Announcing Free .blog Subdomains
A great site deserves a great address on the web. Now you can use a free .blog subdomain on WordPress.com.
Over the last thirteen years or so, the number of sites on WordPress.com has grown — a lot. Every one of those sites gets a unique wordpress.com address. And since there are millions of sites created each year, it means the address you’d like isn’t always available.
Today, a whole new range of possibility opens up: free .blog subdomains.
What’s a subdomain?
Glad you asked! This site’s address is blog.wordpress.com. Here, wordpress.com is the domain and blog is the subdomain.
Say your name is Molly and you’re starting a food blog. The domain mollysfoodblog.wordpress.com — that is, the subdomain “mollysfoodblog” on wordpress.com — is already taken by someone. Or you’re starting a website to offer tech advice; but there’s already a site using techadvice.wordpress.com, drat!
Now you have more options: you can choose to use a free subdomain with a .blog address, like mollys.food.blog or advice.tech.blog. There’s a list of popular .blog domains we’ve reserved just for this:
- art.blog
- business.blog
- car.blog
- code.blog
- data.blog
- design.blog
- family.blog
- fashion.blog
- finance.blog
- fitness.blog
- food.blog
- game.blog
- health.blog
- home.blog
- law.blog
- movie.blog
- music.blog
- news.blog
- photo.blog
- poetry.blog
- politics.blog
- school.blog
- science.blog
- sport.blog
- tech.blog
- travel.blog
- video.blog
- water.blog
These .blog subdomains work just like the regular wordpress.com subdomains — they don’t expire, they’re free to use for the lifetime of your site, and you can always replace them with a custom domain at any time.
How do I get one?
First, create your new site. In the first step of signup, we’ll ask you about your goal for your site — select only the “Share ideas, experiences, updates, reviews, stories, videos, or photos” option. In our experience, the people who select this option generally find that a .blog subdomain fits their site well. Fill out the other fields as well, and click Continue.
Now, in the next step when searching for a site address, you’ll see a free option at the top of the list. We’ll suggest a .blog subdomain related to the terms you entered in the first step. For example, if you searched for “Tech Advice,” we might suggest advice.tech.blog as an address for your site.
Click Select next to the address you choose, and you’re all set,
Your new website and its perfect domain name address are only a few clicks away. If you start a new site with a .blog subdomain, let us know in the comments! We’d love see what you create.
- November 28, 2018
- Domains, New Features
WordPress.com News 
That’s really a wonderful news, thank you WordPress.com team!
LikeLiked by 18 people
Thank you, thank you! This will definitely increase the blog site’s professional presentation!
LikeLiked by 14 people
Thank you ! thats awesome! 🙂 🙂
LikeLiked by 12 people
Thank you for the option. Just one quick comment, it would be beneficial if we could choose a more appropriate subdomain. For example, my attempts generated ***.home.blog when ***.news.blog is a much better choice.
LikeLiked by 17 people
Thanks for letting us know. We will continue to refine the algorithm that generates the .blog subdomain suggestions. If you’re not quite happy with the option that we’ve come up with try modifying the search terms and see if we can find something more that works a bit better for you.
LikeLiked by 22 people
Thanks fot those subdomains! There is a way to solve this. If you want the subdomain mylovelyname.school.blog and the system is just offering you the option, let’s say mylovelyname.water.blog when you write mylovelyname then just write … mylovelyname.school.blog! Just write exactly what you want! If it is available the system will show this option to choose!
LikeLiked by 11 people
Are the subdomains only available for new sites or can you assign one to an existing site?
LikeLiked by 17 people
Currently, the .blog subdomains are only offered for new sites. We don’t have a way to change the address of an existing WordPress.com site to a .blog subdomain right now.
LikeLiked by 17 people
Can you migrate your current site to a new .blog domain after creating it?
LikeLiked by 10 people
If you create a new site with a .blog subdomain, you can migrate content to that new site using the guides here: https://wordpress.com/support/changing-site-address/#changing-your-site-address-to-one-you-already-own
We don’t currently support changing the address of a WordPress.com subdomain to a .blog subdomain though. If this changes in the future, we’ll post something here.
LikeLiked by 9 people
This seems like a helpful new feature!
LikeLiked by 17 people
Please clarify: If one has a ‘custom domain’ but stops paying for it i.e., MollysFood.com what is the status of the Free .blog subdomain? Will not mollysfood become a free subdomain of WordPress.com i.e., mollysfood.wordpress.com. If so, what will happen to the free subdomain?
LikeLiked by 13 people
If you create a free site with an address of mollys.food.blog and then later add a plan with a custom domain such as mollysfood.com, the .blog subdomain mollys.food.blog and the custom domain mollysfood.com will both point to the same site.
If you let the plan and custom domain expire, then the site will still resolve using the .blog subdomain mollys.food.blog, but the custom domain mollysfood.com will no longer resolve to the site.
I hope this helps answer your question.
LikeLiked by 13 people
This is so cool! I’m still quite excited about this even if I already have my own domain. So useful for starting bloggers. Good job WordPress.com!
LikeLiked by 14 people
This is really good news, but I have the following general question
Is the list of popular .blog domains going to be regularly reviewed/added to? For example could an ‘astronomy. blog’ be added if there were enough demand
The Science Geek
LikeLiked by 9 people
Currently we don’t have any plans to expand the list of .blog domains we’re using for these free subdomains, but if that ever changes we’ll publish an updated list here.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Its good to see new things coming on. I already have my own two Websites and Domains, but it will be a good thing for those who start up new sites to have their own, according to their own topics. Thank you all for the hard work put in for all of us the bloggers!
LikeLiked by 9 people
Good new options, good implementation of feedback given to WordPress Happiness Engineers. Am happy I stayed to build my new website with WordPress.com and did not have to go look elsewhere. Keep the improvements ongoing.
LikeLiked by 10 people
I have noticed the existence of about many blogs that use subdomains of .science.blog. These blogs are not brand new and some have older posts. I thought to have such a subdomain was just an option announced in this post.
LikeLiked by 9 people
We have been testing the use of these .blog subdomains on a limited basis for a while, so there may be a number of older blogs using these reserved .blog domains. We published this post once we felt the feature was ready to be made available to everyone.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Once I select a sub domain, how can I change it later? Please give details.
LikeLiked by 6 people
You can change one of these free .blog subdomains in the same way that you can update your WordPress.com subdomain from the My Site->Domains page. See this support page for more information.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Can people still register ___.wordpress.com for free?
LikeLiked by 8 people
Absolutely! When creating a new site, just make sure that you don’t only check the option to “Share ideas, experiences, updates, reviews, stories, videos, or photos” and we will suggest a WordPress.com subdomain as the free option for your new site’s address.
LikeLiked by 10 people
I went to take advantage of this with a new idea I had, however, there was no .blog option even though fitness was a component. Is this feature active already?
LikeLiked by 9 people
It is indeed active. Make sure that you select only the option to “Share ideas, experiences, updates, reviews, stories, videos, or photos” in step one when creating a new site.
LikeLiked by 3 people