemap / wireframes
6. Copy / content creation
7. Staging site setup
8. Visual design
9. Testing
10. Launch
11. Site maintenance

Our goal is to cover each point as completely as possible to provide you with a blueprint for developing your own process. Take what’s useful and relevant to you and add any additional information you might need for your particular use cases, working style, industry, or else.

Be aware that a formalized web design process is a living document that you’ll likely change over time as you repeatedly go through it and as web design requirements change. That way, it always reflects your latest way of working and current level of technology.

To make getting started extra easy, we also created a customizable checklist template. To use it, just create a copy and adapt it to your needs as you go through the information below.

1. Determine website goals

The first thing you need is background information on the website you are about to build. The main objective is to understand its purpose, as this lays the groundwork for many decisions down the line.

For that, your first task is to understand who your client is. Their type of organization, industry, and audience make a big difference in the end product. Good questions to ask are:

• What exactly does your business do?
• What are the company’s vision, mission, and/or values?
• How do you differ from the competition?
• Which problems do you solve for your customers?
• Which challenges, opportunities, and trends are shaping your industry?
• What regulations or compliance requirements does your industry have?
• Is there an existing brand identity?

Once you have a better picture of the client, the second step is to find out how the website fits into their business. This is a set of questions that will help you do so:

• What’s the goal you hope to achieve with the site?
• Who is the intended audience? What’s the first impression they should have when entering the website and what actions should they take on it?
• What type of content are you planning to publish?
• What are must-have features and functionality?
• How should the site be different or the same as that of competitors?
• What’s the budget and timeline?

Questions like this are important for several reasons. First of all, lots of industries have distinct conventions when it comes to website design. For example, you would use a very different color scheme for a children’s toy store compared to a corporate financial services website. The client might also already have existing branding that you have to take into account to preserve an established look and hit the right tone.

In addition, the type of site you will build also has a big influence on the web design process. A brochure website, blog, and online shop all have very different purposes and require unique approaches. There can even be legal requirements that you have to meet. For example, on real-estate websites, visitors might have to virtually sign a contract before they can view portfolio items.

Without being crystal clear about what you are making and for what purpose, you are almost certain to get off on the wrong foot, which can be costly and time-consuming to correct. Therefore, spend enough time on the discovery phase until you have a firm grasp of the client’s needs. Extensive contact with stakeholders, market research, audience personas, a design brief, and competitor analysis are all useful tools for this stage.

2. Scope the project

Once you know what you are tasked with designing, the next step in the web design process is to put together the project scope. This is where you determine the exact functionality and technical requirements for the site. It also helps you estimate how long the process will take, allowing you to agree on the exact work to be done (to prevent scope creep) as well as deadlines and milestones with your client.

Ask your client for these basic pieces of information:

• How many pages does the site need?
• What will they contain? Do you have to account for things like forms or e-commerce functionality?
• What other features will be on the site?
• What about content? Will the client provide it, or is that part of your duties?

Once you have collected key information, you can estimate how long the total project will take. Be sure to build in some buffer for when, not if, something unexpected happens.

A very useful tool for visualizing the timeline is a Gantt chart.

It shows the project timeline, key deliverables, and their expected completion times. You can easily create Gantt charts using existing Excel or Google Sheets templates.

3. Identify and allocate resources

After this, it’s time to deal with your resources, including money, workforce, and tools. Let’s go over them one by one.

An established scope makes it easier to calculate project costs. For example, it helps you see how many hours it will take and calculate the cost of labor. However, don’t just think about the time—also consider external costs, such as:

• Domain and hosting fees
• Plugins or themes you might need to purchase
• Stock photos or graphics
• Fonts or other assets

Be sure to calculate these beforehand for yourself and to provide an accurate estimate to your client. We have a checklist for website costs if you need a refresher. For hosting options, consider:

• WordPress.com
• Pressable
• Bluehost

If you need a free tool for local development, check out Studio.

Another part of resourcing is determining who will do the work. If you’re a freelance full-stack developer, you might handle everything yourself. If you’re part of an agency, the work will likely be divided between the design and development teams. Either way, ensure there’s a clear plan and everyone knows what’s expected of them.

4. Prepare your project management platform

By now, you should have a good overview of the work that awaits you. It’s time to put it into order and make it more manageable.

