WordPress has a simple pitch for students: build now, worry about paying later.
The company has launched WordPress.com Education, which gives eligible students a free Student plan for their first 12 months. TechCrunch reports that WordPress has already tested the program with more than 5,000 students across 27 countries.
Students will be given a chance to build and experiment with real websites while learning skills that can carry beyond the classroom. According to TechCrunch, 88.9% of educators involved in the program said it improved students’ employability, while 81.5% said it strengthened their entrepreneurial skills.
For Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, the timing stands out as social platforms increasingly compete with traditional websites for the attention of young creators who want to build an audience online. WordPress’s response is to put more of its paid web-building tools in students’ hands for a year at no cost.
What’s included in the plan
Despite being a student plan, WordPress.com left in many of the features needed to run a standard website. In the company’s announcement, WordPress.com said the plan includes everything in its Personal plan, including an ad-free experience, plugin installation, extra themes, an Activity Log and tools for changing site colors and fonts.
The plan also includes 6GB of storage, backups, staging sites, SFTP/SSH access, phpMyAdmin and Studio Sync, giving students access to a much more capable web-building environment.
Students with the plan will also be able to use a free .blog or .art domain, giving them a dedicated web address for their sites from the start. The plan is therefore designed to support more than just classroom exercises, allowing students to build sites that can also serve as portfolios or other personal projects.
WordPress also said Student plan users will have access to its Happiness Engineers for account, plan, and hosting support.
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Why WordPress is targeting students now
WordPress.com is launching the Student plan as the way young creators establish themselves online continues to change.
Social media has become a major way for students to build an audience online without maintaining their own website, while the rise of AI coding is making it easier for people to create websites and web apps without relying on traditional development platforms.
Giving students access to WordPress early is therefore a longer-term customer acquisition play as well as an education initiative. Many of today’s students will become developers, creators, entrepreneurs, and publishers, and familiarity with WordPress now could make them more likely to continue using the platform as their projects and businesses grow.
How does the plan work?
After the initial 12 months, students can renew for $2 per month, or $24 per year, or switch back to WordPress.com’s free plan. Their posts, pages, and media remain if they do not renew, but the Student plan features are removed.
The bigger test will be whether a free year is enough to turn students experimenting with WordPress today into paying creators, developers, and business owners later.
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