WordPress began life as a simple blogging platform and has grown into the most popular content management system available today, which also powers some of the world’s most popular websites.
WordPress is entirely free to use and download. And it’s built by hundreds of community volunteers.
Friendly for Non-Technical and Developers
If you were a non-technical person or a beginner, you can buy some simple web hosting, use a one-click install, select a theme, and you have your very own website or blog in under half an hour.
For web designers or developers, or people who want to jump in even more profound, there are also many great things you can do technically to make a great website. You can code your themes and plugins, make WordPress look, and function exactly how you want it to be. WordPress is also always under constant development.
Difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org
First, starting, one of the things which confuse many beginners is the difference between the wordpress.com and wordpress.org. This is understandable since both domain names are very similar, and both are related to building WordPress websites. So what is the difference?
What is WordPress.org
WordPress.org is the official WordPress website, and this is the homepage for the popular open-source WordPress software. Open Source means anybody can use it or contribute to it free of charge. So, it has a significant community effort. We can download it, customize it, and update it to a live server once complete. He gives us total flexibility since it’s self-hosted. And also, hosting costs for WordPress is relatively cheap when starting.
What is WordPress.com
The alternative is wordpress.com. WordPress.com is a hosting web service, which allows you to have a WordPress site hosted on it. It uses the same WordPress software, but it takes away all of the setups and will host it for us. The site wordpress.com was created by one of the co-founders, but it is not free (except for free tier)
We don’t have the flexibility we have when self-hosted. We have restrictions on which themes and plugins we can use depending on the pricing plan, which we choose.
| WordPress Platforms | wordpress.com (free) | wordpress.org (free) |
| Cost | Free | Free |
| Jetpack Essential | Free | Free |
| SSL Certificate | Free | No |
| Custom Domain Name | No | Yes |
| Hosting Storage | 3GB | Depends upon hosting provider |
| Monetization Freedom | No | Yes |
| Branding Freedom | No | Yes |
| SEO Features | No | Yes |
| Free Themes and Plugins | Yes | Yes |
| Custom Themes and Plugins | No | Yes |
| WordPress.com Ads | Yes | No |
| Ecommerce Store | No | Yes |
| Membership Site | No | Yes |
| Maintenance | Yes | No |
| Full Control | No | Yes |
| Google Analytics Integration | No | Yes |
There is a free option but it will show wordPress.com advertising on your site. So this is probably not something which you want to use for a serious project. And you may want to go for one of the personal premium plans
On some of the low plans, we also don’t have access to all of the themes and plugins, which we have access to when self-hosting too. So, wordpress.org is the one to go for if you want full control of your project with a little setup work.
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