The first step is to list all the phases and tasks the project will go through and add them to a project management tool. This also allows you to bring them into the correct order. Recommended tools include:

• Trello
• Asana
• Jira
• Google Sheets
• Excel

As mentioned earlier, you can also use the free checklist template included in this article.

Feel free to break the phases down into smaller chunks if that’s how you prefer to work. In addition, include all the resources you already have and attach them to their respective tasks. While you are at it, don’t forget to input the timings and milestones you determined earlier for each item. This will help you stay organized.

By the way, your planning should also include regular check-ins with clients for approvals and updates. This fosters collaboration and ensures everyone stays on the same page.

5. Create a sitemap and wireframes

From here, it’s time to start conceptualizing the end product and create a plan to follow along.

You’ve already determined the must-have pages for the website in the project scope. These often include the usual suspects (homepage, about page, contact page, legal pages, etc.), but you might also have less common ones depending on the project. The next step is to put them into relation to each other and plan the site structure. You can do so with a basic sitemap.

The way pages are arranged greatly influences a website’s navigation and user experience. For example, it determines how easy it is to find content and how often visitors have to click to reach it. A good structure also makes the site more crawlable, giving it an SEO boost.

Part of the site structure are also navigation and menus. They point out important pages and are often an initial entry point for visitors, so it’s important to consider them as well as other navigation elements like breadcrumbs.

Once you have the overall structure, the next task is to visualize individual pages. This is where you create layouts for each page and determine how elements will be arranged—a process also known as wireframing.

Wireframes let you map out the page structure before dealing with design considerations. They help you focus purely on usability and are a great tool to collect feedback from clients. Be sure to also map out your mobile layouts!

You can create wireframes using a variety of tools:

• Graph paper – Go old school with pen and paper.
• Google Docs – While not the best option, it still works. Tables are your friend.
• Professional design tools – Options include Balsamiq or Figma. If you use Figma, consider using a wireframing kit like Johannes WP, which is specifically made for wireframing WordPress websites.

You can find additional options in our article about wireframes.

6. Write the website copy

With the concept finished, you can start creating the visual parts of the website. Ideally, this doesn’t start with colors, fonts, and CSS but rather with written content.

While this might seem backward, it actually makes a lot of sense. Design should follow content, not the other way around. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you have a finished design but it can’t accommodate the intended text.

Writing copy doesn’t just mean crafting text for the main sections of the page wireframes you created earlier but also for navigational elements, buttons, forms, and other page elements.

There are several ways to handle this step:

• Receive the content from the client
• Draft the copy yourself (if that’s part of your agreement)
• Hire a content writer or copywriter.
• Use Jetpack AI to create placeholder copy

It’s important to be a bit flexible here. Content might still change and not everything has to be fully ready. It’s fine to use placeholders for some parts, like product descriptions.

However, you want at least a rough idea of what you need to accommodate in your page designs before you start creating them. This saves you from having to make time-consuming changes later.

7. Set up a staging site

Now that you’re ready to work on the actual website, it’s crucial to set up a development version. As a professional web developer, you know better than to do the design process on a live domain.

The typical approach is to use a staging site (which, incidentally, are available on all WordPress.com Business plans and above), or set up a local development environment, such as the aforementioned Studio.

Once that’s ready, you can immediately start creating the raw structure of the site. This includes setting up all the pages you scoped earlier and creating navigation items pointing to them.

While you’re at it, you can also install any plugins included in your scope, implement features like forms, and insert written content into the appropriate places to create a rough version of the site.

8. Create the visual design

The next step is visual design. This is where you implement the structure from your wireframes and make it look good with fonts, colors, and other elements that create the website’s aesthetic.

This part of the process often happens in two phases: first creating a design mockup and then implementing it. In a WordPress website, the central element for that is the theme, which controls the website’s design.

Here, you can either go with an existing theme or create your own. If you have a WordPress.com Business plan, either is an option since you can upload any third-party theme you want.

Obviously, making a theme from scratch is more work though it gives you the possibility to create a bespoke solution. Going with an existing theme takes less effort, yet it might not have all the features you want or need.

The most time-friendly solution is often to take a hybrid approach. That means finding a theme that is very close to what you are looking for in terms of design and functionality, and then customize it according to your needs.

