The "marketing bar" is a disaster
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You already put WP branding in the footer of every free website, and you went to the trouble of making it look professional and giving users several options to best fit their needs and site design. But now you’ve destroyed all that by slapping a huge, intrusive, sticky marketing bar in the header of every page that cuts into valuable screen space and sometimes even blocks out content.
At least let the bar scroll out of view, and give readers the ability to collapse it once they’ve gotten the point. Maybe even provide admins with styling options (like size, color, text, etc.). But you won’t get many more new users the way it is now. They’ll see right away how obnoxious and annoying it is and think: “I don’t want that distracting clutter on my website. I better look elsewhere.”
It’s also incredibly insulting to your existing users and the content they create for your platform. The bar’s only purpose is to drive readers away from creators’ websites as fast as possible, and it never ever lets up. Blogger is usually inferior but here they definitely have you beat: Their bar is smaller, scrolls out of view, comes in different colors or transparent, and also has a sign-in link, sharing links and built-in search. They also let you remove it at no charge, but it’s so discreet and useful that a lot of people want to keep it.
I don’t even know why a company as big as WordPress that’s “the world’s most popular website builder” and “powers more than 43% of the web” still thinks it needs to advertise so much, and in such a cheap and desperate way. You’re already #1. Chill out and quit acting like a noob.
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If you don’t want ads or a marketing bar on your wordpress.com website, you either upgrade to a paid plan or you find and buy yourself a domain and hosting and switch to the open source wordpress.org.
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Hi @maxexam,
Thanks for your feedback. Free sites are ad-supported, however you can remove ads by upgrading to a paid plan. To remove the footer credit entirely, this is possible by upgrading to a to a Business plan or higher.
Hope that helps.
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Gee, I didn’t know that. Thanks for totally missing the point. Did you even read my post? It’s not a support question. Are you even real people or just copy/paste bots?
I have no problem with the footer credit. I actually like it, because WordPress is a very respected platform, and I’m happy to advertise for them. But if they want to maintain that place of respect, then they need to keep acting like professionals with integrity, and not pull dirty amateur-time tricks like this new “marketing bar” nonsense.
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You don’t like the marketing bar, well we gave you solutions to get rid of it. So we did read your post. On every platform you can use for free, you’ll find a marketing bar or whatever. Belueve me, some platforms are much more intrusive.
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No you didn’t read it. I never asked for any paid “solutions.” I know about those already. This is the Ideas forum, not Support. I was criticizing and making suggestions. @metabreakr thought I was talking about removing the footer credit (I wasn’t), and you’re telling me how ads on other platforms are much worse when I already specifically mentioned Blogger as a platform that has a better marketing bar than WP.
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Thanks for the feedback, I’ll pass that along.
As mentioned, we run ads on free sites to keep them free: https://wordpress.com/support/no-ads/
To remove ads, simply purchase any paid plan: https://wordpress.com/pricing/
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