From Why Blog?
to WordPress, done right

WordPress.com's November 2005 homepage puts the signup box beside its explanation of blogging. You can read the whole pitch without scrolling far. The reasons to write fit in a few lines: connecting with an audience of dozens to millions, stopping the mass emails to everyone and keeping an archive of your thoughts. Below them are other people’s blogs.

Invitations to this free service once sold for as much as $90 on eBay, according to Matt Mullenweg's second-birthday account in 2007. Before public signup opened on November 21, 2005, getting in meant finding an invitation.^[1] Another route was downloading Flock, a browser with WordPress.com integration.^[2] By the date of our November capture, the blue signup box was open to everyone.

The small print draws a useful boundary. Visitors who want to download WordPress and run it themselves are sent to WordPress.org. Below that sits a credit to Ric Johnson for donating the domain. The .com is the hosted blogging service this story follows.

On WordPress.com's June 2007 homepage, a featured post about the forthcoming iPhone sits above popular blogs and posts, a tall tag column runs down the right, and the signup box has to compete with all those things to read. In small print, the login box asks Already Hip?

The tag column had an official Easter egg. In the December 2006 redesign announcement, the company told readers to narrow their browser window: the tags would drop below the rest of the page. That redesign replaced what had been intended as a temporary placeholder.^[3]

Turkey blocked all of WordPress.com in 2007, the company reported that August. It published a lawyer's letter concerning complaints by Adnan Oktar. A dispute about posts could keep readers from the whole hosted platform, including blogs unrelated to the complaint.^[4]

Christmas snow came with a server joke. A December 2007 announcement offered falling flakes through a checkbox in blog settings; the author suggested they melted because the servers ran hot.^[5] Our June capture predates the snow.

The 2008 and 2009 captures put a pale-yellow signup banner above the posts. There was more room for those posts' images, too: in January 2008, WordPress.com raised free storage from 50 MB to 3,000 MB.^[6]

WordPress.com's January 2012 homepage gives Freshly Pressed a grid of selected posts. The orange signup button sits alongside them under A better way to blog. Visitors can browse photography, travel or humor before deciding to join. Four thumbnail areas are blank in this January 2012 replay; the 2011 capture has three blank thumbnails and a missing footer emblem.

The grid’s opening tile counts the day’s publishing in four units: 307,966 bloggers, 628,842 new posts, 354,564 comments and 130,703,351 words, before the reader reaches the selected posts alongside it. The unit matters. Those are the homepage's daily figures for this capture, not a running total of WordPress.com accounts.

Seventeen days later, WordPress.com announced that Freshly Pressed would go dark during the SOPA/PIPA protest. Blog owners could choose a protest ribbon or a full blackout. The blackout option itself failed for about an hour and a half, returning blank error pages on some sites before the company fixed it.^[9] The screenshot above is from January 1, before the protest.

The footer offers several ways to keep going: support, free features, premium add-ons, a theme gallery, popular tags, advanced services and developer resources, followed by a separate group of links to apps and other projects. WordPress.com introduced that public catalogue in December 2010, with large screenshots and examples of sites using each design.^[7] The first paid themes, Headlines and Shelf, followed in February 2011.^[8]

WordPress.com's November 2013 homepage fills the screen with a concert crowd. A white panel holds signup and login, a blue play illustration and a link to discover what other bloggers are writing. The crowd supplies the audience; individual recommended posts have lost their place in the foreground.

By June 2014, even that panel has thinned out. Create your new website for free sits above an address field ending in .wordpress.com. The line beneath the headline names both a personal blog and a business site. You are choosing an address before browsing anyone else's writing.

The 2015 and 2016 captures keep the crowd, darkened with blue, and use a single button to start a website. Links below it still make room for blogging and discovery. The compact footer also points to themes and mobile apps.

There was another interface change behind the homepage. In November 2015, WordPress.com introduced Calypso, a rebuilt administration interface. Its launch account says the developers started without being strong JavaScript programmers.^[10] That was the publishing panel; the concert photograph is the public-facing page.

WordPress.com's June 2017 homepage replaces the photograph with a blue background and the claim WordPress powers 28% of the internet. Our 2018 capture updates it to 30%. Both figures describe WordPress as software; they do not count websites hosted on WordPress.com.

Under the signup buttons, a narrow announcement promotes plugins and themes for Business plans. WordPress.com's August 2017 announcement confirmed support for third-party plugins and themes in that plan.^[11] Below the blue hero, separate sections invite visitors to build a website or start a blog.

In June 2019, the headline becomes Build a website, build a movement. A circular customer portrait sits beside it, with a Free card and five paid-plan cards farther down. The capture’s HTML includes a playful an Automattic mambo credit. The company is still selling a place to publish, but the examples now include a fan base, a store and a portfolio alongside a blog.

WordPress.com's June 2020 homepage lays overlapping website examples across desktop and mobile screens. A large blue 37% headline sits above them, again referring to the wider WordPress software. The product gets a sentence below the previews: Build a site. Sell your stuff. Start a blog.

The 2021 and 2022 captures retain the device arrangement under a website-builder headline. The June 2023 still moves the headline left and shows a black-and-white magazine-style design, with a section for themes and patterns below. You can compare finished pages without first reading a blog post.

The words on the signup page stayed broad while the plan names changed. In July 2022, WordPress.com restored Personal, Premium, Business and eCommerce alongside the free plan. Its announcement said the simplified plans had not preserved the flexibility people wanted.^[12] That return came after our June screenshot; the screenshot is not a record of the restored pricing.

The 2020–2022 stills show more site examples against a green background, with blogs among them. Discovery has moved away from the front of the homepage, while choosing what your own site should look like has become a much larger part of the pitch.

WordPress.com's October 2024 homepage turns blue again. Editing controls overlap site previews beside WordPress Without Limits; in June 2025 the headline is Hassle-free WordPress. By June 2026 it reads WordPress, done right, with site recovery, developer tools and support in the text beneath.

The domain section has its own jokes. The June 2026 capture's HTML lists ssh-pls.com and gluten-free-gutenberg.com among the sample addresses. At the top of our collection, the domain credit was a thank-you to a donor; here, domains have a sales section of their own.

A site could even be prepaid for a century. The company's February 2025 announcement priced its relaunched 100-Year Plan at $38,000, including hosting, a domain and preservation tools.^[13] That is a separate offer, not the price of the homepage's signup button.

Building also gained another route: WordPress.com announced an AI website builder in April 2025, generating text, layouts and images from a description.^[14] The early page asked people to start writing. This page shows the tools and hosting around what they make. And in the June 2026 capture's code, Freshly Pressed still has a mention, inviting readers into the Reader to find handpicked posts.