# WordPress

WordPress is a free, open-source publishing system. You use it to build and edit websites, and can extend it with add-ons.

Source: https://ibenta.no/en/glossary/wordpress
Publisher: Ibenta (https://ibenta.no)
Updated: 2026-09-27

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WordPress is a [CMS](/en/glossary/cms). The software itself is free and licensed under the GPL, which gives you the freedom to use, change and redistribute it, as [wordpress.org explains](https://wordpress.org/about/). What you pay for is everything around it: [hosting](/en/glossary/hosting), themes, add-ons and someone who keeps it all up to date.

## Free to use, not free to own

The strength of WordPress is that almost anything can be added with a [plugin](/en/glossary/plugin). That is also its weakness. Each plugin is code from a new supplier, and it has to be updated when security fixes come out. A site with 30 plugins has 30 things someone has to keep an eye on. We have written about [what a WordPress site actually costs over time](/en/blog/wordpress-total-cost-what-ownership-means-2024).

WordPress suits you well when you want to publish often yourself and have a fixed agreement on who runs the site. Without such an agreement, the updates tend to be left undone.

## Find out whether your site runs WordPress

Open your website in a browser on a computer, right-click and choose "View page source". Search for "wp-content" with Ctrl+F. If you find it, the site runs WordPress. Then ask whoever runs the site when WordPress and the plugins were last updated, and who is responsible for it.