Pros & Cons
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- Many blogging options
- Attractive free and premium themes
- Free option
- Lets you transfer sites to other hosts
- Useful video tutorials
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- Lacks WYSIWYG editing
- Weak photo editing tools
- Lacks phone tech support
WordPress.com Specs
| Blogging Tool | |
| Download Selling | |
| Free Version Offered | |
| Site Membership | |
| Site Portability | |
| Unlimited Monthly Data Transfers With All Plans | |
| Web Store |
Although it started life as a pure blogging play and still includes many blog-focused community features, the updated WordPress.com now handles most website-building needs—including e-commerce, social media integrations, drag-and-drop functionality, and mobile presentation. Editors' Choice winners Duda and Wix are more capable, better all-around website builders. But I found WordPress.com to be a good, low-cost option for people who want to get online relatively quickly and don't mind its limitations, such as a subpar image editor and no phone support.
WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org: What's the Difference?
From the outset, it's important to make clear that WordPress.com is not WordPress in the commonly understood sense. Rather, WordPress.com is a service from Automattic Inc. that uses code from WordPress.org, the popular and free, open-source blogging and site-building platform. In fact, WordPress.com hides the server code and handles hosting. That's why it resembles website builders more than sites built using the open-source WordPress.org code, which requires you to sign up for a WordPress hosting service. You can learn more about the WordPress.com and WordPress.org differences in our How to Get Started With WordPress primer.
Plans and Pricing: An Easy Way to Blog
Like Wix, WordPress.com has an ad-supported free account level. This tier includes 1GB of storage, dozens of themes, and a preinstalled SSL certificate. Next up the ladder is the Personal plan (starting at $9 per month or $4 per month if billed annually), which adds a custom domain name, a limited selection of themes, and 6GB storage. It removes WordPress ads, but not all WordPress branding. Personal lacks monetization options, but includes SEO tools, spam protection, social sharing, site stats, and email and live chat customer support.
(Credit: WordPress.com/PCMag)The Premium Plan (starting at $18 per month or $8 per month if billed annually) increases the storage to 13GB, removes customization limits, and enables some monetization. The Business plan (starting at $40 per month or $25 per month if billed annually) includes unlimited storage space, plug-in support, and removes all WordPress branding. It also has 24/7 priority customer support and the ability to have a WordPress.com technician schedule a one-on-one screen share to quickly get your site up and running. The Commerce plan (starting at $70 per month or $45 per month if billed annually) builds on the Business tier by adding payment acceptance, marketing tools, automation, and other money-making features. Finally, enterprise-scale companies can contact the WordPress VIP sales team to discuss a custom plan, starting at $25,000 per year.
How do WordPress.com's plans stack up to the competition? As mentioned earlier, WordPress.org's software is free, but you must pay for web hosting if you opt for that less-turnkey option. Such services cost about the same as shared hosting, depending on the amount of storage, number of sites, and length of your contract. Among the pure site-builder plays, Duda starts at $25 per month ($19 per month if billed annually), Squarespace starts at $25 per month ($16 per month if billed annually), and Wix starts at $17 per month (though it has a free option). So, the bottom line is that WordPress.com's pricing is quite reasonable.
Simple Site Setup
When you select Add a New Site from the My Sites page, you have two choices: Create a new site or add a WordPress site that already uses Automatic's JetPack plug-in, which powers much of the service's functionality. I opted to start fresh with a new site.
(Credit: WordPress.com/PCMag)First, you choose a plan; I started with Free to see what's included. The first step is selecting an option from the following categories: Basic Writing and Publishing, Business Promotion, Selling, Importing an Existing Website, and Other. Next, you choose your desired site name, topic, and goal. Once these are selected, you can choose to start writing, watch tutorials, choose website designs, or skip straight to the dashboard. Note: I did this without first picking a WordPress theme or template. The default option looked pleasant enough, if a bit generic. The themes thankfully use responsive designs, so they look good on mobile devices and don't offend Google and other search engines.
WordPress.com lets you easily post to the included blog using a clearly labeled Write button at the top right. If you want to change the design, select Appearance from the left panel, then choose Themes > Editor > Customize > Additional CSS options to make the changes you want. You can also select Editor from the Quick Links section of the Dashboard. In short, I found the setup and basic editing incredibly simple.
Site Creation on Desktop and Mobile
WordPress.com's desktop site builder offers no specific tools for mobile site design, but the templates display perfectly well on the smaller screens, complete with mobile-friendly menus. Other site builders I've tested let you customize your site for mobile to varying degrees.
WordPress.com also offers useful Android and iOS apps for editing your site on the go. In addition to adding blog posts and media from the phone, the app lets you change your theme, menus, and even install plug-ins. Further, you can check your site stats, but you can't add or manage store products, unlike Wix's mobile app.
A Somewhat Dated Content Management System
The WordPress.com content management system (CMS) is better suited to blogging than to general website creation. It's outdated compared with modern web-based site builders, because it's not at all WYSIWYG like Wix and other competing platforms. WordPress.com introduced drag-and-drop functionality to modernize its editing tools, but it still heavily utilizes blocks. You add or remove content blocks for text, business hours, contact forms, carousels, comments, images (more on that in a bit), and other essential site items. Small arrows at the top of each block section let you move a block up or down. In testing, I used the drag-and-drop feature to move blocks around, but it felt oddly clunky compared with the conventional arrows.
