Regular readers of this blog will know that it started as self-hosted, moved to free, back again and now it’s free
again. You could call it indecisive, but I’d prefer to claim it was all in the interests of research.
It may be hard to argue with free, but generally you get what you pay for. For example:
- WordPress sometimes serves its own ads to new visitors and they look pretty terrible
- Limited set of widgets and of course no access to the wonderful resource that is the WordPress plugins libary.
- Most frustrating is that the widgets are limited to the homepage leading to a high bounce rate on individual posts, plus other people’s related posts appear rather than your own!
- Limited analytics. OK for the curious but for the stat addicts out there, nowhere near enough.
- No ads. You can’t place Adsense or other ads on your page.
Given the past history, you won’t be surprised to learn that I’m considering switching back again. The one-click
install means even a user with basic technical knowledge can install a site and gain access to the resources of the
Wordpress community.
The counter-argument is that it’s free and that the lack of options means you spend less time tweaking and more time on the day job.
But that’s half the fun, isn’t it?
Soccer Blogger
TBH, if you’ve been with WP free for a while, then switching to Wp.org isn’t that difficult.
Web hosts and domain price shouldn’t exceed $60 a year- the only difficult part is about traffic, which is easier for a startup wp.com blog because of their inbuilt tagging system.