What’s the Difference Between the WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites?

What exactly is the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org? To many people there is no immediate difference, but when it comes down to it there’s a very important distinction between the two sites. Read on to learm more.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com allows you to create a blog for free that is hosted by wordpress. There are free templates and basic customizations available to make your blog more personalized. However, the blog address is a subdomain of wordpress.com (i.e. yourblogname.wordpress.com) rather than your own domain (yourblogname.com).

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is a much more robust blogging solution with huge advantages over a standard wordpres.com blog. WordPress.org allows you to download the actual WordPress application – the same one that powers all the WordPress.com blogs. You can then easily install it (using their famous 5 minute installation) on your own hosting with your own domain to make the blog fully personal.

Outside of the affordable cost of hosting and a domain name, everything else you need is free! The WordPress application is free, and there are thousands of themes, plugins, and extensions available to make the blog fully 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, there’s little reason to settle for a wordpress.com blog. If you go with a free blog on wordpress.com, you’ll likely find yourself outgrowing it’s functionality in short order. 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 self-hosting your blog, 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 Dotster’s blog hosting plan and get started with a WordPress blog on your own domain today!

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