WordPress

What it is

WordPress is software for running a website you manage from your web browser. You sign in to its dashboard to write pages and blog posts, add images, and publish them, without writing code. A theme sets how the site looks, and plugins add features.

History

WordPress began in 2003, when Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little built it from b2/cafelog, a blogging tool Michel Valdrighi had launched in 2001. Plugins arrived in 2004 and themes in 2005, and it grew from blogging software into a platform for whole websites. It is free, open-source software, made by a community of contributors. As of 16 October 2026, W3Techs counts it on 39.7% of all websites, more than any other content management system.

Sources: WordPress.org: Learn about WordPress origins and version history; W3Techs: Usage statistics of content management systems

What Nextweb does with it

When you ask for WordPress, Nextweb works out what else it needs and installs that first: the PHP runtime and the MariaDB database below. Each package lands in its own folder inside Nextweb, so there's nothing to install on the machine.

Installing gives you WordPress itself. A deploy turns it into a website with its own copy of WordPress, its own database and user, its own PHP, and its own address. The WordPress page shows the whole session, and the first lesson walks through it.

Before you start

It runs on Linux x64. The site is served on your own machine; to take it public, you put a proxy such as nginx in front of it. Automatic HTTPS certificates aren't built yet. The free license covers three sites.

Versions

Published is the date the file was uploaded to Nextweb's download server.