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When you choose WordPress.com for building your WordPress site, you don’t need to purchase hosting with any other company. In fact, you can’t combine a WordPress.com site with another hosting company. WordPress.com is your host and we offer a range of hosting plans from free to eCommerce, and everything in between, to meet your needs.
Since you’re here, in one of our WordPress.com courses, we’re not going to dig into the comparison of choosing between different hosting providers. We’re assuming that you’ve already decided to host with us. However, if you have any uncertainty or confusion around the concept of a hosting provider, we recommend reviewing our WordPress Introduction resource and the links within it.
The short version of this lesson is: Start with the Free plan, explore what WordPress.com provides and what requires an upgrade, decide on what’s important to you, and upgrade as needed.
- During a signup flow, click on the plan you want to start with.
- On an existing site:
- Go to Upgrades > Plans↗︎ from the main dashboard
- Select a plan
- Complete the checkout process
But let’s really unpack what these hosting plans are all about.
The signup flow you choose to create a WordPress.com account will determine which hosting plan options are shown as being available. But you can manage your plan at any time under Upgrades > Plans↗︎ from your main dashboard.
WordPress.com plans are also flexible: start with any plan and upgrade anytime. You’ll be credited for any unused time on your current plan, paying only the price difference for the first year of the new plan.
Wondering which plan suits you best? Inside your account or on our Pricing Page, you’ll find a helpful grid outlining key features of each plan. For a detailed comparison, simply click the ‘Compare Plans’ button below the main grid. We also offer a support guide for an in-depth look at each plan, ensuring you make an informed choice.
Still not sure where to start? No worries. You can start small, explore, and upgrade as needed. Downgrading is also possible, so don’t get too hung up on this step. Start with where you are now and adjust as needed down the road.
This is all great, but how do you choose and what do all these features mean?
Some of them are straightforward, like the amount of storage included with each plan. If you’re building a site that will include a lot of media, such as high quality images or videos, then you’ll want a hosting plan that offers more storage space and the ability to upload videos. If you’re not really sure how much space your media will use, you can start with a lower plan and upgrade later.
Some hosting plans have limitations and to unlock specific features you’ll need to upgrade to a higher plan. The most obvious is our Free plan, it is, afterall, free. One area of confusion that is often encountered between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress sites is this concept of free. Word on the street is that the “WordPress software is free” and some people argue that a self-hosted WordPress site using this free software provides more functionality than the WordPress.com Free plan.
And yes, on the surface, that is true. A self-hosted WordPress site is equivalent to a WordPress.com site on the Creator plan. But understand, a self-hosted WordPress site is not free. The software, being open-source, is free. But the ability to use that software to create a website that is available on the Internet requires hosting and no hosting is truly free.
Even the WordPress.com Free plan has a cost. This cost isn’t in the form of money, but is in the form of features and ads. Just like those free games you may play on your phone, a WordPress.com site on our Free plan is going to display ads. You don’t earn anything from these ads, they help to offset our cost for giving you free hosting.
That said, even our Free plan is powerful. You can create as many pages and posts as you like. You can choose a professional looking theme, and you have many customization options for these themes.
How to assess the pros and cons of the Free plan
The primary limitations of the Free plan include:
- We display ads on your site
- You can’t assign a custom domain as the primary site address (so your URL will include “.wordpress.com“)
- You have a limited amount of storage space — but text based content doesn’t use up much space
- You can’t upload videos to your media library — but you can embed YouTube videos
- You can’t use the advanced Styles customization feature or CSS for convenient ways to control the look of your site (such as colors, fonts, and more) — but you can apply custom styles on a per block basis
- You can’t install plugins or custom themes — but WordPress.com includes many pre-installed plugin features, in fact, far more built-in features than the core WordPress software provides, eliminating the need for many of the basic plugin add-ons
Even with the limitations of the WordPress.com Free plan, you have access to everything you need to build and launch a beautiful, functional, professional website.
So why might you want to upgrade if the Free plan is so great?
