WordPress.com has launched WordPress.com Education, a program that gives participating students a full hosting plan free for their first year, with no credit card required. The plan includes 6 GB of storage, plugin support, developer tools and a free .blog or .art domain, while teachers can bring the service into courses and classroom projects.
Automattic announced WordPress.com Education at its annual WordCamp U.S. conference on Monday. The program is intended for classes that teach website building as well as other projects where students need to create and manage websites.
Students Get Business-Level Development Tools
The Student Plan is not a reduced version of WordPress.com hosting. Students receive staging sites, backups, plugin and custom theme support, SFTP and SSH access, phpMyAdmin, GitHub deployments and PHP version switching, alongside 6 GB of storage.
Teachers apply to the WordPress.com Education program using an official school email address and receive validation codes for participating students. Each student then creates a separate WordPress.com account and owns the site they build, while teachers can be invited as administrators if they want to follow students’ work.
The program also gives students a free .blog or .art domain during the first year. Other domain extensions can be purchased separately.
Sites Can Remain Online After the Free Year
After the first 12 months, students can keep the Student Plan for $24 per year, or $2 per month, plus any applicable domain costs. Students who choose not to renew can move to WordPress.com’s free plan without losing their pages, posts, comments or uploaded media.
The free version does not retain the Student Plan’s .blog or .art domain, third-party plugins or custom themes. Functionality tied to those plugins would also no longer be available.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is introducing the education program as WordPress remains widely used for website publishing. The supplied article states that the open-source WordPress software powers about 43% of websites on the internet.
WordPress.com said it tested the education program with more than 5,000 students across 27 countries before its wider release. In surveys of participating educators, 88.9% said WordPress knowledge combined with the program improved students’ employability, while 81.5% said it improved their entrepreneurial capacity.
Featured image credits: Phil Oakley via Flickr
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