Wordpress.com vs Wordpress.org: The difference

During my workshop at June’s AZREBN, I discussed the differences between a blog at Wordpress.com and a Wordpress.org blog.  Here I’ll share some of those differences again, for those that missed the session.

To get started, I’ll define the two categories.  A Wordpress.com blog is one that appears at Wordpress.com.  The blog you create will have a name similar to stevebelt.wordpress.com.  Blogs created at Wordpress.com are free to start, though you can upgrade them for a fee, and new bloggers evaluating whether blogging is for them should absolutely consider starting at Wordpress.com.  In contrast, a Wordpress.org blog is a blog in which the Wordpress software has been downloaded from Wordpress.org and then subsequently installed on either your own server (which I do), or via hosting provider like GoDaddy, HostGator, DreamHost, etc.  Some hosting providers will even install Wordpress for you, so you can skip that step and get right to blogging.

The first consideration I like to make, is that I am blogging for business.  The blog is a part of my business.  To that end, I want as much control and ownership over my business as I can possibly get.  Today, Wordpress.com is as close to free as you can get, and has a fairly liberal policy with regard to what type of blog you can have there.  But that’s today.  Wordpress.com could change their rules at any time, for any reason.  If they did, how would that impact your business?  While I doubt Wordpress.com will change its rules any time soon (if ever), it’s not something I’m prepared to bank on, even if the chances are slim.

All of the rest of the differences are functional, rather than philosophical. The first functional difference between a Wordpress.com blog and a hosted Wordpress blog has to do with your theme choices.  Wordpress.com has ~100 themes you can choose from.  That sounds like a lot, I know.  But there are a lot of blogs, and no matter which theme you choose, you are going to be one of 1000’s that share the same look and feel.  Heck, I use Chris Pearson’s Cutline 3 on the Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog.  That has to be one of the top 10 most popular themes in existence (it’s used right here at AZREBN too), but one day, if I decide to switch, I’ll be free to do so, and not be limited to 99 other choices.

Speaking of themes, Wordpress.com will allow you to pay $15/year to customize the CSS of a theme.  But that’s the extent of the customization you can do.  You cannot change the layout or functionality of the theme, as you don’t have access to the PHP files.

As shown here in my admin panel, hosted Wordpress bloggers can make any change to the theme they want to.  I’ve made a reasonable number of changes to Cutline 3.  The sidebars are narrower, the whole theme is wider, the header is shorter, and I have a signature area with my shiny bald head in it.  Changes like this take some expertise in CSS and PHP, and many of them would not be possible on Wordpress.com.

The other big thing that differentiates a Wordpress.com blog from a hosted Wordpress blog is that you are free to install any number of plugins to power your blog.  Plugins needs some definition, I suppose before this makes any sense.  A plugin is an additional piece of functionality that you can “plug in” to Wordpress to do something extra for you.  An important plugin for you to consider would be one that backs up your blog.  I use a plugin aptly called Wordpress Database Backup.  Every day this plugin extracts everything from the database that holds all of the posts and configuration for my blog, zips it up, and emails it to me.  I have restored from this database, and it does work.  If you ever bungle up your blog, you’d be very, very happy to have used this plugin to recover it.

Other important plugins to consider are All in One SEO Pack, Wordpress.com stats, Twitter Tools, Subscribe to Comments, Similar Posts, wp-cache, Share This, MyAvatars, Gravatar, Google XML Sitemaps, Google Analytics for Wordpress, Get Recent Comments, Feed Footer, FeedBurner FeedSmith, and DoFoolow.  The names of some of those plugins help you understand what they do.  A thorough post on Plugins seems like a good idea for a later topic.

The final differentiator is price.  You can successfully blog at Wordpress.com for free.  A hosted Wordpress blog is going to cost you at least $7/year for a domain name, plus a hosting account which often costs ~$20/month.  Add to that, the hosting account will cause you to learn some minimal hosting skills, like how to FTP files, how to upgrade Wordpress with subsequent versions, how to install and change a theme, and how to install and change plugins.

Oh, and speaking of XML Sitemaps (we were talking about sitemaps, weren’t we?), there was a recent change at Wordpress.com to include as standard functionality a sitemap.xml for your Wordpress.com blog.  That’s a good thing.  If you want Google to really like your blog, you will want to register your blog with Google via Webmaster Tools and then submit a sitemap.  In the past, you didn’t have a way to create a sitemap, and now you do.

And speaking of Google, here’s an interesting factoid.  I created the Scottsdale Real Estate Blog during my session.  The first post went up right at the end of my session at 10:30am.  Google alerted me that this post was indexed at 12:50pm.  It took just 2:20 for Google to decide to index a brand new post, from a brand new blog.  For grins, I Google’d the title of that post around 3pm on Friday.  The post came up #10 in the search index.  Today it comes up #1.  Honestly that probably has more to do with the number of comments, and the link from my other blog to it.  And sure, not many people are searching on “Welcome to the Scottsdale Real Estate Blog”, but the point isn’t so much the rank on a very obscure set of terms, but rather the speed with which the post was indexed at all.