WordPress – Website Builder Reviews

this app has changed my life. It has helped me on a whim; to write my feelings out and get the thoughts. All of the thoughts. A tornado….picking up trucks and cows along its path. Get them out. Momentarily anyway. The more time I make to write, the little more I start to heal. I won’t be silenced. Many have told me to stop writing. Don’t be so….what. True? Raw? Almost unbearable to read? These are my truths. My memories. My trauma. My love. I want and feel the innate urge to tell my story. I know people will listen. If I can help just one person. I’ll have done what I have been put on this earth to do. Help people. Love all of loving, warm, cozy, dopamine filled feelings that this life can give. Thank you. Thank you. I just need a more aesthetically appealing site!!! 🤣🥰✏️📝
Respectfully,
Kerry P

Yes, it’s a mobile app, and ten years ago that would have justified its limited functionality and beta-like business, but not any more. The phone I use today has twice the computing power of the desktop computer I had when I first used this app. There’s simply no reason a Mobile app doesn’t have the same options I can get access to through a desktop computer. Add to that it’s inability to communicate properly with the desktop site (like how it almost never recognizes posts started, scheduled, or even published from the desktop) and it’s annoying built in bugs (it’s actually designed to pick up already used tags only after you type at least two letters (really? If I have to remember at least the first two letters then I’m actually forced to memorize them all... so what’s the point?).

I suggest the top brass as this app use only WordPress for all their publishing needs for the next month. I’m certain we’d see some improvements. Until then I’ll just fumble through this as best I can going back and forth between app and desktop because, frankly, the website isn’t exactly mobile friendly. But then, neither is the mobile app.

In general i dont like apps. It’s the icon god to a program. But forced into some things. I’d prefer if all companies took their time, made sure all changes through apps to iPads to software updates to those were all compatible. Why make tiny update to things to accidentally leave something off every few weeks? Then have to have a million bug fixes? So for ipad I cannot see some of my pics to edit them. But can see on the post. And i have looked at all things to turn off and on. I no longer have ability as of few months ago to edit or add other features. Like main picture. Add to my headings pages etc. They no longer exist in any menu?? In new blog or edit blog. The page itself has were these categories exist but now while creating or editing a blog. I am using a free version though. Oddly to get the “visual” view to show I also ave to turn it to http to force it to flip to visual by clicking it back. If I dont do that toggle off and on, all is shaded. It’s not a choice. It’s just gray until I got back and forth to get it to be not gray?? Thats dumb.

I can live with the limited features, because I primarily want something to quickly check stats at random times. But the recent versions are painfully slow fetching updated information — and going back and forth between screens seems glacial compared to how quickly you can get the info on a web browser. The fact that you have to click on a “more” link after only about half a dozen posts (on the stats page) is frustrating. Then when you go one level deeper and come back, the numbers have reverted to a report from earlier in the day, not the one you just saw. I’m not technically astute enough to know what causes these frustrations, but it reminds me of the old days of the Facebook app, when it was just a wrapper around a web app. Also, it’s useful on the desktop browser version that it tells me what time these stats are from (for easily knowing how many hits I’ve had since that time), and it’s inexplicable that this simple feature was removed from WordPress a few years back. I realize WordPress is free — so it costs me nothing — but I think it’s borderline unusable in its current state.

I use WordPress for work because I'm frequently on the go and away from a computer, and for whatever reason accessing the site from iOS Safari makes it impossible to save anything into the body text form.

While WordPress is a lifesaver and easy to use for the most part, I'm continually frustrated by how many features from the main site are missing. For instance, there doesn't seem to be any way to assign authorship to a blog post in WordPress , and nor does there seem to be any way to edit metadata in the media library. I can live with the fact that embedded social media cards and iframes don't display properly in the text form while writing, but it would be nice if posting a raw url in WordPress 's text form automatically converted it into an html embed.

Another problem with WordPress is that it seems to have caching issues. Tons of drafts that have already been published stay visible in drafts, and keep accumulating the longer I use WordPress without deleting it. I hope solutions to these things are in the pipeline.

I’m making this brief (short memo, pun intended because it is a writing app) because if I had been asked to write a review 3 months ago I would have given it 3 stars. However, upon closing out and deleting my account over a week ago, now I’m receiving spam from one of their 3rd party partners or at least I hope it’s spam, otherwise, the alternative is this app has a security breach and my data has been compromised. In case you are wondering, TrustPilot sent me an email to the email address in this app’ possession thanking me for a recent purchase (good luck with the payment as the debit card used was prepaid and now has $0 value) and asking me to review this app’ based on a ‘free’ gift they were mailing me. How could I receive a gift since I have deleted the account and if I hadn’t deleted the account why did it take 3 months before I was told of the free gift but if there an honest to god free gift, ever, then why is this app partnering with a party just to solicit a response by offering a made up item. You can’t really trust any of these social media sites.

