Today at WordCamp US 2026, we’re officially launching WordPress.com Education.
At its heart is a free dedicated Student Plan, built to give students the tools of a professional WordPress.com environment while they learn.
Now, students can build real websites in a professional environment that they can keep using after the course ends. |
We’ve been quietly piloting this for the past year, and it’s already reached more than 5,000 active students across 27 countries. Now we’re ready to open the doors. |
How do we give the next generation the best tools, so they don’t have to write with a borrowed pen? |
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That line is the whole reason WordPress.com Education exists. |
The Student Plan: Free professional WordPress.com tools |
Any teacher can apply for their class at wp.com/edu and get, for every student: |
- A real WordPress.com plan: The same platform millions of businesses run on. No watered-down “student tier,” no restricted plugin access.
- A free domain name: Students can register a .blog or .art domain at no cost (our two education-eligible TLDs for this initial phase).
- Plugin support: Students can install plugins and extend their sites as part of their coursework.
- The first year, completely free: No credit card required.
This isn’t a stripped-down classroom version of WordPress.com. The Student Plan includes plugin support, 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync. Students learn and build with many of the same tools they’ll encounter working with WordPress professionally. |
After year one, renewal is just $2/month ($24/year) — a price that keeps the site online and accessible long after the course ends. |
That last point matters more than it might sound. This isn’t a throwaway class project that disappears when the semester ends. It’s a real website, on a real domain, that a student owns and can carry into a portfolio, a job application, or their first freelance client — for less than the price of a coffee a month. |
And even if a student decides not to renew after the first year, nothing gets deleted. The site simply drops to a free WordPress.com plan on a free subdomain, and every page, post, comment, and media file the student created stays exactly where it is, fully intact and online. |
No countdown timer, no “pay or lose your work” ultimatum. The portfolio a student spent a semester building is theirs to keep, whether they renew or not. |
Why we built the Student Plan for real classrooms |
Teachers tell us the same challenges come up again and again:
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Setup takes too long. Creating accounts, configuring sites, troubleshooting access issues — all before the actual coursework even starts. WordPress.com handles the infrastructure so you can focus on teaching. |
Students lose their work when the semester ends. Most classroom tools delete everything once the course closes. Motivated students who want to keep building have nowhere to go. With WordPress.com Education, every student owns their site and can keep it live for $2/month — or take their content with them, anytime. |
Not every student starts from the same place. Students in under-resourced schools or countries often face barriers that limit what they can build or access online. |
This program gives every student the same professional-grade platform, the same custom domain, and the same opportunity to create a real web presence — no matter where they’re starting from. |
Preparing students for the real web |
Education systems around the world are rethinking what digital literacy means in the age of AI. |
We think the answer starts with ownership — not another walled-garden tool that disappears the moment a subscription lapses, but the open web itself. |
Students leave with a domain they control, content they own, and practical WordPress skills built on the fundamentals that power over 40% of the internet. |
It’s already working: 5,000+ students, 27 countries |
At IES LuÃs Seoane in Spain, marketing teacher JoaquÃn says giving students access to WordPress.com from day one lets them work in a real environment. More than 20 of the program’s 30 students went on to internships, and employers were “surprised by the level our students bring—not just in SEO and SEM strategy, but in working with WordPress.” |
I love the ‘forever’ nature of this. My students can build a real portfolio that they can keep and use after the course ends. |
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— Javier, Media Studies Teacher, San Telmo Arts School, Spain |
Survey results from pilot educators confirm this:
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- 88.9% said WordPress knowledge, combined with the program, improves their students’ employability.
- 81.5% said it improves their students’ entrepreneurial capacity.
Real skills, on real infrastructure, translating into real outcomes — internships, jobs, and the confidence to launch something of their own. |
Building the bridge to the community |
WordPress.com Education is also a bridge into the wider WordPress community. Beyond our own classroom program, we’re supporting two WordPress.org initiatives with free WordPress.com hosting: |
- WordPress Credits is a WordPress Foundation program that partners with educational institutions to engage students in open source contributions. We provide free hosting to participants, and 150+ students have benefited so far.
- WordPress Campus Connect is a WordPress.org initiative that brings local WordPress communities into higher education institutions through student-led events. WordPress.com has sponsored dozens of these events with free hosting for organizers and attendees.
It’s about moving students from “I have a website” to “I’m part of a global open source community” and doing our part to strengthen the programs the wider WordPress project has already built. |
Bring WordPress.com to your classroom |
WordPress.com Education is more than free hosting. It’s a program that works alongside educators to prepare students for the future of the open web, helping them retain ownership of their content while strengthening their employability and entrepreneurial skills. |
This includes initiatives such as AI-assisted website creation, microcredentials, and professional certifications designed to build practical skills, validate knowledge, and turn ideas into real-world opportunities. |
If you’re a teacher, department head, or program coordinator who wants your students building real, lasting websites they can own and grow — apply today. |
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July 31 – August 13, 2026 |
Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog. There are two bigger updates worth paying attention to this round, as well as a run of fixes: |
You know your brand, now your site does too |
Getting AI to write or design in your brand’s voice usually means describing that voice from scratch every single time, or settling for generic output when you don’t. |
Guidelines is a settings page where you write it down once: how you write, what your images should look like, and what you’re trying to accomplish. The WordPress Agent in the editor, via Telegram, or via email pulls from those guidelines so any and all outputs are grounded in what makes your site uniquely yours. |
Plus, you don’t have to start from scratch. On a paid plan, the WordPress Agent can read what you’ve already published and draft your guidelines for you, every section at once or one section at a time. Each suggestion arrives as a change you can accept or dismiss, nothing is saved until you choose to, and your published posts and pages are never edited without your review. |
Know where your plan stands before it lapses |
The purchase page for your plan now tells you plainly what’s happening and what it means for your site. As your expiration date gets closer, the message escalates from a heads-up months out, to a warning at 60 days, to an urgent notice in the final week. Each one spells out what you’d actually lose if your plan expires, too: things like plugins, custom themes, and your storage. |
We shipped reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com too, including: |
- Adding FLAC to the audio formats you can upload on a paid plan, alongside MP3, M4A, WAV, and OGG.