Thanks to block themes and the WordPress Site Editor, this has become simpler than ever. For example, you can adapt visual elements like colors easily using Styles and/or the WordPress Customizer.

In addition, the Site Editor gives you control over all typography available on your website. You can assign a multitude of fonts to any text elements on your website.

Using custom CSS is also a possibility. 

Finally, your website will likely also include visual page content, such as photos, icons, graphics, or videos. Depending on your contract, these might either come from the client or be something you create. Be aware that you have the possibility to source free images directly inside the WordPress.com editor.

First, there is the Jetpack AI image creator. Simply insert an Image block and choose Generate with AI. 

Then, input your prompt in the panel that shows up.

You can also insert images from Openverse and Pexels.com by clicking the Block inserter button and choosing the Media tab.

Search for any image and click on a result you like to automatically add it to the editor, complete with the correct attribution.

9. Test the website thoroughly

Already done with the design? Alright hot shot, let’s move on then. Now it’s time to get to testing, which is one of the most crucial stages of the web design process. You don’t want to launch a website only to find parts or even the entire site not functioning correctly.

Testing should ideally happen on a staging site, especially one that uses the same environment as the eventual live website. This allows you to spot potential conflicts or problems that didn’t surface during development.

Here are the most important things to examine each page for:

• Double check the content – Content is the main attraction of any website. Go through all pages to ensure there are no typos, missing images, or other errors that detract from the user experience.
• Ensure all features work – Test all central functionality, such as web forms, shopping carts, and interactive elements. For example, see that form submissions reach the intended destination.
• Verify all links – A well-planned site structure is only effective if users can actually use it. Make sure that links go to the correct destinations and are not broken. A tool like Screaming Frog lets you scan for broken links in bulk.
• Check SEO – Make sure all pages have correct meta information, such as title tags and meta descriptions. Screaming Frog also allows you to scan for that.
• Measure speed – Page speed is a major usability and ranking factor. Run all pages through tools like PageSpeed Insights to identify performance bottlenecks and fix them. You can also use WordPress.com’s free Site Profiler tool.
• Test on different devices and browsers – Since most users access websites on mobile devices, ensure the site looks good on all screen sizes. Test the site on multiple browsers as well.
• Validate accessibility – Modern web design must meet accessibility standards, such as WCAG guidelines. Check for sufficient color contrast, keyboard navigation, and compatibility with assistive technologies using tools like Lighthouse (which is also part of PageSpeed Insights) or WAVE.

Invite your clients or other stakeholders to get involved in testing as well. Fresh eyes can catch issues you might have missed. Plus, you’ll need client sign-off on the website before launching. User testing is also a possibility at this stage.

10. Launch

With testing complete and any problems resolved, it’s time to publish the website. Here, too, having a detailed launch checklist can be extremely helpful to ensure you don’t overlook anything.

After all, there are important things to do, such as connecting Google Analytics and Search Console, setting up security measures, creating user accounts, and configuring backups.

When you set a launch date, be sure that any promotional efforts, such as social media updates and email campaigns, are prepared in advance. This coordination ensures that your website makes a big splash as soon as it goes live.

11. Do regular site maintenance

While the website design process is mostly done after launch, it doesn’t mean your work is over. Websites are ongoing projects that require regular maintenance to stay functional, secure, and effective.

Here are some common maintenance tasks:

• Addressing smaller bugs
• Publishing and updating content
• Creating new pages
• Building traffic
• Performing software updates
• Conducting security audits
• Running backups
• Measuring KPIs through analytics

Smart developers have a plan for maintenance to continue creating value for clients—and revenue for themselves.

Of course, it’s best to automate as much of this work as possible. For example, WordPress.com automatically handles backups and updates, so you don’t have to do them manually or set up a separate solution.

You can find a full list of recommended maintenance tasks in this article.

Stay on top of things with your own web design process

Creating a website that meets today’s high standards for design, usability, and performance is no small feat. With countless moving parts to manage, having a structured web design process is essential to stay on track.

By following a plan beforehand, you can save time, reduce errors, and ensure that nothing important gets overlooked. It allows you to focus on delivering results that align with your client’s goals while making your workflow repeatable for future projects. The steps outlined in this article serve as a flexible foundation to help you put together a process that works for you.

