WordPress Offers Students Free First Hit of Plugin Dependency
Company hopes to inspire the next generation of creators by letting children experience PHP errors before they’re emotionally equipped to process them.
SAN FRANCISCO — In a bold effort to remain relevant among young people who believe websites are the thing that opens before the TikTok app, WordPress.com has launched a free student plan featuring domains, plugins, staging sites, SSH access, phpMyAdmin, and 6 GB of storage. The first year is free; continued access costs $2 per month. TechCrunch
“Today’s students deserve practical, career-ready skills,” said an Automattic spokesperson. “That’s why we’re teaching them how to spend six hours identifying which plugin destroyed the website after a routine update.”
Under the new program, every student will receive a free .blog or .art domain, allowing them to build a professional portfolio at addresses such as jaydensigmaportfolio.blog and mrsrobinsons-third-period-group-project-final-FINAL-2.art.
Students will also gain access to advanced professional tools, including:
- Installing 37 plugins to reproduce functionality available natively everywhere else
- Learning that “Deactivate” and “Delete” are spiritually different concepts
- Discovering three abandoned plugins are somehow essential to the homepage
- Clearing the cache and lying that it fixed the problem
- Telling a client, “That’s probably Cloudflare”
- Editing one line of CSS and immediately adding “Full-Stack Developer” to LinkedIn
Teachers welcomed the program, particularly the inclusion of plugin support.
“I used to spend class time explaining HTML, design, accessibility, and how the web actually works,” said high-school technology teacher Megan Walsh. “Now I can spend it asking 28 students which asshole installed Elementor, Gutenberg, Divi, Beaver Builder, and WPBakery on the same website.”
WordPress said its pilot program reached 5,000 students across 27 countries, with 88.9% of educators reporting improved employability. Researchers believe the remaining 11.1% had already checked Indeed and discovered every WordPress position required eight years of experience, advanced PHP, server administration, SEO, graphic design, cybersecurity, client support, and the willingness to work for $19 an hour.
The program also includes backups and staging sites, teaching students the foundational web-development principle that every tiny change must first be tested on an identical copy of the website—before being pushed directly to production at 4:57 p.m. Friday without telling anyone.
Upon completing the course, qualifying students will receive a certificate confirming they can build a professional website, troubleshoot a fatal error, and confidently blame “a plugin conflict” without possessing the slightest fucking idea which plugin caused it.
“At least they’ll graduate prepared,” Walsh said, watching the school newspaper’s homepage redirect to an Indonesian gambling site. “Some of these kids are only 15, and they already look 46.”