What is the Difference Between wordpress.com and wordpress.org?

January 9, 2009 by John Jenkins · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blogging 

The answer to this question is pretty clear - wordpress.com is a mostly free host for wordpress blogs and wordpress.org hosts the software itself which enables you to set up your own self-hosted blog. So my question is really What is the difference between hosting your blog at wordpress.com and self-hosting a blog based on wordpress? And the answer is, quite a lot.

First of all, let’s look at the advantages of wordpress.com:

  • They automatically update wordpress for you when the latest version is shipped.
  • [Presumably] they do a good job of load-balancing so that when your latest post goes viral, your blog stays available.
  • It is free (for the basic package)

And the disadvantages:

  • No plugins sniff
  • RSS feeds on your theme probably don’t link to feedburner
  • As far as I know, you can’t access the google webmaster statistics which shows average pageviews and bounce rate.
  • If a theme you like isn’t available, you’re out of luck.
  • No way to modify the theme beyond access to the CSS if you pay for that upgrade. e.g. if the theme doesn’t include your tagline that’s tough.
  • If you violate the terms and conditions, your blog may be deleted.
  • …and some terms concerning advertising

The lack of access to the CSS / Themes means that you probably need to add inline CSS and set the widgets up if you want to get close to the look that you want.

self-hosting fixes all of the disadvantages, and if you ever expect your blog to be successful, I strongly recommend it.

As you may have noticed, this wordpress blog is self-hosted, so why am I talking about wordpress.com. Well, I’ve recently acquired a wordpress.com blog which has both (a little) traffic and pagerank and talks about programming - something I’m interested in. I would enjoy making on-topic posts to that blog. Some early experimentation has shown that the blog can rank well for keywords much more easily than this timepoorblogger blog.

I wanted to use the Rubric theme but it doesn’t contain my tagline or any obvious link to the rss feed. Eventually, I settled on the MistyLook theme which fixes those problems.

I wanted a decent set of archives (monthly archives are useless aren’t they?) so I created a page called archives and populated it manually. To do this I set up a blog on my PC using the easy wordpress template script added a clean archives blugin, imported the posts from the wordpress blog (total time 20 minutes) and cut and pasted the archives html across.

I also quite like blogs with a popular posts section in the sidebar. I added a text widget with the title popular posts and set up an unordered list with the most popular posts and views as shown on the wordpress stats page. I’m interested to see if anyone will actually click on these links - it should be fairly obvious from the stats.

A question for the SEO guys, what would you do, if you received a wordpress.com blog with traffic and pagerank?

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