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Three years of arithmetic, shown line by line: $1,130.04 for WordPress with a premium builder against $1,084.00 for a hosted subscription — and the month where the two lines cross.

A site that knows WordPress well making the case against it: the four project types where a hosted builder wins outright, what maintenance really costs in hours, and the three signals that mean you chose wrong.

Three routes — the directory, a .zip upload and the SFTP fallback — plus the four-point check that should happen before any of them, because plugins are where WordPress security actually goes wrong.

A nine-phase path from empty install to published site, in the order that avoids rework — including the one setting you must change before you publish anything at all.

Gutenberg costs nothing, ships with core and is now good enough for most sites — which is awkward for anyone selling page builders. Here is exactly where its ceiling sits.

One membership, unlimited sites — that has always been Divi's argument, and in 2026 it still is. What is new is a complete rewrite in Divi 5 and a deadline for everyone still running Divi 4.

Elementor remains the page builder most WordPress sites reach for first, and mostly deserves it. The caveats are the per-site licensing, the output it generates, and one hosting claim that is simply wrong.

Same software, two entirely different products, and one number that settles most of the argument: plugins stay locked on WordPress.com until the $300-a-year Business plan.

WordPress is a content management system that grew into a website builder — and the argument over the label is really an argument about maintenance and money. Here is the answer without the tribalism.