If you have ever right-clicked a website and chosen “View Page Source,” you have probably stumbled across the word “wp-content” somewhere in the code. That’s WordPress. It’s the software behind roughly 40% of all websites, from tiny personal blogs to news outlets and online shops. Yet plenty of people who use it every day still couldn’t tell you what it actually is, or why it took over the web in the first place.
So let’s start from the beginning.
WordPress is free, open-source software that lets you build and manage a website without writing code from scratch. You install it on a server (or let a host do it for you), pick a theme for the design, add plugins for extra functionality, and start publishing pages and posts through a visual editor. No coding degree required, though there’s plenty of room for developers to go deep if they want to.
It started in 2003 as blogging software. Two decades later, it powers everything from local bakery websites to enterprise platforms used by universities, government agencies, and Fortune 500 companies. That range is exactly why it’s worth understanding, whether you’re launching your first site or maintaining your fiftieth.
A few reasons keep coming up when you ask long-time users why they stuck with WordPress instead of the dozens of other platforms that existed alongside it. Click each one to read more.
Nobody owns WordPress. It’s built and maintained by a global community of volunteers and companies, which means no single business can shut it down, jack up the price, or lock you into their ecosystem. You can move your site to any host, at any time, without asking permission.
Need a contact form? A booking calendar? A full online shop? There’s very likely already a plugin for it, and if there isn’t, a developer can build one using WordPress’s well-documented hooks and APIs.
A one-page portfolio and a 10,000-product webshop can both run on WordPress. You’re not forced to migrate to a different platform the moment your site grows past what a beginner tool can handle.
The block editor lets you build pages by dragging and arranging content blocks, no different from arranging Lego bricks, without touching a line of code. When you’re ready for more control, themes, custom blocks, and the REST API are all there waiting.
If you’re new to WordPress, the good news is that you don’t need to learn everything on day one. Start with the basics: get comfortable with the block editor, understand the difference between pages and posts, and pick a theme that fits your goals rather than the flashiest one you can find. Everything else, custom development, advanced SEO, performance tuning, can wait until you actually need it.
The tricky part: that same flexibility can overwhelm you, precisely because there are so many ways to do the same thing. A tutorial can only take you so far. At some point you just need someone to tell you which of the six options actually matters.
Tutorials, forums, and a lot of trial and error. It works eventually, but every dead end costs you an evening, and you never quite know if the answer you found still applies to the current version.
You describe the problem once, out loud, to someone who has probably hit the exact same wall. Often the answer takes five minutes. It’s free, and it happens up to eight times a year.
Reading documentation only gets you so far. At some point, it helps enormously to sit across from someone who has already solved the exact problem you’re stuck on, whether that’s picking a host, choosing between two plugins that do almost the same thing, or figuring out why your layout looks broken on mobile.
Nobody is going to ask how long you’ve used WordPress before they help you troubleshoot something. That’s the point.
WP Meetup Amsterdam
That’s the whole idea behind WP Meetup Amsterdam. A few times a year, WordPress users of every level, complete beginners, freelance developers, designers, agency owners, gather at Stayokay Hostel Amsterdam Oost for an evening of talks, questions, and drinks afterward.
If you’re building your first WordPress site, or you’ve been quietly Googling the same three questions for months, come to the next meetup. Bring your questions. There’s a good chance someone in the room has already answered them for themselves, and would be glad to save you the trouble.
