We hear about two similar but different terms — wordpress.com and wordpress.org. We need to familiarize ourselves with both to spare any confusion between them. Hence, we will discuss the first topic wordpress.com in this article.

Wordpress.com is a hosting service created by Automattic, a company led by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. This would be a good choice for those hobby bloggers who just need up to 3GB of storage space and don’t really care about monetizing the site.

There are several plans available to build a site from wordpress.com. The table below has the list of the plans you can choose from according to your need.

Why choose wordpress.com?

• It is free up to 3GB of storage space. If you are sure you will not need more than that, then you got to go to wordpress.com. In the future, if you need more storage, then you can upgrade yourself to any of the above-paid plans. You can have 13GB in the premium and 200GB in the Business plan.

• You don’t have to worry about the updates or the backups. Unlike wordpress.org, this will allow you to save time.

Why not choose wordpress.com?

• Wordpress.com places ads on your free websites and you will not get paid for it. However, you can have an ad-free experience with paid accounts.

• You can not sell ads on your website which limits your monetization process. If you really want to sell ads, it is available when your site has heavy traffic and you can apply for wordpress.com’s own advertising program – wordAds. But this means you need to share your revenue with them. As per the premium and business plan, you can get wordAds right away.

• You don’t have the freedom to upload the plugins to your site. The free site users have built-in features pre-activated. Then, Business plan users can install plugins from a limited selection. Likewise, the VIP program lets you install and download any plugins.

• The theme is not customizable which means you just have a limited theme collection and can do very little customization to your site. The premium and business plans have premium themes and can also use custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheet).

• Wordpress.com restrict you from their stats. You can’t use Google Analytics or any other tracking platforms. Except for the Business Plan, because it can use Google Analytics as well.

• A free wordpress.com looks like this, http://yoursite.wordpress.com This is not a standard one because there is wordpress.com in your site address. You can remove this by using a paid plan, http://yoursite.com

• Your site can be deleted at any time if they think it violates their terms of service.

• The e-commerce website costs you $540 per year and that is a bit much for a starter. There is no free site plan with e-commerce features and integrated payment gateways.

• You cannot build membership websites with wordpress.com.

• Your site will have a “powered by wordpress.com” display tag which can be removed only with paid plans.

Conclusion

This is all we need to know as the basics of wordpress.com. We will soon see the basics of wordpress.org as well. So, if you can make it do with limited control over your site and monetization, then you should choose wordpress.com over wordpress.org.

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