WordPress.com has been very good to me for last 2 years. It is a very good platform to start a blog to get ones hands on it. It is a very good software.
But it is not somewhere you can stay for a longer period of time.
In my experience I have realized that it also comes with its own limitations and challenges which are hard to deal with as time passes.
Here are my reasons of switching from .com to .ORG :-
- Custom domain – I have been writing on simpleprofoundresults.wordpress.com for over 2 years now. But now it has expanded onto my personal offline business too. More on that later. Yes I know that I can have custom domain here too but it cost whopping 13$ per year. Read on to know what it not as much a good deal as it sounds like.
- Themes – The only themes I can access on wordpress.com around 180 odd free themes they offer, plus 190 something premium theme (Starting at 19$). The customizing they offer are pretty limited too considering wordpress.com doesn’t allow plugins.
- Plugins – I can install plugins on my self-hosted site. With email newsletter form popping up to SEO, Podcast plugin, and whatnot. WordPress.com doesn’t allow any plugins.
- I dont own my subscribers – The subscriber I have right now on this blog (Around 400 odd people). They are not mine, neither I have a list with me. they are subscribed to wordpress.com rss and it is limited to that.
- I can edit the code – This may be not important to some of you here, but having an accessible editable file is sometimes a simple copy paste task for changes expected on the blog/website. WordPress.com doesn’t allow you ti do this for free. For the edits you have to shell out around $30 per year.
- Space limit – wordpress .com only gives me 3gb of media storage which will seem like much, but will fill up pretty fast in few years.
- I dont own my blog – This is one of the biggest reason I am moving to self hosted site. i want to keep it simple, not run any advertisement on it and own it completely. If you people are not aware, wordpress.com runs an advt. on your site that other people see. So even when you dot run ads. People do see them when they visit you. So your site is not as clean as much as you think it is. There are ads. Its just that you are nto aware of them. Wordpress can change their policy anytime want to and I cannot do anything because I dont own it.
WordPress.org costing on bluehost/godaddy/etc.
Hosting – 8$/month – 12$/ month
Domain – 12$/ year
This is a sweet deal to me, becasue my day-job can afford it.
I will be posting my experience and tools i am using to build my site from scratch.
Keep watching this space for updates.
Love
Sumeet Soni
3 responses to “7 reasons I am moving to WordPress.org from WordPress.com”
What would happen to your wp.com followers once you migrate? I don’t have ideas. It’s easy to do that what happens to the followers who have followed your wp.com site?
I used jetpack to transfer all my old subscribers to this new blog.
All my posts and comments are transferred too.
You wouldn’t be able to see all the posts here becasue i am still in process of migrating the content. But you can see few.
You can also notice that I am replying you from my new site (as the new author).
Also know that this post is now migrated to the new blog which has the all old comments on the previous blog.
Thats how powerfully you can migrate from .com to.org.
I am glad I could help. Let me know if you want to know anything else.