Now it’s your turn: What strategies or tools have helped you master the web design process? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Many of those features are powered by Jetpack, a versatile plugin that provides WordPress websites with a suite of essential tools for site security, performance, and more. It’s included with every WordPress.com website (even sites on our Free plan). For self-hosted sites, Jetpack tools are also available on a subscription basis, with bundled and ala carte options. 

Jetpack provides WordPress.com with tons of value. It makes sure your site performs well so you can build and create with confidence. But what exactly does Jetpack do and why should you care? Let’s look at just some of the ways Jetpack gives your WordPress.com site superpowers.  

What’s inside the Jetpack toolbox?

Jetpack offers tools in four categories to meet your website’s needs: security, performance, growth, and management. Many of these tools are included with free WordPress.com websites, with additional tools unlocked on higher plan tiers.

Jetpack Stats: Understand what’s resonating with your readers

Free; more features unlocked on Personal and above

Use Jetpack Stats to see your website performance at a glance, including how many visitors are on your site and what content is performing best. Quickly see where your traffic is coming from to better optimize your marketing and partnership strategies. Jetpack is fully GDPR compliant so you can track your visitor metrics with confidence. 

To access your free stats, navigate to the “Stats” tab in the WP Admin. For even more information on your website’s trends and insights to improve your website’s performance, upgrade to Premium.

Jetpack Social: Share in a snap

Free and above

Gone are the days of logging into every social platform to share your newest blog post with your followers. Jetpack Social lets you preview and share your content across major platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Mastodon, and Threads – with just one click from within the WordPress Editor. 

Jetpack Social also enables you to automatically put quick share buttons on your posts, enabling your visitors to share their favorite content with their communities, expanding your content’s reach.

Activity Log: Keep tabs on every move

Free; additional features unlocked on Premium and above 

With the Activity Log, you always have a high-level view of changes and actions taken across your site, from comments to new posts to downloads.  Whether you have a large team of content creators or you’re trying to find the source of a pesky bug, the activity log offers transparency and accountability for every website change. 

Free users have access to the 20 most recent website updates. Upgrade to a paid plan to view your complete site activity across your plan’s data retention period.

AI Assistant: Your creative co-pilot

Free and above (limit 20 requests on Free plan, unlimited on paid plans)

With a suite of AI-assisted tools, creating engaging content for your website has never been easier. Jetpack’s AI Assistant can help you quickly generate text, lists, tables, and AI-generated images. AI can also help you edit existing content, highlight readability challenges, identify tonal shifts, and suggest word and image updates to optimize user engagement on every page.

Jetpack Blocks: Add tons of functionality to your site

Free and above

Blocks make it simple to build pages and add functionality to your site’s content. Jetpack provides WordPress.com websites with several blocks that allow you to embed content, add monetization options, customize forms, and much more. Here’s a glimpse at all the things you can do with Jetpack-powered blocks:

Akismet Anti-Spam: Keep your site squeaky clean

Free and above

Spam can attack your site faster than you can say “where’s the firewall?” but Akismet Anti-spam offers professional-grade defenses. Using advanced machine learning, Akismet can filter out 99.99% of spam in user-submitted text, including spam comments, bot form responses, and fake leads, keeping your site and CRM looking pristine and professional. 

Akismet Anti-spam can be found in the Jetpack section of the WP Admin. From there, you can monitor how much spam has been blocked across your site and choose whether you want to review or automatically delete potential spam messages.

Jetpack Newsletter: Jump from post to inbox

Free and above

You no longer need a separate platform to get your content into people’s inboxes: Jetpack Newsletter allows you to convert your blogs into emails right from your post-publish page. Jetpack offers tools to support your newsletter from start to finish, from collecting subscribers on your website to sending and tracking your newsletter’s performance – all from within WordPress.com. Already have a dedicated following? Simply import your existing subscriber list to get started.

VaultPress Backup: Your site’s safety net

Business Plan and above

Accidentally broke your site with a new plugin? Never fear: VaultPress Backup has you covered. With daily backups and additional backups created every time you make an edit, it ensures that your website is crisis-proof. 

To enable backups, simply navigate to the Jetpack tab in your WordPress Admin and select “Backup.” 

Once VaultPress Backup has been enabled, it will automatically create daily backups of your site and backups after every change, with multiple secure copies stored across the cloud. If you ever want to return to a previous version of your site, click the date arrows to navigate to the date you want to roll back to. Click the “Restore to this point” button to revert your site with just one click.

