With over 4 million downloads and counting, WordPress is probably one the most popular open source blogging platforms available to bloggers. However, while WordPress installation is famed for taking as little as 5 minutes, that’s just the beginning. If you host your own WordPress blog you’ll need to make sure it’s always secure and find and configure the right theme and plugins to keep everything working as you want. This can take considerably longer than 5 minutes. If you are not ready to install and manage your own WordPress blog, or want to try the platform our before installing on your own hosting, WordPress.com free blogs can be a great alternative.
Benefits of Free WordPress.com blogs
The main benefit of using a free WordPress.com blog instead of the self hosting alternative is the fact that everything will be taken care off for you in terms of security, spam filters and keeping the entire thing updated and running. Everything, from the most optimal setup settings to security backups is taken care for you. You will never have to worry about spikes of traffic on your blog, since it would be really unlikely that WordPress.com goes down just because you got featured on a popular blogger’s must read list. WordPress.com takes their security seriously, and uses SSL encryption to protect your login credentials, which is something you’d need to pay for if you had your own blog hosted on your own server.
In terms of traffic, a free WordPress.org blog benefits from belonging to a greater ecosystem, and features such as ‘blogs of the day’ or tags can bring you some unexpected traffic spikes. It’s considerably easier to find friends and like minded bloggers with whom you can connect by using the extensive blog tagging system provided by WordPress. It is true that, generally speaking, a stand alone WordPress blog may have a harder time advertising itself and becoming a well known part of the blogsphere, so from that point of view WordPress.org makes things a bit easier.
Drawbacks of WordPress.com blogs
While having a WordPress.com blog is free and has lots of benefits, few free things are perfect and WordPress.com actually operates a fremium model, with some advanced services offered previous payment. The first and major drawback of using a WordPress.com blog is that you cannot upload your own themes and plugins. While the variety of plugind and themes available is not bad, and you can edit the CSS to customize the look and feel a bit, this may feel very limiting to somebody intending to create a personal or business brand. While there are many WordPress themes suitable for small business websites, you may find the choice at WordPress.com quite limited.
Another thing to keep in mind is that unless you pay for it you are not allowed to use your own domain name. This means your blog web address will be something like myblog.wordpress.com unless you pay $12 to $17 a year to be able to use your own domain. Paying this fee is highly advisable, because it allows you to move your blog to a different platform or to your own hosting without losing all the valuable inbound links you have, or losing visitors who have you bookmarked on the old address.
Besides the first two issues outlined above, there’s another thing that you won’t be able to do on a WordPress free blog. You can’t use advertisement on a WordPress blog, so if you plan on making money on WordPress self-hosted is the only way to go. What’s more, WordPress can and will display advertisement on your blog if they want, but you can pay a small yearly fee of around $30 to make sure there are no ads on your blog.
Can Businesses Use Free WordPress Blogs?
While nothing stops you from using a free WordPress blog as a business, you will need to keep in mind both the benefits and drawbacks of using a WordPress.com blog. A free blog can help driving traffic to your website for free but you’ll probably feel quickly restricted by the lack of suitable themes for businesss, and the fact that you’ll probably spend hours to integrate the look&feel of your WordPress.com blog with that of your business website. Considering that you’ll need at the very least purchase a domain name and the pro-services that allow you to use it on WordPress.com and remove advertisement, you may be better off just hosting it yourself.
I am considering transferring from Blogger to Word Press so many thanks for this really useful post.
I like WordPress more, personally. And now that exporting/importing is easy the only problem is actually changing the look&feel to match your blogger blog
Thanks for visiting!
When I established my blog in February of 2010, I decided to use Word Press, but had my tech person link my URL directly to my website. This tactic has more than doubled my traffic and is nearing triple the traffic I had prior to Feb. 2010. Thanks for providing some objective insight which is quite rare these cays.
Leanne Hoagland-Smith
Author of Be the Red jacket