WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org – The Definitive Overview for Business

Nov 19, 2009
31 Comments

wordpressvswordpress

Do you feel as though blogging is more complex than it’s been made out to be? When you’re new to blogging, choosing a blogging service or software is overwhelming. Many people never even learn that there’s a version of WordPress you can put on your own domain. The dot com version of WordPress is the first thing they encounter and off they go. If you are aware there are two versions of the world’s most popular blogging software, you’re now faced with a decision–one you don’t feel qualified to make.

You feel there’s a lot riding on this decision, and you don’t want to screw it up. Let me put your mind at ease by telling you that you aredefinitely going to screw things up. There’s another word for this: learning. I’m only partly kidding. Seriously: doing things is better than not doing anything. Movement is progress. But we like to learn quickly, rather than slowly. We like to avoid mistakes made by others if we can. I hope this post helps you in that regard.

Be aware, however, that I focus on business owners, and I treat blogging as marketing for a business. I’m going to cover this from that angle. I’m not a “problogger,” and it’s likely you aren’t either. We’re marketing a business, and our long-term goal is sales.

Your One-Sentence Answer: For business marketing, you want to use WordPress on your own server, which means WordPress.org.

For the longer answer, I’m going to break it down for you by listing out the major differences along a few major broad categories.

Hosting: Self or Other

The biggest major difference between the two WordPresses is that the dot com version is hosted for you for free on Automattic’s servers, while the dot org version is software you install on your own web server. Automattic is the parent company of WordPress. Hosting with WordPress.com means you save a lot of money, because it’s free, and you never have to worry about your server crashing. You never have to worry about upgrades, because they’re automatic. Everything just works.

To receive those benefits requires you to give up something very important to a business: sovereignty. You don’t control the software or the server. There are incredible extras and freedoms unavailable to you if you go with the dot com version of WordPress. If you install WordPress on your own web server, we call that self-hosted WordPress to quickly tell which flavor of WordPress we’re talking about.

Self-hosted is a double-edged sword. With great freedom comes great responsibility. You have access to scads of themes and plugins that will let you do amazing things with WordPress that you can’t do on the dot com version—it’s like getting the keys to the kingdom. But you’re responsible for managing everything and keeping it updated. Plugins, themes, and WordPress itself require constant upgrading and backing up. Sometimes there are glitches that can only be solved by people who really know what they’re doing. If that’s not you, then you must have access to a qualified person.

Domains: My Place or Yours

One area beginners almost never know anything about is how search engines work and how to optimize site content to be easily found in search (which is called search engine optimization, or SEO). If you get a blog with WordPress.com, your domain name will be http://yourblogname.wordpress.com. This is because your site lives on WordPress’s servers, not yours. If your blog begins to rank highly in search results, and you later decide to move to your own server, it will be extremely difficult to keep your search rankings. You will have become dependent on search traffic because it brings you customers and sales.

You can have your own domain “mapped” to WordPress.com for a small fee, so that your domain will be http://yourblogname.com. This makes it much easier to migrate to your own server later. So, if you’re going to use WordPress.com for now, at least map your own domain name to it and choose standard date-based permalinks (the permanent addresses for each post on the blog, usually in a year/month/day format).

If you self-host WordPress on your own domain, you can do whatever you want with it. You can make the entire domain use WordPress like a content management system (CMS), or you can place the blog in a subfolder, so the address becomes http://yoursitename/blog. This is important if your site already has other components, such as ecommerce catalog, client login areas, training, employee admin areas, or forums.

Using your own domain and hosting WordPress on your own server means any search rank authority your content accrues belongs to you, not to WordPress. This is highly desirable, because blogs (especially when I’m helping you with them) can become crazy search magnets and attract a lot of highly-relevant traffic.

Plugins and Themes: Power to the People

A plugin is a little program you add on to a self-hosted WordPress blog that provide additional capabilities. With plugins, you can do cool and highly beneficial stuff like:

  • Incorporate contact and other kinds of forms into your site
  • Have related post links show up below a post
  • Use Google Analytics to measure your web traffic
  • Improve your SEO even more
  • Allow commenters to subscribe to future comments by email
  • Create an ecommerce catalog right in your blog
  • Turn your blog into a social network
  • And much, much more.

On WordPress.com, however, you have no choice but to use what’s made available to you through the service. Their functionality is good and they cover a wide range of needs, from related post links to video embedding. But the price you pay for free and easy is that you get what they give you and that’s that. If that’s acceptable to you, then the dot com version of WordPress might be what you need.

Themes are the how your blog looks: the design. With Wordpress.com, you can choose a theme from the list they give you. If you don’t like any of ‘em, you can pay a small fee for the ability to customize the CSS file for your blog. If you don’t know CSS, you have to hire that out. If you have to hire it out, you may as well go self-hosted and get absolutely everything about it just the way you want.

