WPBeginner was founded in July 2009 by Syed Balkhi as a go-to WordPress resource site for newbies and DIY users.
Over the last 16+ years, WPBeginner has become the world’s largest free WordPress resource site for beginners, and it is often referred to as Wikipedia for WordPress.
In 2011, we joined the Awesome Motive family, a company created by our founder, Syed Balkhi, to offer premier software and training for WordPress. Today, our software and WordPress plugins are used by over 30 million websites.
At WPBeginner, our main goal is to provide cutting-edge, helpful WordPress tutorials that are easy to understand for small businesses, bloggers, and non-techy WordPress website owners.
Our Editorial Team and Editorial Process
Our editorial team at WPBeginner is a group of WordPress experts led by the most well-known WordPress expert in the world, Syed Balkhi. WPBeginner Editorial staff includes a dedicated team of programmers, writers, video creators, and editors with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, web hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and online marketing.
Unlike other copycat tutorial websites, our team is full of true WordPress practitioners. We are passionate about the WordPress community and regularly contribute to WordPress core software.
Our highly-skilled editorial team manages every piece of content we publish at WPBeginner. Before publishing, our content goes through different phases of the editorial process. And each editorial phase is managed by multiple team members, ensuring the content is thoroughly fact-checked and reviewed for accuracy and integrity.
How We Test and Review Products
We actually test and use all the products that we recommend in our content. There are over 60,000+ WordPress plugins, so we take our responsibility to our readers very seriously. We extensively review each plugin or tool that we cover here on WPBeginner to ensure it’s the best solution for our audience.
How We Choose Products
Before we test anything, we decide what actually deserves a spot in a recommendation… and just as importantly, what doesn’t. We weigh three things:
- Trust factor: how widely trusted the tool is among real WordPress users.
- Fit for the job: whether it’s genuinely the right tool for the specific topic the article covers.
- Quality: how well it’s built for WordPress — well-coded, actively maintained, and a good citizen on the platform.
If a product is popular but isn’t right for the topic, or simply isn’t a strong WordPress tool, we leave it off… even if it’s a name you’d recognize.
And when a tool only partially fits the category, we’d rather point you to a dedicated solution that does the job properly.
Every product we include earns its place for a clear reason, and we’ll tell you what that reason is.
How We Test Products
For full transparency, every product review tells you exactly how we got our hands on that specific tool. Some power our own business day in and day out, while others we install and test specifically for the review. So we label each one with one of three levels:
- We run this in production: we actively use this tool to run WPBeginner or our other businesses.
- We used this, then moved on: we genuinely relied on this tool on real WPBeginner projects in the past, even if we don’t use it day-to-day anymore. We still know it inside and out.
- Hands-on tested for this review: we signed up, installed it on a staging or test site, and put it through its paces specifically for this article.
This way, you always know whether a recommendation comes from years of daily use or from focused hands-on testing… and you can weigh our verdict accordingly.
When comparing products, we run a wide variety of tests, including performance tests, speed tests, reliability checks, and scalability tests. This is to ensure that our reviews are the best in the industry. This is why users trust WPBeginner.
How We Evaluate Products
Different types of products call for different yardsticks. A plugin, a theme, and a hosting provider each succeed or fail in different ways, so we score each category against the criteria that actually matter to you.
Plugins
- Ease of Use — setup time, whether it offers a visual/no-code builder, and whether a beginner can get up and running without digging through documentation.
- Features & Flexibility — whether it does what you need today and can keep up as your site grows.
- Value for Money — the quality of the free version, what’s locked behind paid tiers, and price versus what you actually get.
- Support & Documentation — support response speed, depth of documentation, tutorials, and community resources.
- Reliability & Active Maintenance — whether it’s actively updated and compatible with the latest version of WordPress, plus install count, ratings, coding quality, and security track record.
- Customization & Extendability — whether it’s well-coded and ships with developer documentation, hooks, and filters so it can be extended. This matters a lot for WordPress plugins.
Themes
- Customization & Ease of Use — Full Site Editing and block support, customizer depth, page-builder compatibility, and how quickly you can launch and edit a demo site without touching code.