You can install useful plug-ins to alleviate some of these issues, such as the Elementor drag-and-drop page builder. But with WordPress.com, your plug-in options are limited compared with the truly transformative plug-ins available to WordPress.org users. WordPress.com offers a good selection of themes, though some are premium and cost extra. Don't think the free themes are worthless; some rival Squarespace's slick visual style. When you click a theme entry, you get a preview showing tablet, phone, and desktop previews—a nice touch. By clicking the Activate Theme icon, I began customizing my site with payment, multimedia, and other content widgets.
Page Management and Privacy Options
There are no page choices like those offered by Duda for Contact, About, Store, and other possible sections. Instead, you have a robust list of widgets that offer those functions. You can add an about and contact block, social icons, an event calendar, a post carousel, a post list, and other sections. It's a manual process you define for yourself, rather than an automatic, pre-defined page. It gives you more flexibility, depending on your site vision.
WordPress.com is GDPR-ready, thanks to a widget that displays a cookie and privacy notification. By choosing Status from the Page Settings right-hand sidebar, you can password-protect any page. You can't drag page entries up and down to change the navigation hierarchy here, but you can do exactly that on the Customizing > Menus page. Having these closely related functions in very separate parts of the interface doesn't make much sense in today's world of DIY website builders.
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Limited Image Editing
WordPress.com lacks proper photo editing tools: you're limited to cropping and rotating. By contrast, Duda, Squarespace, and Wix offer photo editing courtesy of Adobe's Aviary online photo editor. That said, I like how the service lets me save uploaded to an online repository for reuse later—on a per-site basis.
Blogging With WordPress.com
For blogging features, WordPress.com is hard to beat. WordPress as a whole started life as a blogging platform, and that remains a strength. From just about anywhere in the interface, a tap of the Write button lets you start venting your mind to the world. The blogging interface is simple, and in fact, it's the same editing interface you see for any site page. After you title the post, you can choose fonts and formatting, and add media, a payment button, or a contact form.
When you're done crafting your post, you can publish it immediately, schedule a date and time, or password-protect individual posts. You can also assign categories and tags to the post, connect social media sites for sharing, and add a location. Once your post goes live, your readers can add comments to and favorite it.
As mentioned earlier, WordPress.com hosts a community of blogs you can find under the Reader tab of the start interface. Any users who have signed up for WordPress.com accounts can follow your site, find it in the Discover section, and search for relevant blogs. WordPress.com even recommends blogs you may be interested in following based on your activity. It's a great way to build community.
How to Make Money With WordPress.com
WordPress.com lets you make money with any of its premium plans. I already noted the easy PayPal payment option, but for full store functionality, you can add a plug-in, such as WooCommerce (made by WordPress.com's developer, Automattic). Just a half-minute or so of setup is all it takes to add a Store entry to your site dashboard. Clicking it takes you to a page with just one button: Set Up My Store. After you add standard contact info, it's a short process: add products, set up shipping, payment methods, taxes, and customizations.
WooCommerce is a well-equipped web storefront with promotions, coupon codes, inventory tracking, buyer reviews, and product options such as size and color. In addition, WordPress.com supports newsletters and email marketing blasts, much like Wix and Squarespace.
The Jetpack AI Assistant
Derived from the OpenAI API, the Jetpack AI Assistant helps with all your blogging and writing needs. You launch the prompt-based assistant from the block inserter tool. It is a powerful tool that you use to correct spelling and grammar, offer title suggestions, translate writing into different languages, or even look up information.
(Credit: WordPress.com/PCMag)For example, I asked the AI Assistant to list a few must-see locations in Seoul, South Korea, and was pleasantly surprised by the suggestions it offered. Note, however, that this feature is no longer free and now starts at $5 per month. Furthermore, I still don't recommend using AI for your site-building needs, as a human touch is far superior.
Publishing and Traffic Stats
WordPress.com gives you many publishing options. You can preview the site at any time and schedule page updates by date and time. Save a draft after an edit without specifying a time if you're not ready. You can make a whole site private, only accessible to those whose emails you enter, and you can password-protect individual pages, as you can with many site builders, including Weebly.
WordPress.com's site management console offers robust site statistics. You get the expected tallies of views, visitors, likes, and comments, along with top search terms and even a map of your visitors' geographic locations. An Insights tab lets you see your top days and times, as well as top posts and products.
WordPress.com claims its sites have excellent SEO, and you can tweak elements like meta titles and descriptions. The WP Admin page (separate from the site's dashboard or the individual site editing menu) offers a place to submit your site to search engines, which is essential if you want traffic.
One advantage of WordPress is that your site is portable: You can save its content as an XML file and move it to another WordPress web host if you like. Doing so requires that you install the JetPack plug-in on your WordPress host server.
Free and Paid Customer Support
Free WordPress.com sites offer only community support, while paid accounts get email and chat support 24 hours a day, Monday to Friday. Most WordPress.com pages also offer support from a question mark icon in the lower right of the editor page. After clicking that, you can type in a search box to find knowledge-base articles on your question, or initiate a chat. Business plan customers are entitled to a one-on-one, 30-minute Concierge orientation session (Zoom video screen share with audio) with a WordPress expert, but there's no regular phone support.
I asked about how to sell digital downloads and how to connect a domain from another registrar. After I typed a query in the help panel, the panel displayed the message, "We've received your message, and you'll hear back from one of our Happiness Engineers shortly." The initial chat was answered in less than a minute, and the support representative was knowledgeable.