If your blog is self-hosted, you can add any theme you like, or commission your own from a professional WordPress theme designer. Your options are wide open.

Code and Customization: Yes and No

One of the most commonly used scripting languages on the web to make dynamic actions happen in websites is called JavaScript. Almost any kind of widget, stats tracker, buy button, or email sign up form is done via JavaScript. Well, guess what? You’re not allowed to use JavaScript in a WordPress.com site. They’re not doing this because they’re mean, but because there are many issues with having executable scripts running on a site. These issues mostly relate to security and keeping spammers away.

While that’s perfectly understandable and reasonable, it doesn’t help you do what you need to run your business. A lot of necessary business blog elements make liberal use of JavaScript, so for many that’s a deal-breaker when it comes to WordPress.com.

Migrating from Dot Com to Self-Hosted

If you’ve already got a WordPress.com blog and you want to migrate to a self-hosted WordPress blog, don’t worry: you can do that. You can export all your posts, pages, comments, and other content out of WordPress.com and then import that into a new blog you install on your own server. This post is not the place to go into details about it: you can Google it or talk to your (hopefully) blog-savvy webmaster.

A Final Word and Your Thoughts

Like I said at the beginning, I’m writing this for businesspeople. I’ve listed what I feel is important for that audience, based on my experience working with many blog consulting clients over the years. If you’ve got something to add I didn’t think of, please help make this post more useful to everyone by adding your comments below.

  • Nan
    great article - thank you.
  • emumbert1
    Early on, I developed a wordpress.com site by mistake. I wasn't paying attention and ended up getting what I deserved, I guess. When I got into their (dot com) forums, I started asking some questions about better ways of marketing. OMG, it was like I blew a stinky in church. These people are pretty hardcore about rising above the world of commerce, and doing something pure like their blogging platform was only for those with a higher calling. I got out of there, got my site transferred back to dot,org and never looked back. They do not like commerce, period.
  • remarkablogger
    Thanks for sharing your story. Marketing is not something to "rise above."
    Wow. What a load of bullshit! What people don't realize is that they're
    always marketing, they just don't know it---they're either doing it well or
    doing it poorly.
  • This is a great post Michael. Very helpful! Thanks for some clarification.
  • Yol
    Hi,

    Thanks for the post. I haven't had much luck with Wordpress on my own, though. I have installed it twice on my own host, as part of our web site, and both times my blog was considered a “potential attack site” by Google, as it had obviously been hacked, defeating the purpose of it all. Something to consider... I cannot say if it was one of the plug-ins, or what, but it happened twice. So much work for nothing...
  • remarkablogger
    Talk to your hosting company about this. If you used a free WordPress theme
    other than the default, that might be the problem. Free themes often have
    links to "bad neighborhoods" on the web.
  • Mark
    Mike,

    This is a great summary introduction to the differences between .COM and .ORG.

    I have self-hosted my blog on my ecommerce site. However, I notice the performance of Wordpress is pretty dismal. Aside from moving to a bigger server, are there any Wordpress settings that I should review to ensure I get the most out of my current server?

    Thanks
    Mark
  • remarkablogger
    Mark, the biggest factors in WordPress page delivery speeds are hosting and
    database calls. Moving to a faster host can help a lot, but getting rid of
    excessive calls to the WordPress database probably helps even more. Your
    blog's theme and plugins are the culprits, here--especially plugins!

    Look into caching and optimization plugins (ironic, I know, but these really
    should help) and ditching other plugins that may not be really providing
    value.

    Glad you found the article useful!
  • Mike,

    Great summary on the cost/benefit of the .com or self-hosted versions of Wordpress. This is a great summary that should provide new users with the information needed to make a wise decision. The ease of installation and power of self-hosted Wordpress makes this a no-brainer for me. I was new to the web development world and found it relatively easy to create a site. The support is great too.
  • Thanks for this guide. I've been meaning to write something to help my blog readers understand the difference between the .com and .org flavors of WP, and now I can just send them here!

    I think that the biggest reason for business owners to avoid WordPress.com is the vague language in their terms of service regarding what counts as "unwanted commercial content." Forum posts, as Karen notes, seem to indicate that nearly any direct commercial activity can be cause for WordPress.com to suspend your account.

    Of course you're right, Michael, that forum posts aren't a legal agreement. It looks like the legal agreement that is in place, however, is vague enough to give WordPress.com carte blanche to shut down business blogs, even if they do it on a case-by-case basis and only if someone complains. Why risk that when you can be free of the terms entirely, by self-hosting WordPress in the .org flavor?