I used WordPress yesterday to edit my blog. Later that evening I did more writing and a editing on my desktop as I have done reliably for years. I loaded WordPress today to pick up where I left off. Not only did WordPress NOT load the most recent version of this page as saved via my desktop and instead loaded only the page as last used on WordPress the previous day, but also immediately saved the page as this outdated version without prompting, thus
erasing all progress made on my desktop the previous evening. When I looked up the page edit history to revert WordPress’s mistake, it loaded only the edit history up to the date and time when I first used WordPress. The desktop version was nowhere to be found. It did however show up in the edit history when I logged into the desktop again just now, proving that it did in fact save, so this error was entirely the fault of WordPress and thus rendering it entirely useless with no redeemable qualities whatsoever. Deleted.

I’ve been developing WP sites since 2005 and decided to try WordPress . WordPress makes it pretty easy to add new posts on the fly from anywhere + works well with iCloud Drive. One thing that is strangely missing is being able to write posts in Markdown. I’ve been writing on my phone long before WordPress, so I am used to writing in Markdown for things like headings, lists, separators, etc that I would later copy + paste into the WP editor when back at my computer. Even on my computer I use markdown while writing posts because it saves on time. Alas, typing ## and the return key does not turn my block into an H2. My custom post types also don’t show up in WordPress , nor do any post types or blocks created by plugins. I’m hoping support for these things come soon - WordPress would be perfect if it did!

I love WordPress! Super useful. I really enjoy the new updates and features. I would definitely use this and will recommend it to friends. It is possibly the easiest and most convenient way to make a website. However, I do think that some improvements could be made. For example, I often get unwanted suggestions and remarks that are not necessary. Also, when I go onto my site, the recent changes that I have made don’t appear. I do refresh the page, but find it doesn’t show up until the next day. This was a huge problem, especially, when I posted a link that led nowhere. When I tried to update it, it didn’t show up until the next day. Please check this out, and if you can, update the site more often! Love the new changes, and overall think WordPress deserves a 4 star review.

This site intentionally makes every step unnecessarily difficult. It’s incredible! Now, when I signed up, I was prepared to be “tricked” into paying for something and then finding out that there’s some dumb process in order to receive a refund ... usually the amount is so low, most people just don’t feel like going through the “hassle”. This company ALSO has had me log in multiple times, get routed to the wrong page after clicking on their link upon looking up how to change my Primary Domain page... the page was similar so it was obviously intended to frustrate the poor soul to click on the link through their “Support” tab. I’ve received error messages that my purchase didn’t go through...Thought that everything I saved was deleted...
This is just Day 1!! Seriously though, are you guys just bored? Making a profit just ain’t what it used to be?
Get your stuff together.

Once again I’ve had an offline draft trashed by WordPress , which resulted in losing about 4 hours of writing and editing. I no longer trust the this app app as it doesn’t fail safe — it fails with data loss. If you author posts offline (say on long flight without WiFi), AVOID using WordPress and compose in anything else. It is a shame, really, that the this app app can’t function on the level of the most rudimentary iOS text editor.

Loss of a star, loss of faith...

—

(Edit: It is great to hear that a number of the issues I’ve mentioned below are on the roadmap and that WordPress is not in maintenance mode. Thank you, Automattic, +1 for paying attention and raising hope for something better)

—

Aesthetics and ancient UI aside, I’m disappointed in its utter lack of any reasonable offline editing support (it kinda works, but one wrong tap and you’ve lost the draft you’ve been working on) as well as its inability to render basic HTML. Don’t believe me? It can’t render definition/description lists, a common staple of formatting for literally decades. Author a DL and it shows as simply “[DL]”. DLs aren’t exactly cutting edge and new...

WordPress rises to the top only because the others out there only aspire to be as good as this product (which is a very low bar). I expect more from the top blogging platform on the planet, but it is what it is: an app for maintaining your this app blog and little else.

At the risk of being attacked, I’d like to say that I don’t appreciate WordPress logo being turned into a rainbow for pride. While it is great for some, it goes against religious/personal beliefs of others. If you’d like to show your support, please make it where app users can opt in rather than force everyone to have a rainbow. Forcing the issue is just as insensitive and offensive as doing the opposite. Rather than automatically updating WordPress face, again, just let people choose for themselves. I’m quite disappointed that, for a platform that is designed to be personalized to suit and encompass a person, this isn’t customizable in this regard. This is a big issue right now. Please be more aware that without giving options, we are recreating the same problems with a different spotlight on it. I hope you read and take this into consideration. 🕊

Being that I tend to work on my iPad and not a laptop like most bloggers I know of, having WordPress really makes it easy for me to do just that. I do have a couple of suggestions. While I realise not everything that can be done on the browser can be possible on an app, I’m still suggesting:
1) Please integrate Gutenberg into WordPress . It’s been a bit messy going back and forth from browser to app without the integration.
2) Please integrate a way to adjust the uploaded photo size. Not just the display size but the actual image size. Sometimes, it can only be downloaded into one giant resolution that isn’t necessary for the size of blog content and it could help with storage and bandwidth issues.
Thanks! Truly enjoy this app.