- Removing ads is a big one — you just need the Starter plan for this one
- Being able to set a custom domain as your primary site address is another one — also part of the Starter plan
- Increasing storage — it’s much cheaper to upgrade your hosting plan than to purchase add-on storage
- Hosting videos directly — this options becomes available on the Explorer plan
- Advanced Styles customizations — this feature also becomes available with the Explorer plan and is a game-changer when it comes to convenience and flexibility with managing the overall look of your site
- Access to our email and live chat support — each paid plan offers a progressive level of priority for support
- It’s worth noting that our support is vastly different from the support offered by most other hosts. When you’re building a site with WordPress.com, if you need help with the actual content and features within your site, we will help you. Very few hosting providers offer support for content related questions, or they charge a premium price for it.
- When you have specific needs that require plugins, such as building an eCommerce store, or offering online courses, or providing custom newsletters, this is when the Creator or the Entrepreneur plans become most relevant.
We suggest starting with the Explorer plan. It gives you access to all of the built-in features we have available, you won’t run into any snags when trying to customize specific pieces (like the background color of the entire site), you’ll be fully supported, and have more than enough storage space for getting started.
This is an excellent plan for getting your base site created, regardless of what additional features you may want to add down the road. But let’s face it, you’re not going to build your online courses before you have a homepage, an About page, and a Contact page at the very least. Setting the base site up might only take you a few hours, but it could take you much longer as well. So, start with what you need and then upgrade later — whether that’s tomorrow or a month from now, and then again to the next level, whether that’s a week later, or more.
If you just want to play around and test the waters, start with the Free plan. Even though a few of the built-in features are gated behind a paid plan, you’ll still be able to play with them. You may even find that you don’t need those gated features and end up choosing the Starter plan to remove ads and use a custom domain.
Another huge benefit of the WordPress software in general is its extensibility. This is where plugins, and the Creator plan, come into play. But also understand that plugins can be hugely overrated unless you specifically know what you need them for.
For example, do you want a simple contact form included on your site? With a self-hosted WordPress site you will need to install a plugin for that. With WordPress.com, we have a range of different types of contact forms built-in via our pre-installed plugins that are available even on the Free plan.
Do you want to offer social sharing options for your content? This is also part of the pre-installed plugins built-in to WordPress.com, no additional plugin needed. Same with automatically sharing your posts to your own social accounts.
This is why it’s a good idea to explore WordPress.com thoroughly before deciding if you need a plugin enabled plan. Not that we want to discourage you from upgrading! But we also want to make sure that you have exactly what you need to achieve your goals. No more, no less.
Speaking of plugins, don’t forget to watch our Picking the Perfect Plugin webinar.
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Picking the Perfect Plugin
Elevate your website with plugins! Discover plugin power, from selection to management. Join and choose your site’s perfect enhancement!
We also offer a few more options to make your hosting plan selection a bit less stressful.
- Choose from monthly, annual, bi-annual, or tri-annual plans
- If cash out of pocket today is more important than long-term savings, choose a monthly plan.
- If long-term savings is more important, choose the duration that you can afford right now.
- You can switch between billing frequency at any time with the help of our Happiness Engineers.
- Monthly plans have a 7-day refund window.
- Annual, bi-annual, and tri-annual plans have a 14-day refund window.
- The unused portion of your current plan will apply as a credit for any plan upgrades.
If you think it will take you a month or longer to be ready for a particular plan upgrade, start with a lower plan.
If you think you’re going to be ready for certain features in less than a month, start with the plan that gives you access to those features.
It’s tough to predict how long it will take you specifically to complete different stages of your site, because you’re the unique variable in this equation.
- How much time do you have available to work on your site?
- What’s your current skill level when it comes to computers in general?
- Are you nervous about building a website, or are you happy to take the plunge and explore?
- How well thought out is your website, do you have a documented plan?
These are the factors that will determine how long it takes before you’re ready to use specific features or launch your site. For some, that could be a matter of hours and they’re ready the same day. For others, it could take weeks or longer. (Hint: It takes most people longer to make decisions than to complete the steps.)
If you have no idea how things might go for you, start with the bare minimum of what you need (that could be the Free plan) and upgrade an hour later if necessary, there’s nothing wrong with doing that.
Choose a plan, they said. It’ll be easy, they said.
At the end of the day, choosing a plan isn’t exactly difficult. But it’s a point that many beginners get stuck on. Do you need to know all of the information we covered in this lesson in order to select a plan? Maybe not. But you’ll be far more informed and confident about your choices by having this knowledge.
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