Many people don’t know that there’s a distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org – they simply know that WordPress = blog. So here’s a simple breakdown:
WordPress.com
WordPress.com provides a free blog hosted by wordpress.com. There are templates and some customizations available to make your blog personalized. However, the blog address is a subdomain of wordpress.com rather than your own domain.
WordPress.org
WordPress.org is a much more robust blogging solution with huge advantages. This site is where you download the actual WordPress application – the same one that powers WordPress.com blogs. You can then easily install it on your own hosting with your own domain and really make the blog your own.
Outside of the reasonable cost for the hosting and domain, everything else you need can be had for free! The WordPress application is free, and there are thousands of themes, plugins, and extensions available to make the blog 100% customized for your needs. If you’re knowledgeable enough, you can create your own theme or edit a theme that someone else created. The functionality of WordPress is greatly extended with the addition of plugins (which wordpress.com blogs cannot use). Plugins do everything from speeding up your blog to optimizing it for search engines or even creating polls for use in blog posts.
With all the added benefits of wordpress.org and a self-hosted WordPress blog, that’s really the choice we strongly advise people to go with. If you go with a free blog on wordpress.com, you’ll quickly find yourself outgrowing it’s functionality and wanting to do more than you can with it. As a basic blogging platform it’s a good start, but it’s worth it to install your own WordPress. If you currently have a wordpress.com blog and want to move to a blog you host on your own domain, you’re in luck – wordpress.com has an easy export feature that allows you to create a file to import into your own blog for quick transfer of posts, pages, comments, and more.
Check out Domain.com‘s blog hosting plan and get started with a WordPress blog on your own domain today!
I went for the free blog and just bought my own domain name. It suits me down to the ground! I don’t need any more for what I want.
I was wondering what the difference in the .org and the .com sites were but I’ve never tried wordpress out
This blog really helped me choose a domain name