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Office of Information Technology 
Web Publishing

Web Publishing Free Tier

All students, staff, and faculty at NC State are eligible to create a free WordPress blog.

The free tier of the Web Publishing service offers free websites for the NC State community. All students, faculty, and staff at NC State can build as many free-tier websites as you want in the Web Publishing service..

When you build a free website with Web Publishing, you get:

  • Your own website at a [something].wordpress.ncsu.edu URL.
  • A curated set of themes and plugins to extend your website, including the NC State Theme designed by University Communications. (Additional themes and plugins are not allowed at this level.)
  • Access to learning resources.
  • Support from the NC State Help Desk when you need assistance.

Frequently Asked Questions

In the free tier of Web Publishing, you can only use a fourth-level domain under wordpress.ncsu.edu: for example, [something].wordpress.ncsu.edu. If you need another URL, you will need to use the paid tier of Web Publishing.

You’ll have access to a number of plugins and themes that have been licensed for campus, including The Events Calendar, Gravity Forms, and more. You’ll also get access to many plugins which have been developed for the NC State community, including Protected Content and the free version of the NC State Theme!

We are working on compiling a list of all plugins and themes that are available to free users – please keep an eye out!

In addition to many resources available from the WordPress community, you can also reach out to the NC State Help Desk for assistance.

To balance the needs of keeping our environment clean and serving the needs of our community, we only remove a website if it meets all of the following criteria:

  • the site has no active NC State users that can edit content,
  • the site has had no changes to its content in the past year, and
  • the site has had fewer than 1,000 hits in the past 30 days.

We provide the option for users to export their sites before they graduate or leave the university, though we cannot guarantee compatibility with other services because they may not have the themes and plugins we offer.

For student organizations, we recommend that you use DASA’s Student Orgs WordPress instance.
For coursework, we recommend that faculty use WolfWare WordPress.

For more information on our other web hosting options, please visit Get on the Web.