WordPress is the most popular content management system in the universe. WordPress.com is a free or low-cost hosting option that uses WordPress. It’s a great choice for your family book club site, your private blog, or a classroom project. Does WordPress.com make sense for your practice website, your professional site, or your business online presence?
WordPress thinks so.
WordPress.com still offers a free plan and low-cost plans, but they also offer business plans that cost about the same as business hosting for your WordPress.org website.
Super easy start
If you decide to make a new website at WordPress.com, there is a wizard that puts in words and pictures for you, offering you a business website that is modern, calm, professional, and so on. There are also nearly 300 available themes, and site owners on the Creator or Entrepreneur plans can upload a purchased or custom theme.
Once you’ve chosen a theme and WordPress.com has set it up for you, you get a checklist:
There are a couple more items: “Register a custom domain” and “Get the WordPress app.” Custom domain use is not free. Writing new homepage text to replace the generic starter text at your new website is not a 5 minute job. And you cannot expect to complete this checklist and have a successful professional website. This overly optimistic approach is basic to WordPress.com.
The theme you choose will, for example, include a page with step by step instructions.
These are nice, clear instructions. But you’ll notice that there is no discussion of how to plan your site architecture, branding, or customer path to purchase. “Create a page” doesn’t mention content. And you have to have quite a few functioning posts and pages just to set up the homepage correctly.
So your WordPress.com business site will be easy to build, but not as easy as WordPress.com pretends, and low cost, but not as low cost as you might have thought.
However, setting up a WordPress.org website can actually be impossible for a beginner, and it will generally not include a free option.
WordPress.com is web hosting
The free and low-cost plans do not allow you to install Google Analytics or plugins. You can choose a pricier plan to get more flexibility, and more choice of themes. Having your site hosted at WordPress.com gives you very robust, highly secure hosting at a very reasonable price. The capacity is impressive and their higher-end plans have few limitations.
We now have two websites hosted on the Creator plan, as well as several personal WordPress.com websites. Moving the two large professional sites onto WordPress.com was not simple, but we got good technical support. One of the clients’ office staff had some trouble getting used to the new interface, which is different from WordPress.org sites, but that’s human beings for you. Once the sites got moved and settled in, we have had no problems.
In fact, I would bet that most people would not be able to tell which of our sites are hosted at WordPress.com.
You get the WordPress.com interface
At WordPress.com, you can put all your WordPress websites, including both WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites, onto a single list and move among them easily from that one page. When you’re in one of the WordPress.com sites, you can easily switch to another WordPress.com site with one click. You can see new comments and subscribers for all your sites at a glance.
This is handy if you manage multiple websites.
Your content belongs to… maybe you
In a way, your content belongs to Automatic. By using the service, you give them worldwide rights to use your content as they see fit. “By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world- wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing, and promoting your blog.” Also, “Automattic may terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately.”
What’s more, the free plan allows Automatic to place ads on your website.
This creates some of the same problems you have if you choose to use a Facebook page instead of a website.
The bottom line
If your goal is to hoist up a website yourself quickly and cheaply, maybe even for free, then WordPress.com is an excellent choice. Realistically, you will probably end up with a poor quality website. However, they do give you the option of letting them build it for you. I haven’t tried this, but I can see that being an easy and economical choice.
Also, there are some things you could do to improve your chances:
- Go through the same strategic planning for your website that you would for a custom website.
- Choose a theme that does exactly what you want.
- Use large, high quality photos for your visual elements.
- Focus on top quality content.
- Pay to use your own domain and refuse ads.
If you intend to have a professionally-built website, WordPress.com hosting is a good option, too.
Do you have an opinion on this question? We’d like to know about it. Please tell us what you think in the comments.
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