Automattic unveiled WordPress.com Education in August 2026, a free program that gives students access to professional website-building tools through their teachers, with no credit card required for the first year.
The product was announced at the company’s annual WordCamp US conference. It is designed for classroom use, allowing teachers to provide each student with a full WordPress.com domain, a free domain name on either a .blog or .art extension, and plugin support.
Despite being free, the Student plan is not a reduced offering. It includes 6 GB of storage, backups, staging sites, SFTP/SSH access, phpMyAdmin, Studio Sync, and plugin support — the same tools available on paid tiers.
Teachers can use the program for courses focused on website development or for classroom projects that involve building web pages. After the first year, students can continue using the service for $2 per month ($24 per year). If they choose not to subscribe, their site reverts to a free WordPress.com account on a free domain, and all content — pages, posts, comments, and uploaded media — remains intact.
Automattic, which operates WordPress.com and supports the open-source WordPress software powering roughly 43% of all websites on the internet, said it piloted the program with 5,000 students across 27 countries. In that pilot, 88.9% of educators reported the program improved their students’ employability, and 81.5% said it improved students’ entrepreneurial capacity.
The company noted that young people today often establish their web presence through social media profiles rather than dedicated websites. The free education plan could allow WordPress to reach students in underfunded schools and position the platform as a training tool for the next generation of web professionals.
Source: TechCrunch