So glad you added editing tools! So much easier than the web builder for me. Although I have barely begun to use it, just browsing through WordPress I’m in awe. The old app was little more than an analytics tool and way to work with comments, which for me were few. It never solved my problems, but it looks like this will.

I was literally about to jump ship to another builder with better mobile tools (ahem, Universe or Wix…) but I couldn’t justify the move when I already have so much content and widgets setup. It would have been a major process, and not likely to maintain all the features I’m using.

I only work on my iPad—no desktop/laptop in my house—but find the web builder clunky and slow. I got used to it, but at the same time it drained my creative flow and I stopped wanting to work on my site…

NOW I CAN GET BACK TO IT! Without the painful transfer out of this app. Thank you! I hope you keep improving it. (Universe’s builder is beautiful visually, maybe take a cue. 😉)

I think that WordPress has gotten a lot cleaner in recent months, and there are some features present that previously weren’t unless you were on the desktop site.

Despite that, I still am experiencing some issues with WordPress .

My first and main issue is that it’s EXTREMELY difficult or impossible to manipulate the HTML in the iPad app. For instance, resizing photos with HTML does not work in-app. If I try to do so, then publish my post, all the formatting I did will disappear.

My other problem is with text formatting. There is some bug (for lack of a better word) that occurs when using bold or italics. If I change my text to bold, then enter for a new paragraph and am still using bold, it will publish in such a way that all of the bold text is mashed together into one giant bold paragraph.

There are also some huge bugs with ordered and unordered lists. Typically, the first item in my list will “jump” to the previous paragraph after I publish the post or save it as a draft. There seems to be no way to fix this, (either in HTML or Rich Text mode), unless I’m in the desktop site.

Besides bugs, another feature that would be nice to have in WordPress is the ability to mosaic multiple photos like you can in the desktop site.

This is a very ambitious app in its scope— it is trying to replicate all of the features of WP web experience. Unfortunately, the feature set is so large and the scope footprint is very complicated for this app. As a result, while WordPress has some great features and is easy to navigate, it is some extordinarily annoying bugs, especially when using it on my iPad with an external keyboard. The sections don’t expand as I type, puting my cursor into “invisible space.” It can be very difficult to touch-select my cursor to the right spot. It has strange glitches and gets into strange states where it needs to be restarted. If it didn’t have these bugs, I’d give it a 5. I’d really like to see it stay in WordPress store and improve but for the time being it is a sub-par experience to working on the WP web on my laptop, so WordPress is not for me for that reason.

When I Thought I was getting a good deal it was all good. But I see now it’s a trick. I signed up for the premium service. Which I thought it said, they would build the website and I would have help with the building of it, I thought it said that it would be like having them sitting next to me. But that wasn’t the case what so ever. When I went to the support site (after I was emailed a link to get right back to my account) I had to login Every time. That alone was a great big pain in the rear.
And everything I wanted to add while I tried to build it? Which I don’t know how to use this program. Everyone says it’s so easy to use has experience in building websites. I do not have any experience. And now when I login to my account it says to upgrade to premium? WTH?? I have receipts to prove that is what I paid for to begin with!! Disappointed Discouraged!

I just joined a couple of weeks ago. I’m new to blogging completely. I’m trying to set my site up the way I want to do it. But there are so many posts out there that it’s hard to decipher through them to see what I’m trying to find. I wish finding help with setting it up were easier and free. The site is a little hard to use to me in that for me all settings should be together. But you have to go to different places to edit different things, which in a sense I understand but it makes it confusing for newbies!! I’m sure over time I’ll get the hang of it and will figure out how to set up my site. Trying to figure out how to make page look better and what the different things are right now.

This is the classic “I wish I could give it a zero star rating”- I am sorry, but this thing has always been very buggy and never syncs properly. Finally, I was given advice from a tech support friend at another company who was familiar with this problem: he agreed WordPress is no good and told me that it was easier to just bookmark your web page on your phone and go directly to it. He was right— I put an icon on my home screen that I hit when I want to use/edit/check up on comments etc., and it works so much better than this dumb app which has only resulted in me wasting an hour or two of my life trying to get it to work properly. Don’t like to give negative reviews but my irritation level is too high to just delete it and forget it, so a parting shot before I delete it is warranted to keep future potential users from wasting time on it. You have been warned!