Jetpack Search: Ctrl-F your content

Business and above

Do you have a large website with a lot of content? Help your visitors find what they’re looking for quickly by enabling Jetpack Search. You can turn on Jetpack Search and filtering with just one click in the Jetpack tab of WP Admin. Jetpack will automatically index all of your site content and offers flexible design options that match your brand.

For eCommerce sites, this is particularly valuable: research shows that people are 2x more likely to purchase something when they search versus standard browsing.

SEO Tools: Climb the ranks on search

Business and above

Help new users find your site with Search Engine Optimization, which helps your website climb up the ranks on popular search engines like Google. With the Jetpack SEO tools on WordPress.com Business plans and above, you can control your title tags and meta descriptions to ensure your site is optimized for search. 

You don’t have to be an expert to use Jetpack SEO: Jetpack will notify you if your text exceeds the recommended character count limitations to ensure your metadata looks great in search engine results.

Additional Plugins from Jetpack

Business plan users and above can install additional plugins to their websites. Let’s look at two top-tier plugins the Jetpack team offers to further extend your site’s capabilities.

Jetpack Boost: Make the jump to lightspeed

Paid plugin

Speed matters: just a one-second delay in website loading times can cause a 20% drop in website conversions, with slow sites causing users to experience stress equivalent to watching a horror movie or taking a math test. With Jetpack Boost, you can get suggestions to optimize your website and give your website a relative speed score. Boost will also optimize your code for ultra-fast response times, no developer required.

With Jetpack, you can be sure you’re getting the best: Boost beat out the top 5 WP performance plugins in a head-to-head test.

Jetpack CRM: Know your customers

Paid plugin

For a fully integrated, simple CRM, try out Jetpack CRM (formerly known as Zero BS CRM). Jetpack CRM allows you to manage your customers and website visitors with ease, ensuring you never lose a contact or a sale. With integrations for WooCommerce, Paypal, Stripe, Gravity Forms, and more, you can ensure all your data and sales operations are at your fingertips. Unlike complex CRM platforms, Jetpack CRM keeps things simple so that you can run your business effortlessly.

Ready for takeoff?

With Jetpack built into every WordPress.com website, you get best-in-class tools to help build and grow your site, no matter which plan you choose. It’s that special ingredient that helps make WordPress.com the best place to host your website (in our biased opinion). Sign up to create your first website today or upgrade your existing plan to access everything Jetpack has to offer.

Luckily, for people with visual impairments, those dealing with slower internet connections, and even the robots powering search engines, there’s a simple yet powerful solution: alt text (short for alternative text). This unsung hero of the digital world ensures that everyone can access and benefit from the images we often take for granted.

What is alt text?

Alt text is exactly what it sounds like—a description of an image that appears on the page. Simple, right? But there’s more to it than that. To write truly effective alt text, it’s important to understand why it matters, when an image needs an alt attribute (spoiler alert: not every image does!), and the best tools to help you make sure your images are covered. Let’s dive in and make your alt text work smarter, not harder!

Why alt text is important

Alt text isn’t just a box to check—it’s a powerful attribute that serves two important purposes: making your content inclusive and helping search engines understand your images.

Accessibility

Alt text provides a written description of an image for those who rely on screen readers or encounter issues loading images. It’s there to ensure that no matter the barrier—be it visual impairments or low-bandwidth connections—your content remains accessible and meaningful to all users.

Without proper alt text, you risk not only making your site inaccessible to visitors but also potentially violating accessibility laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which could result in fines or other legal consequences. Similar laws are found throughout the European Union, Canada, the Republic of Korea, and Australia—just to name a few. If you’re trying to make the case for an equitable online experience for your team, this is a great place to start.  

Want to learn more about building an inclusive online community? Here are a few resources to get you started: 

• WordPress Accessibility Day
• WordPress Accessibility Standards
• WordPress Accessibility Forum

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine crawlers pull several key details from an image, including its file name, captions, title, and alt text. Among these, alt text is the most important for helping search engines understand the image’s subject within the page’s overall content. This information works alongside the other content on the page to enhance search engine algorithms, boost your rankings, and drive more traffic to your site.

