WordPress now has a free plan meant for students
What's the story
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, is venturing into education with a new product called WordPress.com Education. The offering is part of a suite for classrooms and comes with a full WordPress.com domain for each student. It also offers free domain names on the.blog or.art domains and plug-in support. Teachers can provide students with access to the program for free for the first year without any credit card requirement.
Plan features
New student plan offers full-fledged experience
The new Student plan is not a stripped-down version of Automattic's product. It offers 6GB of storage, backups, staging sites, and other tools.
The plan also supports plug-ins, SFTP/SSH access, phpMyAdmin, and Studio Sync.
This makes it an ideal choice for courses teaching students how to build websites or group projects incorporating website building.
Training initiative
Aiming to integrate WordPress into classrooms
The student plan is aimed at integrating WordPress into classrooms, training the next generation of website professionals.
This could be especially beneficial for underfunded schools as it offers a free solution.
After the first year, students can continue using the service by subscribing for $2 per month ($24/year).
Even if they don't subscribe, their work won't disappear; it will just downgrade to a free WordPress.com site on a free domain with all content intact.
Pilot results
Pilot program's success across 27 countries
Automattic has already tested the program with 5,000 students across 27 countries.
The pilot results were promising, with a majority of educators (88.9%) saying access to the program improved their students' employability.
Even more impressive was that 81.5% of them said it enhanced students' entrepreneurial capacity, highlighting the potential impact this initiative could have on young web creators around the world.