I use this to post my horror stories and maintain a basic about me page. Normally don’t have many problems aside from your ridiculous pitches to reinstate my pro which I’ll never do again because holy crap it did absolutely nothing for me but remove a simple picture ad. I’ll keep your little picture ad then. But now every single time I want to update the about me page - the ONLY page I bothered making - I have to watch the update load screen load for 15 mins and when I’m sure it’s stuck I have to delete the entire app because a hard reset doesn’t work — lose everything I did - and reinstall WordPress . This allows me ONE successful update before the process repeats. Getting old fast. The second I can figure out where to make a new one that crap is gone.

I love this app, I’ve been using it for my blog for years, but it’s one step forward and 5 steps back.

Two complaints that need to be addressed:
1. Imbedded video. Unless I use the website I cannot embed videos in the post from WordPress . I used to be able to just drop the link into a text field and, viola!, the video would appear. Now, it just appears as the link, with no preview. And if I have to edit a post that has an embedded video from anything other than my computer browser, it reverts to just a link.
3. No clock coordination. I don’t know when scheduled posts are going to go live. I set the time (CST/CDT) and it either publishes early, not really a problem, or doesn’t publish at all. I like to have my posts to go live at specific times so that my regular readers know when to look. For example, if I schedule a post for 8am(CDT) on a specific day it might go live at 4am (CDT) that day or never. Come on people.

Whomever writes your update diaries: Kudos to you!

Been an avid user for close to two years. Increased functionality of phone app is much appreciated. Start blogging on iPad and resume edits on phone, synchronized same in browser. It's efficient, it's enjoyable and is effective. Keep up the good work, this app gang.

One request: make it this easy to integrate Anchor, Podbean or some other podcasting app. I have a content host, but being able to post to this app from a podcast app or vis. versa would be awesome. Partner with one of those app crews if you need to, maybe. That's my suggestion for improving this app.

Ver 12.6.1 review:
Updated from 12.4.1 to this and regretted doing so. I preview the stats page from the earlier version. This one doesn’t look as good and also loads slower. I only use WordPress to view the stats page and nothing else. I do the rest in Safari. I’m thinking of just deleting WordPress and just stick with Safari on the iPad.

Ver 12.5 review:
Newest update now crashes opening opening. Tried removing and re-downloading WordPress , but it crashed just after signing in, and continues to quit back to the home screen after launching. Hopefully an update will be out pretty quickly to fix this issue (Rating one star in the meantime).

Ver 12.4.1 Updated review:
Spoke with Charlie, a happiness engineer, and although this is the direction WordPress is headed, I was provided with a workaround to let me keep WordPress installed and use Safari to create new blog posts. So updated my rating to 4 stars to reflect the help and support received.

Original review below:
I like to use WordPress to view this app stats and I like to use Safari to create and edit posts.

However this latest update keeps directing me from Safari and into WordPress every time I try to create a new post, or edit an exisiting post.

Please add an option to turn this “feature” off in the next update.

Thank you

I enjoy the website. I just wish I had more freedom with the layout even though I am not good at coding. I also wish that placing pages within pages were made a little easier. Instead of grouping all blog post together for me that I had the option to choose which post goes under which menu item. I have the personal website which is nice for me for now but eventually I will upgrade to a business one. I also wish that the mobile app was updated to the same ability as the actual website. I cannot change the font color on the mobile app so when I update blogs it automatically changes my font color black even though on my laptop I have the font as pink.

Sept 11, 2019: Tried it again. Splash screen stays so long it’s like WordPress is hanging; trying to use Reader gifts only intermittent freezes and kill-the-app crashes; the editing is now so tap-happy just to get to a post — uninstalled, again. I’ll deal with the website. iPad Pro, first gen, latest OS. And no I won’t contact you. You’ve proven repeatedly → no point.

April 5, 2018: Max size for featured image upload is 0kb.
Late April Fools Day joke? Insanely incompetent. No. You don't need to talk. TEST the dang thing! April 9th: Surprise! Can't even use Reader. Crash City. Thought: testing is your friend, this app.

April 3, 2018: Seriously, no testing phase? Preview invariably yields a 404 error. I've sent so much time flipping back and forth re the classic /wp-admin web interface, since WordPress bombs in multiple ways, that I now use wp-admin as my go to. So much for iPad mobility. Thank goodness for my ChromeBook.

===
Previous: Search bar no longer accessible on ipad b/c only the top tip appears. HTML edit gone AWOL. No way to access featured image ALT tag. The list of infirmities stretches for miles. No clue crew re mobile access. Sad. And I'm paying for this ongoing debacle. Fortunately, only a few months to go before the annual sub date materializes, allowing me to explore alternatives.