When writing alt text, aim for clear, meaningful descriptions that fit naturally with the page’s content. Incorporate keywords thoughtfully, and most definitely resist the urge to overdo it—keyword stuffing not only disrupts the user experience but can also result in search engines penalizing your site as spam. 

Not familiar with keyword stuffing? Keyword stuffing is all about cramming in as many keywords as possible in an attempt to boost rankings on search engine results pages. This doesn’t work and often backfires. Here’s an example:

Keyword stuffed alt text: 

alt=”Cute kitten playing with a ball of yarn, adorable kitten, fluffy kitten, playful kitten, cute kitten image, kitten for sale, kitten pictures.”

Well-written alt text can both enhances accessibility and support your SEO strategy. Use your commonsense and keep your (human) site visitors top of mind. 

How to know which images need alt text and how to write it

After all that, you may be surprised to learn that not all images require alt text. In fact, it becomes an exhausting experience for some users with screenreaders to endure fluffy alt text applied to images that don’t provide any value. Luckily for us, the W3 has categorized web images and offered some tips about how to treat images within each category.  

Here’s how to write the right kind of alt text depending on what your image is for:  

Informative images: These are the most common images found on sites and include pictures, photos, or illustrations that represent concepts or information. Your alt text should give a short description that conveys the essential meaning of the image. 

For example, this image illustrates all of the integrations available with Automattic’s P2, but those integrations are not named in the accompanying content. It’s important here that the alt text provides that information for visitors that may not be able to see or load the image. It should look something like this: 

alt="Logos for available P2 integrations: Crowdsignal, Figma, Twitter, GitHub, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Calendar, and Loom"

Decorative images: If an image is just there to look nice and doesn’t add any important info, use a null alt attribute (alt=””). This tells assistive technologies to skip it.  

Functional images: If an image works as a button or link, the alt text should explain what it does—not what it looks like. 

For example, the alt text for a video icon might say “Watch this video about hibernating bees on Vimeo.”  

Images of text: If the image contains readable text (like a graphic with a quote or a logo), the alt text should include the same words.

Complex images: Charts, graphs, or diagrams need more detailed alt text to describe the data or information they present. You might even link to a longer description.  

Groups of images: If multiple images work together to convey one idea, the alt text for one of the images should cover the whole message. A good example of this would be process shots for a recipe or other how-to tutorial that includes steps. 

Image maps: For images with clickable areas, provide alt text that explains the overall purpose of the image, and include alt text for each clickable section describing where it leads. 

Not sure how to categorize an image? Check out the W3 Images Tutorial for help. 

While there are no official length guidelines, it’s generally recommended to keep alt text under 140 characters. Longer descriptions can become tedious when read by screen readers. Be descriptive, but stay concise—this is not the place for creative flourishes.

Tools to ensure your images include alt text

Chrome Accessbility Report

The Chrome accessibility report is an easy-to-use resource built right into your browser, when you want to quickly test a single page on your site. 

Alt Text Tools

The Alt Text Tools from the NerdPress team is a free, light-weight plugin that generates a CSV file of the images used in your content, along with their alt attributes.

Once the scan is complete (it’s very fast!), you can open the CSV file in the spreadsheet application of your choice. There you can quickly identify images that have missing alt attributes and scan for any that may need some improvement. The file also includes links to edit the posts where the images appear, making it quick and easy to update their alt attributes.

Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker

This freemium WordPress plugin from Equalize Digital goes beyond alt text to ensure your site is accessible to a wide range of visitors. If you and your team are committed to making your content accessible, this is a great resource. 

Equalize Digital also runs a Facebook Group and hosts a monthly virtual meet up for WordPress  developers, designers, and users interested in learning more about creating accessible websites that can be used by people of all abilities.

Alt text may seem like a small detail, but it plays a big role in making the internet more inclusive and user-friendly. By writing thoughtful, descriptive alt text, you’re not just improving accessibility—you’re also optimizing your content for search engines and enhancing the overall user experience. With the right approach and tools, adding alt text can be an easy step toward a more accessible and SEO-friendly site.

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After delivering the evening’s keynote, Matt, Matias, and Mary were joined by distinguished guests including author and poet Mieko Kawakami, Things Become Other Things author Craig Mod, mgn CEO Hajime Ogushi, and SAKURA Internet Inc. Senior Director Genki Taniguchi. The talented pianist Aiko Takei also performed during the introduction and intermission. 