    Also, as soon as you start spending money on WordPress.com's paid upgrades to customize your blog, realize that you might as well save it up for a few months and buy web hosting, where you can self-host a blog and have complete control of your customization.
  • Wendy, that's exactly it. The difference between the effort and money going into WordPress.com or Blogger vs. your own self-hosted site isn't really enough to justify anything but self-hosted WordPress. The returns are simply too great! By all means, please send as much traffic as you can to this post! ;)
  • Thank you for this post. I've been trying to explain to certain people why (for their purposes - business) they should make the switch from Wordpress.com (or Blogger) to Wordpress.org. You explained it really well!
  • Thanks, Carla! You know I try. :)
  • Scott Rarden
    A photographer I know is using a blog on blogger.com to make backlinks to her photography business site - basically short posts about what event, etc she is photographing any given day. Apparently she has no interest/time to create posts that are informative/useful enough to drive traffic in and of themselves.

    Do you think there is any value in that, or would it still be better to host it on her own domain?
  • Good question, Scott. There can be value from using a blog this way, but not much, and here's why. There are only two ways to do it: manually, or automatically. If you do it manually, but you're not gunning for making great content, those backlinks will be of such little value that you're wasting your time. And because of the high amount of labor involved to do this with even one blog (let alone many), it's just not worth it. If you automate it, you can generate thousands of backlinks... of nearly worthless quality, plus you get to play cat-and-mouse with Google. And in that game, guess who's the cat?

    Automation isn't as easy as it sounds, either, because setting all that up is way beyond the technical skills of most folks and is a surprising amount of work. For all that, you'd just be better off buying paid links (which is, of course, is a violation of Google's terms of service).
  • Hey Michael,

    Thanks for this. Question for you, does what you say about hosted sites apply to Posterous and Tumblr as well and not just the hosted version Wordpress. I'm thinking specifically about SEO. Do the same rules apply or have the folks at Posterous and Tumblr figured out how to maximize SEO just as well as on a self-hosted site?

    I do agree with you on the customization point, however. It is very limiting. As a former Typepad client, I know! (Although Typepad was a great place to start.)

    Thanks. Joe
  • Joe, it does apply to these other blogs. They get the "google juice," not you. And there is no self-hosted version of these blogs, making it difficult (if not impossible) to transfer any real authority to another site.
  • Curious, what about the strategy of using Posterous as a tool to update all around the web? Twitter, my blog etc. where do you think the "authority" get attributed?
  • Woe, awesome question, Greg. If you use posterous to post to your self-hosted WordPress blog, and you don't cross-post anywhere else (easily done, by the way), then it's no different than if you had written the post on WordPress to begin with. If you cross-post, you risk a duplicate content situation, where the URL that ranks highest may not be the one you want.
  • I've done some split testing with Posterous.

    I posted the same article to Posterous, various wordpress sites, ezinearticles.com and Blogger as close as poss time way (I mean within 5 min)

    When I checked google after a few hours, the Wordpress sites came in first (i.e. at the top), posterous second and then Blogger.

    BUT a week or so later Blogger had crept up to #1 and Posterous slipped to #3. I put cross-links within the same article to the central site, so regardless of which site is hit, they all lead back to the same destination.

    fwiw - Google doesn’t seem to punish these duplicate articles, though the indexing seems to fluctuate.
  • Another distinction between the two is that you cannot have commercial transactions on a .com blog, such as adding a shopping cart button to sell products or services.

    I do still recommend .com for very beginning do it yourselfers, because .org can be complicated and overwhelming for beginners. I just advise them to keep it informational/educational and to link out to conduct any commerce.

    Having people start with .org brings frustrations for many newbies who aren't tech savvy.
  • Karen, actually, you could, but it wouldn't be a very classy solution. You could use PayPal email links instead of JavaScript PayPal buy buttons.
  • From what I can find you can only use the Paypal button for Donations, not to make actual sales. I cannot find it spelled out clearly from WP themselves but several forum posts indicate that no business may be conducted on the WP.com blog, and only a link on your About page can be used to link to a commercial site. I have a non java shopping cart (mals-e.com) that I use and would recommend if it were allowed but apparently it isn't. So again, WP.org is the best choice for business!
    Karen
  • Karen, the WordPress terms of service do not say you cannot conduct business from your blog. It says "unwanted commercial content" is prohibited, which is pretty vague, because who decides if it's wanted or not? Something might happen if someone complains, I suppose. But in the main, the way they're preventing a total spamflood is a purely technical one: no JavaScript allowed. Forums are not a legal agreement. :)
  • Hi Mike,
    Thanks for this post. I've been wondering about a number of these items and you really broke it down in a conversational way that's easier to digest. Many friends have made that .com mistake. It's really about what your business goals are.
    Thanks again.
  • Thanks, Judy, that's exactly why I wanted to address this. Nearly everyone deals with this question.
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