- Giving you more context if your card was declined and your payment fails so it’s easier for you to troubleshoot.
- Giving you a way out when a plugin install stalls (going to your plugin list or contacting support), instead of waiting for it to resolve itself.
- Stopping posts from showing up multiple times in the Reader.
- Sharpening featured images in the Reader’s compact mobile view.
- Improving the contrast and accessibility of the Views and Visitors chart in Stats.
If you’ve noticed these changes, we’d love to know what you think — leave a comment below! |
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WordCamp US 2026 is coming to Phoenix for the first time on August 16–19, and there’s a lot competing for your time and attention.
If you’re planning your schedule, start here: our selection of eight speakers worth catching, hands-on demos of WordPress Studio and WordPress Agent, and something new for students and educators. |
This year, we’re offering a sponsor code WordPress.com-friend20 for 20% off general admission. |
8 talks worth adding to your WordCamp US schedule |
WordCamp US 2026 has a strong AI thread this year, and Automattic speakers are right in the middle of it.
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We’re talking about vibe coding and agentic commerce to agency workflows, and the future of open source.
If you want to hear from the people building across WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Automattic, start building your schedule here: |
- Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO joins Robert Jacobi in a fireside chat on the state of open source. AI, changing expectations, and the future of WordPress are all on the table, but the useful part is that it isn’t meant to be a prepared keynote: the final 30 minutes are audience Q&A. If you have a burning question about where WordPress goes next, this is your chance to ask it.
- Klaus Harris works on learning and credentialing at Automattic after more than 18 years as a software developer. In “The Making of a WordPress Credential,” he joins Dr. Leslie Thomas to unpack a problem the ecosystem has somehow lived with for years: employers need a better way to recognize real WordPress engineering skill. The session goes behind the year-long Automattic effort to build a professionally governed credential, not another badge you collect and forget about.
- Brian Coords, Developer Advocate at WooCommerce and one of the block-theme community’s go-to teachers, is tackling the question every agency is quietly nervous about. His session, “The Site Is the Source of Truth: Block Themes, AI, and Agency Workflows,” makes the case that once AI starts editing production sites directly, the site itself, not the AI’s memory of what it did, has to stay the one source of truth.
- Shani Banerjee, WooCommerce Developer Advocate, joins Danny Dudzic to take the agentic-web conversation in a very practical direction: the checkout. “From Crawlers to Customers: WordPress and the Rise of AI Buyers” looks at what changes when bots stop simply indexing your site and start comparing products, making decisions, and potentially buying. If AI agents become a new kind of customer, WordPress and WooCommerce have to be ready for more than traffic.
See how WordPress.com is helping students build on the open web |
WordPress.com Education gives students access to a professional WordPress.com environment where they can build real websites, learn practical web skills, and keep ownership of what they create. |
As Javier, an IT teacher at San Telmo Arts School in Málaga, put it: “I love the ‘forever’ nature of this. My students can build a real portfolio that they can actually keep and use after the course ends.” |
More than 5,000 active students have already used the program. If you teach, study, or care about the future of the open web, visit our booth to see how WordPress.com is connecting classroom work to real-world skills and the wider WordPress community. |
At WordCamp US, we’ll have something exciting to announce about what’s coming next for students and educators. |
Come say hello at the WordPress.com booth |
At the WordPress.com booth, our message is WordPress for the future. Our demos of Studio and Agent show what that future looks like: new ways to build, manage, and work with WordPress.
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WordPress Studio is our agentic development tool for WordPress developers and agencies. We’ll demo a brand-new UI, and you’ll see how our Studio Code agent can build, make changes, and ship to production, all from a conversation. |
WordPress Agent is for people who spend more time running a site than coding one. The demos cover guidelines as memory, editorial review, image editing, and using the Agent through email and Telegram. |
Watch the demos, ask questions, and tell us how these tools can improve. |
Help shape what we build next |
The booth isn’t a finished-product victory lap. We’re using WCUS to learn what sparks your interest, what gives you pause, and how we can do better and build better to support you well into the future. |
If you work at an agency, bring the client workflow that wastes your time so we can help solve it. If you publish or run a business, bring the task you wish your site could handle for you. Our booth staff will take that feedback back to the teams that build and market the products. |
Have fun with something decidedly offline |
After all the talk of AI, there’s something deliberately analog waiting in your attendee bag: The Little WordPress.com Zine. |
Inside are stories from people building on WordPress.com, a few gloriously low-tech activities, and a look at WordPress Studio and WordPress Agent.
The stories inside are all wrapped around a bigger idea: the things you build on the web should belong to you. |
It’s a limited edition made for WordCamp US 2026, included in your attendee bag. |
Don’t miss out on WordCamp US 2026 |
WordCamp US 2026 runs on August 16–19 at the Phoenix Convention Center. |
General admission is $100, while student tickets are just $25. Use sponsor code WordPress.com-friend20 for 20% off general admission.
Your ticket covers: |
- Two conference days with more than 50 talks and workshops
- Contributor Day
- Showcase Day
- Lunch and all-day coffee
- Sponsor Hall access
- Closing social
From the team at WordPress.com, we can’t wait to see you there in person, either at our booth or at the many social events! |
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