Social Media Training Tip #10
WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org. After You Read This Post You Will See There Is No Choice!
There are so many questions that we field about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. For starters, WordPress.com is free. With WordPress.org you have to pay a hosting company to put your site up on one of their servers in order to go live on the internet. Not a big deal, especially since hosting costs can run as low as $5 a month. Installation, if starting from scratch, is very easy either way. If you go the .org route, which you will after reading this post, just ask your hosting company to step you through the installation process for the first time. We recommend a hosting company like Bluehost.com for their great prices and extraordinary customer service.
Now for more details on the differences!
For starters, you don’t own what is on the .com version, WordPress does. This is an significant point of your plan to make your blog an important part of driving traffic to your business. Any policy change with WordPress could effect a main channel for revenue to your business. Also, all the intellectual rights to anything you put up can be tossed out the window as well. These could become very big issues in the future.
Secondly, you don’t have anywhere near the access to plugins or all their Web 2.0 functionality on the .com version. WordPress.org has the web’s largest plugin development community. It would be a shame to only have access to the small amount of plugins that the .com version offers. Why limit yourself if you don’t have to?
Last, and perhaps most important, is that the .org version has much better search engine optimization capabilities with the use of plugins like the “All In One SEO Pack” and the ability to change the structure of your blog’s URLs (permalinks). Just think about the last time you saw a .com blog in the search engines?????
If you are serious about making your blog the hub of all your business’s online activity, then it is worth choosing the .org version and making a small monthly payment to a hosting company. If you are already on the .com version, making the switch, even though it costs a little and can be a pain, is worth it. We recommend asking your new hosting company, like Bluehost.com, if they can help you make the switch.
To read about the personal experience of a Practical Social University member, and even more reasons to start out with making the move over to WordPress.org, click here.
Click here for more Blog Training topics.
Click here for more Social Media Training Tips.