If you missed the livestream, you can watch the full event below:

Highlights from 2024

2024 was a busy year for the WordPress project. Here are some particularly noteworthy moments and milestones that Matt, Matias, and Mary reflected upon from the event stage:

• WordPress is growing in Japan (and beyond). Our favorite open-source CMS currently powers 43.6% of all websites around the world, and has a CMS share of 62.3%. In Japan, it powers 58.5% of all websites and maintains a 83% CMS share. 
• The global community is growing too. WordPress sites using languages other than English are expected to surpass English language sites by 2025. 
• It’s all about extensibility. WordPress users downloaded plugins 2.35 billion times in 2024. Users can install plugins on the Business plan and above. 
• Writing and designing with WordPress has never been easier. An improved distraction-free mode provides a cleaner experience when writing in the editor. Thanks to the new zoom-out view, you can use patterns without setting up each single block. 
• Enhancements for builders and developers. The Templates API streamlines registering and managing custom templates, while WordPress Playground became even more useful thanks to an improved Github integration.  
• Even more free-to-use visual and audio content. Openverse, a free tool that makes it easy to find open-licensed and public domain works, grew to 884 million images and 4.2 million audio files. Learn how to use Openverse directly in WordPress.com.

WordPress in Japan

WordPress is flourishing all around the world, thanks in part to the generous support and contributions of the Japanese WordPress community. Here are a few key highlights and fun facts:

• Japan was the first country to localize WordPress, thanks to a forum post from the user Otsukare. 
• Wapuu, WordPress’s lovable mascot, was created by web designer and illustrator Kazuko Kaneuchi. You can learn all about Wapuu (and even buy Wapuu merchandise) at wapu.us.
• The popular forms plugin Contact Form 7, created by Japanese developer Takayuki Miyoshi, reached 10 million downloads in 2024. You can follow Miyoshi’s blog (which is hosted on WordPress.com) at ideasilo.wordpress.com.
• The Japanese WordPress community hosted 189 meetups in 2024. Find WordPress meetups in your area or learn how to start your own meetup.

Q&A session

It wouldn’t be State of the Word without a question-and-answer segment. Audience members (including Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein) sparked engaging conversations around topics that included:

• What open social platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon mean for web publishers.
• How will AI continue to impact search engine optimization in the future.
• Why websites are still relevant (and why it’s important to own your online home)

And much more. You can watch the full session below:

Reflecting on the past 12 months and looking forward to the New Year is a natural part of the season, but blogging about those thoughts? That’s a modern twist that turns personal contemplation into community inspiration.

This January, we’re challenging you to write about the turning of the year – from your experiences during 2024, to your hopes, dreams, and goals for 2025, to everything that’s in between. We can’t wait to read what you come up with!

How to participate in the #2025-new-year-challenge

Participating is easy:

1. Write your post: Craft a heartfelt, honest, or even humorous post about what comes up for you as we enter the new year. Dream big, get specific, or keep it wonderfully vague – it’s your story.
2. Tag it right: Add the #2025-new-year-challenge tag to your post. This is your ticket to others seeing and interacting with your post.
3. Get the word out: Blog about the challenge or share this post with others. Let’s get as many stories as we can!

Discover and connect

Want to see what others created? Starting January 1st, visit wordpress.com/tag/2025-new-year-challenge to explore a world of reflections, aspirations, dreams, and more.

You might find a haiku encapsulating the past year, a fitness enthusiast planning their marathon, or someone simply resolving to be kinder to themselves. Every story matters, and every reflection is a step towards a new beginning.

Make it yours with the Personal plan

Ready to make your online presence more personalized? Our Personal plan is the perfect companion for your blogging journey this new year. Get a custom domain (first year included) and transform your blog from a generic URL to your very own corner of the internet.

Imagine telling people, “Check out my resolution progress at [yourname].com” – pretty cool, right?

Let’s make 2025 remarkable

Whether you’re nostalgic for 2024 or excited to learn a language, read more books, or simply smile more this upcoming year – we want to hear about it. Your post might just inspire someone else on their own journey.

So grab your laptop, warm up those typing fingers, and let’s welcome 2025 with stories of growth, hope, and possibility.

Happy writing, and here’s to new beginnings!