Building your website with Wordpress – Differences Between www. wordpress.org and www.wordpress.com

Most people don’t know that WordPress.com and WordPress.org are two very different platforms, most beginners confuse the two which leads them to choose the wrong platform. The difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org is the hosting.

With WordPress.org, you have the free will to host your own blog or website. WordPress.org is where you’ll find the free WordPress software that you can download and install on your own web server. On the other hand, WordPress.com takes care of all of the hostings for you. You don’t have to download any software, pay for web hosting, or manage a web server.

Comparison between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

Both WordPress.org and WordPress.com have advantages and disadvantages, depending on your needs.

WordPress.com

If you have no intention of paying for your own hosting, managing your own web server or paying someone else to handle all this for you, you should use WordPress.com option. It’s free and easy to set up and you have lots of options for customizing your site.

The disadvantage of using WordPress.com to build your website is that by default, your domain name will, include WordPress.com on it eg.www.beautifulhomes.wordpress.com

Also, you can’t upload any custom themes, plugins or modify the Html or PHP code on the backend of your website.

WordPress.org

While WordPress.org is free to set up, they do offer several premium upgrades including domain name registration (if you don’t want WordPress.com in your domain name), the ability to upload videos and if you want to use their premium themes and plugins. Using the downloaded version of WordPress from WordPress.org opens up more control and flexibility for your WordPress website, but it also means more responsibility. Using a self-hosted version of WordPress means you can use your own domain name, upload and install themes and plugins, edit the code behind your site and have total control and access to your site’s database and files. Most of the showcase sites you see on the WordPress site showcases are the self-hosted version of WordPress since many of them have unique functionality or are custom designs.

WordPress.com and WordPress.org – Which is Better?

If you are a blogger, business owner or just a personal website owner and you don’t have any interest in making money from your website, then you can go with WordPress.com.

But If you are a business owner or a blogger that intends to make money from your website, then I’d advice you use the self-hosting WordPress.org. It gives you the freedom and flexibility to grow your website the way you desire it to.

Why you shouldn’t create a blog or a business website on a free blogging platform if you intend to make money out of it.

Without a doubt,  for you to get a return on investments, you need to self-host your WordPress for your website which is the wordpress.org. this entails that you will be in complete control of your own website and content.

Think about it, most well-known wordpress website are customized and use their own brand name with a .com, .org, .ng, .com.ng etc coming after it.

As stated already, there are some issues you will encounter from using the wordpress.com version of wordpress which are;

• You don’t control your content: the blogging platform does. They could shut you down anytime, and for any reason.
• The web address of your blog will be long and hard to remember (like www.beautifulhomes.wordpress.com) instead of a catchy, branded address you can choose.
• You’re not allowed to advertise on most free blogging platforms, making it much harder to ever make money from blogging.

What you really need to gain traction and make money out of your website is to go for the self-hosting WordPress version which is WordPress.org. But the .com and .org are the same software from wordpress but the wordpress.org is without all the limitations.

Start with a self-hosted WordPress for your WordPress website that way you won’t have to experience the troubles of transferring from the free hosting to self-hosted blog. And the beauty of getting the self-hosting WordPress is that most hosting sites such as soutechhosting.com automatically gives you the wordpress.org option at the Cpanel of your website.