While a frozen pizza can often be cooked directly on the cooking rack due to its cardboard nature, a good handmade pizza has to be fired, or cooked, more carefully.
Your standard run of the mill pizza pan is good for basic heat transferrence, but its value is equally justified by simply catching pizza drippings. There is a fine line between pizza fired and pizza on fire.
True pizzerias cook in wood or coal fired ovens. These ovens are built primarly from clay or tile of some form. The goal is to build up significant heat with very equal distribution. You want your pizza pie to sit on something evenly heated, preferably of a porous nature to suck the moisture out of the dough to give your crust that special fired taste without overdone crispyness.
It isn’t practical to build a wood or coal fired pizza oven for home use so in order to get your pizza fired properly, you should invest in a pizza stone. Effectively what you’re doing is taking the concept of a full scale pizza oven and applying the porous, tiled surroundings to the only part of the pizza that actually comes in contact with another surface in the oven, the bottom.
Cooking your pizza on a thick, substantial stone means super even heat distribution, water will be wicked away from the crust and you’ll get that crispyness that you expect from a primo pie.
I’ve mentioned this in other posts too, but be SURE you preheat your stone from room temperature in the oven. Put your cold stone in your cold oven and heat it all up together. Putting a cold stone in a hot oven, especially a thinner stone will almost certainly crack it, ruining your stone and potentially being a hazard to you or your oven.