- Design & Demos — the total number of starter demos, plus how many genuinely fit the target niche (for example, a blog theme is judged on how many real blog demos it offers), along with overall design quality.
- Speed & Performance — a real speed test on a clean demo install: load time (in milliseconds), page size (in KB), and Core Web Vitals / Lighthouse scores.
- Value for Money — free version quality, price versus what’s included, and licensing (single-site vs. multi-site).
- Compatibility & Support — plugin and WordPress-version compatibility, update frequency, documentation depth, and support response.
Hosting
- Ease of Use — the dashboard/control panel, 1-click WordPress install, free migrations, staging, and how fast you can get a site live.
- Value for Money — intro versus renewal pricing (the real gotcha), plus included SSL, domain, email, and backups.
- Speed & Performance — TTFB (in milliseconds), fully-loaded time, load testing under concurrent traffic, and global response times from multiple regions.
- Uptime & Reliability — monitored uptime percentage over our testing period.
- Support — actual response time to a real test ticket or live chat (in minutes), plus the quality of the answer.
We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers. All opinions are our own, and we DO NOT accept payments for positive reviews. Unlike other websites, you simply cannot pay for a sponsored article or buy an advertising spot on WPBeginner. This ensures our content quality is always the best in the industry.
Every piece of content, including our articles and videos, is created by an expert WordPress contributor whose specific area of expertise aligns with the content topic.
We Fact Check for Accuracy and Integrity
Our editors review each content to ensure it’s thorough, contains accurate facts, and also adhere to our strict editorial guidelines. After the editors’ review, as a final check, each content is re-reviewed by the Senior Content Manager for accuracy and integrity.
On top of that, our Review Board closely works with our editorial team and provides the necessary details they need to ensure all our content is top-notch.
All improvements and suggestions offered by the board team members are shared directly with our editorial team.
Up-to-Date Content
At WPBeginner, we strive our best to ensure our content is always up-to-date. Every few months, we routinely monitor our existing content and ensure all information, including original screenshots, is relevant and updated.
How is WPBeginner Funded?
Running a popular website like WPBeginner that helps millions of users every month requires significant investment. Both on the server infrastructure part as well as on the content creation part.
Our team creates and maintains thousands of free written WordPress tutorials and hundreds of free videos tutorials.
So yes, we have to make money otherwise we would have to shut the site down. Below are two primary sources that fund WPBeginner.
Our Products
Over the years, we have created several premium WordPress plugins and business software to help you improve your website and grow your business.
Today, our software are used by over 30 million websites. When you purchase any of our premium WordPress plugins, it helps us fund WPBeginner.
We really appreciate everyone in the WPBeginner community who use and support our plugins. Thank you.
For more details on the plugin brands that we own or have invested in, please visit AwesomeMotive.com or see our premium WordPress plugins page here on WPBeginner.
Referral Fees
We earn referral fees when you buy services from companies that we recommend.
We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers. We thorougly test and use all products that we recommend. All opinions are our own, and we do not accept payments for positive reviews.
This monetization method is called affiliate marketing. The biggest brands on the internet offer affiliate programs such as Amazon, eBay, Google, etc. Many of your favorite sites use affiliate marketing to pay the bills.
You can learn more about it on our full FTC Disclosure page.
Get Started with WPBeginner
At WPBeginner, we believe that with the right set of tools and resources, everyone can grow and compete with the big guys.
If you’re starting out, then we highly recommend that you check out the following areas of our site:
- WPBeginner Blog – The central place for all our WordPress tutorials.
- WPBeginner Dictionary – The best place for beginners to start and familiarize themselves with the WordPress lingo
- WPBeginner Videos – New to WordPress? Watch these 23 videos to master WordPress.
- WPBeginner Recommended Plugins – Our top pick for must have WordPress plugins for website owners.
- WPBeginner Deals – Exclusive discounts on WordPress products and services for WPBeginner users.
If you have ideas on how we can make WPBeginner more helpful for you, then share your thoughts by contacting us.
As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner, and we look forward to continue serving you for years to come.