Last updated on June 26th, 2022 at 11:41 am
The main differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
Actually, the one you select really depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
WordPress.com focuses on your nice and beautiful content while they handle the rest for you. You don’t need any in-depth hosting or programming knowledge. WordPress.com is a ready-made platform. You sign up and select a sub-domain. Then you’re ready to put your content up.
In contrast a WordPress.org site requires you to have your own hosting account and you will be hosting your website yourself. In fact, this is not that complicated as it sounds. If you’re hosting your own WordPress.org website on your own server that means that you have absolute control over anything and everything.
Your WordPress.org website will look like this.
But if you use WordPress.com and sign up as a member, your website URL will look something like this.
WordPress.com vs WordPress.org – Pros and Cons
In other words, your WordPress.com site is just a subdomain of the WordPress.com site. And because it’s not hosted on your own server, it just means that you don’t have much flexibility and room to move. And as a business it’s really not good to have a URL looking like this.
This really isn’t complicated.
If you want a complete tutorial on setting up your personal or business WordPress site, please have a look at our guide on how to set up a professionally looking WordPress.org site.
Should I host my own WordPress.org site instead of hosting it on WordPress.com
This is one of the key differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
If you’re going to build a professionally looking WordPress.org site the most important step is to choose the right hosting provider. There are excellent hosting providers such as Bluehost and InMotion that provide hosting services for literally $5 a month which is absolutely not a big deal.
For WordPress.com you can choose from hundreds of beautiful themes. A theme is just the look of your website. There are galleries of themes that you can choose from. This means that you can choose your website’s design.
It is the same for WordPress.org except that you can install custom themes, build your own, and edit your own themes from the dashboard. It’s highly customizable.
In both WordPress.com and WordPress.org, you can integrate your social media.
One of the other major drawbacks of WordPress.com is that you cannot install plugins.
Now, what is a plugin? It’s basically an add-on to allow you to improve or extend your site’s functionality. For example, if you look outside here and see this top side image, this is actually a plugin that has been added to our installation to allow for this to occur. You can’t do this with WordPress.com.
Other add-ons and plugins include contact forms, image galleries, video galleries and all kinds of things that can have a huge impact on how your site actually turns out.
For WordPress.com, you must register for an account at WordPress.com.
For WordPress.org, that’s not required. You basically own your own installation.
Having said that, WordPress.org is the best way to build a business website. There’s no better way.
WordPress.com is more for people that want to just put up a blog, or just general content to pass time.
But if you’re a serious about your website, you need to host your own installation of WordPress on your own server.
That way you have full control over your website, and limitless possibilities with what you’re able to achieve or what you’re able to add or display on your site. And you’re not restricted in any way whatsoever.
