In August 2026, Automattic launched the WordPress.com Student Plan, a free hosting package designed for students enrolled at participating educational institutions.

The plan provides each student with a managed WordPress.com site, a free .blog or .art domain, 6GB of storage, automated backups, staging environments, and the ability to install plugins and themes.

It positions itself as giving students “professional skills” and “employability,” but it accomplishes neither. Let me explain.

It teaches the wrong thing

First of all, it the WordPress.com Student Plan teaches content management and website publishing with WordPress only. It does not teach web development fundamentals or how the internet actually works. You can build a website in WordPress without ever seeing a single line of code or any real understanding of what a database is. Sounds convenient, but it is not a good thing.

It is inherently unsafe

Secondly, while WordPress.com claims to provide world-class security, performance, scalability, and support, so that you have the freedom and flexibility to create and build your brand… The reality could not be more different.

The Student Plan, although part of WordPress.com, is an accident waiting to happen. The guardrails Automattic provides at the infrastructure level (DDoS protection, automated backups, malware scanning) evaporate the moment a student installs a plugin. And that is exactly where things go wrong, because the vast majority of WordPress hacks exploit plugin vulnerabilities. The Student Plan hands students full SSH access and the entire unvetted plugin directory, which is the same attack surface that takes down professional WordPress websites. Imagine the legal battles these students might face in two years, when these websites get hacked…

The right choice is easy

If you want to learn how to publish an effective, reliable and safe website on WordPress, you should use a WordPress.com Premium account. This plan has the right guard rails and is the perfect balance between safe and effective.

Or… even better… do not worry about clients doing content updates while you are still in school. Stick to building simple websites and learning the building blocks of the internet (mainly Javascript, HTML and CSS). That will give you a profound understanding of how the web works. And the best thing: you can host it truly free and safe on Github.

Conclusion

The Student Plan tries to be everything (free, professional, powerful, safe) and succeeds at none of them. It is not really free, it might teach you very little about web development, and it is unsafe to use. So if you are still in school, I think your choice is simple: take the sandbox of a Premium account, or skip WordPress altogether and learn web development properly by starting with a static website.

PS. Geoff Graham from CSS-tricks likes my post(!), but does not agree with me. I can see why. Please also read his take. It is informative and a good reminder that there is not one single truth.

()  Joost van der Schee