WordPress.com launches free student plan to court young web creators

WordPress.com maker Automattic is expanding into education with a new, free product for teachers and their classes called WordPress.com Education. The suite for classrooms includes a full WordPress.com domain for each student, plus free domain names on the .blog or .art domains, and plug-in support. Teachers can give students free access for the first year without putting down a credit card or entering a trial, letting them use the technology in courses that teach website building, or for other classroom needs such as group projects that involve building a site.

Unveiling the product at its annual WordCamp U.S. conference Monday, Automattic said the new Student plan isn’t a stripped-down version of its product: it includes 6GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools, plus support for plug-ins, SFTP/SSH, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync.

Automattic is best known for WordPress.com, its website and blog hosting service that runs the open-source WordPress software powering about 43% of all sites on the internet. Despite that ubiquity, WordPress isn’t necessarily the go-to platform for young people establishing their first web presence; those users often opt to simply set up social media profiles instead. The student plan is meant to help WordPress get into the classroom and train the next generation of website professionals, and because it’s free, it can also make inroads in underfunded schools.

When the first free year ends, students can subscribe for $2 per month ($24 a year). If they don’t, their work won’t disappear — the site simply drops to a free WordPress.com site on a free domain, with all pages, posts, comments, and uploaded media staying intact.

Automattic says it piloted the program with 5,000 students across 27 countries, and that 88.9% of educators said access to the program improved their students’ employability, while 81.5% said it improved students’ entrepreneurial capacity.

Why it matters

By making a full-featured site-building product free for classrooms, Automattic is betting it can win back a generation of young creators who now default to social platforms instead of the open web.