WordPress is a free program for creating websites and running them without having to write computer code by hand. Think of it as a “control panel” for your site: through a simple screen in your web browser you add pages, articles, photos and menus, and WordPress turns all of that into a real website that anyone in the world can open.
It first appeared in 2003, and today more than four out of every ten websites in the world are built with it — from small personal blogs to large online shops. Its main strength is flexibility: you can add ready-made features (a contact form, a shop, a photo gallery and so on) and completely change how the site looks by switching a “theme”, rather like changing the wallpaper in a room.
To be visible on the internet, a WordPress site still needs two things: a place where it lives, called Hosting, and a name that people type in the browser to find it, called a Domain.